In the unlikely event of the discontinuation of the Steam network,” Valve reps have said, “measures are in place to ensure that all users will continue to have access to their Steam games.”
Comment on California’s new law forces digital stores to admit you’re just licensing content, not buying it
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
“Ubisoft take note”
Ubisoft is nothing compared to Valve… You don’t own anything you purchase on Steam and it’s the biggest store by a huge margin, don’t know why Ubisoft is mentioned specifically…
SmilingSolaris@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Aceticon@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
If there is one think we should all have learned by now in this era is that talk means nothing at all: there have to be hard contractual clausules along with personal punishment for those who break them or some kind of escrow system for money meant to go into that “end of life” plan for it to actually be genuine.
“Valve reps have said” is worth as much as the paper it’s written on and it’s not even written on paper.
SmilingSolaris@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Except they have proven this so far to be accurate. Games that have long since been removed from sale are still downloadable for people who purchased them at the time. Which is more than others can say.
Aceticon@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
Well, as the guy falling from the top of the Empire State Building was overheard saying on his way down: “well, so far so good”.
“So far” proves nothing because it can be “so far” only because they conditions or something different haven’t yet happenned.
If their intentions are really the purest, most honest and genuine of all, they will place themselves under a contractual obligation to do so and put money aside for an “end of life plan” which they can’t legally use for other things.
Abnorc@lemm.ee 16 hours ago
But the steam network is still around. When steam actually shuts down and no longer has the infrastructure to provide downloads for games, I have no idea what their plan is. They hypothetically could provide a way to remove the DRM, but I doubt that it’s something the publishers of games would allow.
ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 12 hours ago
But we know that is only guaranteed for single player Valve games
SmilingSolaris@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Blame devs for not creating a system for custom servers, not valve who’s games do have those systems.
ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 11 hours ago
How do you host an Artifact server?
How do we update it to work on unsupported (read future) systems?
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 21 hours ago
They can still delete your account and cut you off from your games.
SmilingSolaris@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Boo hoo, someone say too many slurs on the forums?
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 17 hours ago
Eh… I was just showing that you don’t actually own your games as access to them can be taken from you, that’s all.
Aceticon@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
It’s even more basic than that: if there’s not escrow with money for that “end of life” “plan” and now contractual way to claw back money for it from those getting dividends from Valve now, then what the “Valve representatives” said is a completelly empty promised, or in other words a shameless lie.
Deway@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
And yet, they always refused to put it in writing in the EULA. Wonder why.
PunchingWood@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Just people trying to ride the wave for internet points without really knowing what they’re talking about. It’s just the popular “current thing” to hate on.
Aceticon@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
To add to your point, it’s amazing that so many people are still mindless fanboys, even of Steam.
Steam has restrictions on installing the games their customers supposedly own, even if it’s nothing more than “you can’t install it from a local copy of the installer and have to install it from the Steam servers” - it’s not full ownership if you can’t do what you want with it when you want it without the say so of a 3rd party.
That’s just how it is.
Now, it’s perfectly fair if one says “yeah, but I totally trust them” which IMHO is kinda naive in this day and age (personally, almost 4 decades of being a Techie and a gamer have taught me to distrust until concrete actions prove otherwise, but that just me), or that they know the risks but they still think that for many games it’s worth it to purchase from Steam given that the mere existence of Steam has allowed many games to exists that wouldn’t have existed otherwise (mainly Indie ones) - which is my own posture at least up to a point - but a whole different thing is the whole “I LoVe STeaM And tHeY CaN DO NotHInG wrONg” fanboyism.
Sorry but they have in place restrictions on game installation and often game playing which from the point of view of Customers are not needed and serve no purpose (they’re not optional and a choice for the customer, but imposed on customers), hence they serve somebody else than the customer. It being a valid business model and far too common in this day and age (hence people are used to it) doesn’t make those things be “in the interest of Customers” as doesn’t it being so far less enshittified than other similar artifical restrictions on Customers out there-
I mean, for fuck’s sake, this isn’t the loby of an EA multiplayer game and we’re supposed to be mostly adults here: lets think a bit like frigging adults rather than having some knee-jerk reaction based on fucking brand-loyalty like some mindless pimply-faced teen fanboy.
ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Games sold on Steam are not required to use Steam’s DRM. There are lots of DRM free games on Steam. Steam is only required to be installed to purchase/download them but not to run them. After download, the game files can be copied and ran on any computer without any verification.
yamanii@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
They don’t make it clear which games have steam DRM and which games have nothing at all, they only list it if it’s a third party solution like denuvo.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 20 hours ago
So they’re not DRM free then if you need Steam to download them. You also need to be connected to the internet at least once to confirm ownership, so even if you download it once and think that you can now just transfer the game from one PC to another without an internet connection or without Steam, you can’t.
DRM free and owner ownership means physical.
FreeLikeGNU@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
You can purchase the game in a web browser and use steamcmd, which (one could argue is still requiring an app) to download and install. In cases where the publisher is not invoking DRM (Larian games like BG3, DoS2, etc. for instance) once the game is downloaded you can certainly archive it and transfer it to another machine and run it there without Steam. In the end you are likely purchasing proprietary software (though again it’s not always the case on Steam) and we could say you don’t really own that either, so maybe take your complaints to the publishers or just use the power of your wallet and not buy those games and support libre games, of which there are many, another way. That said, Valve is actively making things better for users by developing and contributing to useful libre software like Proton (WINE, DXVK, etc) that can work outside of Steam.
fushuan@lemm.ee 17 hours ago
once you downloaded the game you can copy it into a pendrive, upload it into mega or whatever storage and use it. I don’t get why y’all get so held up at the fact that steam might stop offering infinite downloads. Once you have downloaded the game you are free to burn it or store it wherever! This is different from streaming music for example, since with music you never have a local copy you can work with.
You can. I have several games where I can literally copy the game folder into another computer, press the executable and be able to play it offline. Terraria, vampire survivors, stardew valley, pathfinder: WOTR, Grim Dawn, AoE2… And more. I literally have “backup” zips of several path versions of grim dawn to play different mods because I’m too lazy to patch the game each time I want to replay different versions.
Once the game it’s in your system it’s as physical as it can get. There’s no difference of storage in your disk, a pendrive, an external drive or an optical CD. You give the example of GoG, there’s plenty games in steam that once “installed” have all the files in the game folder and you can easily move them.