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According to Steam's terms and conditions can they remove games from your library and are Steam emulators allowed? (leminal.space)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by CorrodedCranium@leminal.space to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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This is in reference to a post titled Amazon Prime Video is able to remove a video from your library after purchase.. The title is kind of self-explanatory and piracy was brought up in the comments. Someone mentioned GOG and Steam granting users indefinite licenses to users regardless of whether or not the game is still being sold.

While I could see that with GOG something tells me that's probably not the case with Steam but I can't find a specific quote to back it up. I can't seem to find an instance of them removing a game from someone's library even when a game was banned in a country like in the case of Disco Elysium and Rimworld being banned in Australia.

I couldn't see Valve removing games from people's libraries without a good reason due to the amount of backlash that would cause but maybe under specific circumstances they would.

On a similar note I was curious if anything in the terms and conditions talks about Steam emulators. There's a section it that says:

“… host or provide matchmaking services for the Content and Services or emulate or redirect the communication protocols used by Valve in any network feature of the Content and Services, through protocol emulation, tunneling, modifying or adding components to the Content and Services …”

But I am not sure if I am misunderstanding what it's trying to get across.

I looked through a majority of the Steam Subscriber Agreement but it can be a bit hard to decipher. There could also be comments from Valve staff elsewhere like on Twitter or Reddit that may at least shown their thoughts on the matter.

This might be a bit boring for a lot of people but I am curious about the DRM behind Steam. I feel like people have placed a lot of trust and money into Valve and Steam so I am curious about potential worst case scenarios.

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[-] coughrelief@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago

I think Gabe said long ago that whenever steam died, you'd somehow be given all the games you owned still

[-] CorrodedCranium@leminal.space 17 points 1 year ago

I don't think Gabe actually said anything. It seems like a user, over ten years ago, asked a support staff about it. The Support Tech said

"... measures are in place to ensure that ll users will continue to have access to their Steam games."

Someone on a Steam forum post said Gabe said

"If you right click on a game in Steam, you'll see that you can back up the files yourself. Unless there was some situation I don't understand, we would presumably disable authentication before any event that would preclude the authentication servers from being available.

We've tested disabling authentication and it works."

but as far as I am aware that was just a post from a random user. It could be that they contacted Gabe himself through his email. It was 2009 and from what I recall he would frequently respond to users back then but there's not much to back it up currently.

[-] ninchuka@lemmy.one 7 points 1 year ago

Gabe seems to actually respond to emails, so maybe send one asking about this

[-] db2@sopuli.xyz 0 points 1 year ago

And if you believe that you'll believe anything.

[-] Dettweiler42@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago

They've maintained a very pro-consumer stance so far; so yes, I do believe them for the time being.

[-] runjun@lemmy.world 20 points 1 year ago

If they ever go public, panic.

[-] Dettweiler42@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

I certainly would. Going public is always the precursor to enshittification.

[-] db2@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 year ago

Reddit wasn't evil once too and we all know how that turned out. Or Google if you need a bigger name.

[-] seaturtle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 year ago

IMO Steam is only "pro-consumer" in comparison to some of the really nasty DRM schemes out there. In recent years they've done a bunch of annoying things, including:

making it harder to access older versions of games
gradually changing the fundamental operation of the Steam client to become browser-dependent for everything (it used to be a much lighter and faster application that ran using their own code before it became basically Chrome)
basically orphaning the Steam skins feature with update after update successively breaking more and more things (related to the above)
making it harder to use older versions of the Steam client (okay, this might be hard to avoid technically, but still)

And of course, it's still basically DRM-agnostic for any additional layers of DRM, such as and including Denuvo. As well as having no convenient way to just turn off updates, which means that if you don't take your own precautions and a bad update got installed, well, good luck.

To be fair, Steam's own DRM is still relatively light (compared to some other schemes), and it sometimes does technically have DRM-free games (if Steam acting as a downloader doesn't count as DRM), and it offers tons of cheap games, but all of these features (or better, such as DRM-free installers) are easily available from various competitors. Steam's main attraction these days, frankly, is its selection, with a bunch of games that can't be bought elsewhere. which is a sort of market dominance that it only maintains by virtue of already being big.