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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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[-] CorrodedCranium@leminal.space 2 points 1 year ago

What do you dislike about it?

[-] seaturtle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The Steam client (which, as we recall, is not optional, unlike e.g. GOG Galaxy) is gradually becoming bloatier in terms of technical concerns (due to moving to a browser-based engine), less accessible (due to that move breaking keyboard usability to do things like navigate through the game selection and launch them), and also bloatier in terms of features (a great example is the What's New shelf, but more generally, the interface prioritizes looking pretty than being responsive or data-dense with metadata about one's games).

On top of that, in recent years Steam basically shut off a way to access older versions of games (using a depot downloader). This is on top of Steam generally making avoiding game updates to be a pain anyway. (Yes, updates are often good things, but sometimes it's useful to have an older version, for a variety of reasons.)

As icing on the cake, if you try to suggest any of these features on the forum, be prepared for forum regulars to endlessly argue your thread into the ground, telling you why your idea is oh so wrong for Steam and how you should not have the right to play games you bought unless you do so in and only in the ways expressly authorized by the publishers who control all rights forever and always with zero recourse to you if anything goes wrong such as an errant update that breaks functionality.

Yeah, piracy is better than that shit.

[-] CorrodedCranium@leminal.space 3 points 1 year ago

I get what you mean I have an older laptop I like to run less demanding games on like the original Fallout games but the Steam client takes a while to launch. Ideally I'd like something between small mode/SteamCMD and the normal client.