247
Steam keeps on winning
(www.pcgamer.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
247 points (94.0% liked)
Games
16651 readers
910 users here now
Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
Posts.
- News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
- Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
- No humor/memes etc..
- No affiliate links
- No advertising.
- No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
- No self promotion.
- No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
- No politics.
Comments.
- No personal attacks.
- Obey instance rules.
- No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc..)
- Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.
My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
Other communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
That’s every license of every commercial game no matter how it’s sold, unless it’s open source. So technically even with GoG you only get the license to play. You can only use the installer to install and play the game. You can’t resell it or decompile it for commercial use since you don’t own the binary code.
Yup, but there's no DRM to lock you out a few years down the road when the DRM servers go down, and you don't need to login to their service to play your games.
Yes, the license has restrictions and Steam has been a good actor so far, but you don't have to look far to see how they could flip (see Sony revoking Discover video purchases, which they have since postponed). GOG wouldn't be able to do that since they have no mechanism to remove things you have already downloaded, they can merely revoke future access to it.
Same for much on Steam. They wouldn’t be able to go erase stuff off your hard drives.
Many of the older games on Steam don’t have any DRM. Typically if they’re on GOG, they come the same way on Steam.
That said, I like GOG. It’s one of the few services I buy games on. But this argument that Steam games are locked down by DRM is is silly. Most games that are released on both platforms are identical.
Yup, but you know you're getting DRM-free with GOG, and there's value to that.
But many games still use Steam DRM even if they remove their other DRM, meaning you need the Steam client to be running for the game to run. And it's relatively common for games available on GOG to have Steam DRM on Steam.
That said, it's not really something I worry about. Steam provides enough value to me personally that I'm okay with not every game being completely DRM-free. But if all things were otherwise equal, I'd opt for GOG.
Steam DRM is easily bypassed. Look up hacked steam DLLs
Okay, but:
DRM-free avoids that, hence why GOG has value.
Sure. And DRM free can become DRM laden with a patch too
No it's not. It doesn't even legally count as copyright infringement. You are legally allowed to crack your own legit copy of software. The only thing possibly in the way is the EULA of the software (almost all of them have a possibly-illegal no reverse engineering clause)
The average person isn't going to be backing up their games in the first place.
Only if you download the update for that game.
The patch to the Steam DLL could impact every game, and it still requires the user to patch the binary. Steam updating the binary to patch out the fix has a much bigger impact than a game adding DRM later.
I'm pretty sure you're not, though there's potential for some gray area. Here's 17 U.S. Code § 1201, (a) (1) (A):
And yes, the average person does "back up" their games by having a copy of the installer in a Downloads directory or maybe a separate drive. They're probably not going to use a NAS or cloud service, but that's probably still more likely than applying a patch to a binary.
Not "many". I think last I checked under 2% of Steam games are DRM-free.