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Introducing Steam Families
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this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2024
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bc it's functionally always-on DRM? i mean feel free to spend money how you will but there are tons of good reasons to avoid steam
I have a large library of games I've never played on stream. a couple months back I wanted to play a game I had installed a while ago and guess what, forced always online. not from steam, but from the shitty team behind doom (don't remember which version it was), which just happened to be at the time I had a multi hour internet outage.
afterwards I figured out I had to explicitly block some network traffic to stop it from trying to force me to sign up for an account with the developer.
while steam certainly has DRM options, they are configurable by developers and afaik can't enforce an always online requirement with just steam, only though custom logic in the game or third party DRM. developers are also free to not use steam DRM.
DRM, as usual, harms the legitimate buyers.
that being said, steam still does bring a lot of value, such as their hardware developments, their work on better Linux gaming support, the update distribution through a trusted source, and various others.
Not necessarily. There are games on Steam that don't have DRM.
i'm away from my pc for the week but does steam not require you have it running for basically every game? even if it's a switch devs can flip it still falls under the same category imo but i am curious and don't know the full facts here
It depends on whether the game wants that or not; it must explicitly opt-in to that. If it wasn't Steam offering their extremely nonintrusive DRM, those games would likely use more intrusive DRM systems instead such as their own launchers or worse.
It also somehow doesn't feel right to call it "DRM" since it has none of the downsides of "traditional" DRM systems: It works offline, it doesn't cause performance issues and doesn't get in your way (at least it never even once got in mine).
I'd much rather launch the games through Steam anyways though. Do you manually open the games' locations and then open their executables or what? A nice GUI with favourites, friends and a big "play" button is just a lot better IMHO.
i see. as i said, i'd still consider it drm even in a case like yours where it never gives you trouble. i find performance suffers mostly in edge cases for me but it's often enough that i prefer to simply take steam out of the equation entirely.
i just keep a folder with shortcuts to the games i play on the desktop tbh, i am a bit of a slob that way. anyway this is all very no-stakes so i'm not trying to convince anyone of anything here. if you like something and it works for you then you should use it! i will continue to pirate because that's what works best for me.