902

Steam's new disclaimer reminds everyone that you don't actually own your games, GOG moves in for the killshot: Its offline installers 'cannot be taken away from you' (www.pcgamer.com)

submitted 1 month ago by ooli@lemmy.world to c/games@lemmy.world

305 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] theneverfox@pawb.social 11 points 1 month ago

Doesn't steam have a clause to the effect of "if we go out of business, you'll get X period to download your games so you can manage them yourself"?

[-] Veneroso@lemmy.world 14 points 1 month ago

I don't know if it's a clause but Gabe said it at one point. Is that legally binding though? It wouldn't surprise me one bit that whatever VC eventually buys steam and then runs it into the ground would have no problem changing the user agreement to whatever suited them....

[-] HKayn@dormi.zone 8 points 1 month ago

It's not legally binding, since it isn't part of the user agreement you review when buying games on Steam.

[-] theneverfox@pawb.social 8 points 1 month ago

I think I read in the steam agreement itself - I could be wrong, but I generally have a source tagged to my knowledge, and the knowledge is tagged as a direct quote from the document

And yes, if a VC buys out steam I'd be horrified, but it's structurally resistant to that. It's largely employee owned and heavily employee managed, their handbook helped me understand the concept of how employee owned businesses could be the answer to many of society's problems

[-] Whitebrow@lemmy.world 6 points 1 month ago

If there’s a grace period, perhaps, however:

Steam does not provide installers for games, this means that whatever game you want, needs to be 100% functional and already be parsed/deployed/installed by steam on your hard drive.
That game needs to be DRM free, meaning that it has an executable available that can be launched without steam running or requiring any sort of authentication or input from the steam servers/services before being able to launch, play or even interact with the menus

So only the DRM free games will remain, and only the installed ones at that. Anything that wasn’t will be lost to the wind the moment the distribution service or storage (yours or theirs) bits the dust…

[-] theneverfox@pawb.social 1 points 1 month ago

installers for games are usually just a script that unzips the game and makes some shortcuts. Steam installs all your games in a standard way in a folder of your choice. You can straight up copy that folder to another computer. You can use another launcher and just play your games, there are already many that can read steam's standardized format. I've done it multiple times to avoid redownloading my library
It depends how steam sunsets their DRM, but yes - obviously if a game has 3rd party DRM, that third party is in control. Steam could choose a user hostile way to sunset their own DRM, but they could release ways to deactivate it

DRM is bad, steam provides an easy way for developers to use steam DRM, and it's generally less user hostile than most DRM. To me, this seems like harm reduction

Ultimately, it's not up to steam what, if any, DRM a game uses. They manage their in house offering, but the developer doesn't have to use it if they don't want to