this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
1810 points (97.7% liked)

Technology

59666 readers
2723 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

We are contacting you regarding a past Prime Video purchase(s). The below content is no longer playable on Prime Video.

In an effort to compensate you for the inconvenience, we have applied a £5.99 Amazon Gift Card to your account. The Gift Card amount is equal to the amount you paid for the Prime Video purchase(s). To apologize for the inconvenience, we've also added an Amazon Gift Certificate of £5 to your account. Your Gift Card balance will be automatically applied to your next eligible order. You can view your balance and usage history in Your Account here:

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] MaxVoltage@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

steam scares me

if one day they go mental i will lose so many games.

i have a pc with a large ass harddisk just to download and save all single player games and never update them.

always play offline.

but they already changed it so you cant play offline really idk maybe it was just that game

[–] chic_luke@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I think the fear mongering on Steam is excessive. The games stay offline on your disk, and most of them don't have a DRM. Gabe Newell has also said that, in case Steam ever shutters, an exit plan will be provided. As for the Steam native DRM, there are already open source implementations that can be used to bypass it and Valve hasn't done anything against it in years - so the only problematic DRMs are Denuvo and similar, which Steam does not control.

GOG used to be a valid alternative, but it isn't anymore. With CDPR themselves publishing games with DRM on GOG, on top of starting to be lenient on DRMs, they are literally having something similar to a DRM that is required for some games, a GOG Galaxy API that is completely closed source. And it doesn't support Linux, the FOSS operating system.

The fact that after years GOG still doesn't seem to care about Linux, CDPR releases their games for Windows only (and more often than not with DRM), and Cyberpunk 2077 only runs on Linux thanks to Valve's efforts is also worrying from a game conservation and ownership standpoint: Windows is a Proprietary operating system completely controlled by Microsoft, who can perform modifications remotely and is allegedly planning to popularize a model where people are sold very low spec PCs that only need to stream a Windows computer from the cloud with more powerful specs… not the platform I want to entrust the future of gaming to.

All in all, Steam is still the mainstream gaming platform I dislike the least and trust the most. If I'm going to buy a game and hope it's going to be playable decades into the future, it used to be GOG, but now it's Steam from me.