this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2024
891 points (95.2% liked)

Games

32654 readers
1123 users here now

Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.

Weekly Threads:

What Are You Playing?

The Weekly Discussion Topic

Rules:

  1. Submissions have to be related to games

  2. No bigotry or harassment, be civil

  3. No excessive self-promotion

  4. Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts

  5. Mark Spoilers and NSFW

  6. No linking to piracy

More information about the community rules can be found here.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Whitebrow@lemmy.world 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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

  1. 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.
  2. 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
  1. 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

  2. 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