I feel like this whole hobby has always existed on the verge of being deleted for whatever reason, and I am forever grateful that there are people who put this stuff up in the first place.

Still need to work out a way for me to help out.

And this is why I consider SSDs to be a downgrade compared to HDDs lol

Heh, more of this shit.

Remember, the only reason we can still watch the highly influential 1922 vampire movie Nosferatu today is because some people didn’t destroy all their copies despite a court saying they had to.

DISOBEY DESTRUCTION ORDERS.

COPY ALL THE THINGS.

Back when Mastodon was more in the news I told various friend groups to jump on it. I wrote up guides for them too. They largely didn’t, and some of them even got annoyed at me.

Nowadays I see they’re still somewhat mostly using Twitter though some of them have started to slowly warm up to Bluesky. Sigh.

Sidenote: I wish I could do more to encourage friends on the internet to use Mastodon and Lemmy…

The Steam client (which, as we recall, is not optional, unlike e.g. GOG Galaxy) is gradually becoming bloatier in terms of technical concerns (due to moving to a browser-based engine), less accessible (due to that move breaking keyboard usability to do things like navigate through the game selection and launch them), and also bloatier in terms of features (a great example is the What’s New shelf, but more generally, the interface prioritizes looking pretty than being responsive or data-dense with metadata about one’s games).

On top of that, in recent years Steam basically shut off a way to access older versions of games (using a depot downloader). This is on top of Steam generally making avoiding game updates to be a pain anyway. (Yes, updates are often good things, but sometimes it’s useful to have an older version, for a variety of reasons.)

As icing on the cake, if you try to suggest any of these features on the forum, be prepared for forum regulars to endlessly argue your thread into the ground, telling you why your idea is oh so wrong for Steam and how you should not have the right to play games you bought unless you do so in and only in the ways expressly authorized by the publishers who control all rights forever and always with zero recourse to you if anything goes wrong such as an errant update that breaks functionality.

Yeah, piracy is better than that shit.

Ironically, Steam being shit is a major reason I’ve come back to seeing the value in piracy.

I know to keep the Task Manager handy when I do my testing!

If you have to crack the DRM, it’s not DRM-free anymore.

The ones that are copy-and-paste-the-files-and-run-them, sure. But just because DRM is easy to crack doesn’t mean it’s not DRM.

(The one exceptions might be those super old forms of DRM which basically just need the manual and that’s it. Sometimes, those were actually done in creative ways that made narrative sense in the game, too. So those are like, obsolete DRM that’s auto-circumvented.)

For a while, Recettear and Chantelise were sold on GOG, but I don’t think the Steam versions ever stopped using Steam DRM. But the GOG versions appeared a good long while after the Steam releases.

Also some older Ys games had DRM when they first appeared on Steam, but I don’t remember whether the DRM was patched out by the time they were sold elsewhere (on GOG and formerly on GamersGate). I do know that pretty much all the games developed by Falcom are available DRM-free these days, and I know those that are published by XSEED are the same versions on GOG and Steam. Whether this is the case for the games published by other publishers (NISA, Aksys, and Mastiff) I’m not sure yet. A likely candidate worth checking in this regard is Gurumin. It’s on GOG, and it’s old, and it was published by someone other than XSEED (specifically, Mastiff); I vaguely remember Gurumin on Steam being unable to start without Steam.

Steam can definitely remove your access to games in your account. Though, to be fair, it generally doesn’t, as it has little incentive to do so (outside of such cases as credit card chargebacks). There are a few cases though.

(Note of course that games delisted from sale in the store are generally not removed from accounts.)

To be fair, other stores certainly could too. But something like GOG is limited in what it can do, if you’ve been properly backing up your files, since you can still access your own offline installers even if you completely lose access to your account.

That said, as far as dangers to your Steam account go, I’d say that individual games getting removed is probably less likely than one of the following:

• you losing access due to not being able to login for whatever reason (e.g. forgot your stuff and also lost your phone but you had Steam’s 2FA going so you can’t login)
• getting your account stolen by a hijacker (which there are TONS and there have been for years due to the profitability of virtual item fraud and account fraud and the synergies between these two activities). If Steam screws up their side of things, this might even happen through no fault of your own – for example, a bunch of people got hijacked several years ago when hijackers discovered that Steam’s password recovery page would accept a blank input.
• having your account banned for whatever reason. Probably less likely if you’re well-behaved and don’t cheat and don’t talk about piracy on Steam, etc., but it’s worth noting that this could happen. Also, if you dabble in cheats and your account gets VAC banned, I’d imagine that having to use a new account ends up being kinda similar to being banned from your old one, due to the hassle of having to switch accounts.

There’s an old story about Gabe Newell saying that if Steam ever shuts down Valve will make sure players are able to access their games, but there’s a few problems with this:

• It’s not actually in the Steam Subscriber Agreement.
• This is old info anyway.
• Given how big Steam is, it’s more likely to be sold off than to go dark if Valve finds itself in financial trouble. And even if GabeN has truly promised this, the new owners of Steam are not beholden to such a promise.

As for Steam emulators, like SmartSteamEmu, I’m pretty sure they’re not allowed but Valve just largely turns a blind eye to them and will do so unless they become a very significant issue in some way.

IMO Steam is only “pro-consumer” in comparison to some of the really nasty DRM schemes out there. In recent years they’ve done a bunch of annoying things, including:

• making it harder to access older versions of games
• gradually changing the fundamental operation of the Steam client to become browser-dependent for everything (it used to be a much lighter and faster application that ran using their own code before it became basically Chrome)
• basically orphaning the Steam skins feature with update after update successively breaking more and more things (related to the above)
• making it harder to use older versions of the Steam client (okay, this might be hard to avoid technically, but still)

And of course, it’s still basically DRM-agnostic for any additional layers of DRM, such as and including Denuvo. As well as having no convenient way to just turn off updates, which means that if you don’t take your own precautions and a bad update got installed, well, good luck.

To be fair, Steam’s own DRM is still relatively light (compared to some other schemes), and it sometimes does technically have DRM-free games (if Steam acting as a downloader doesn’t count as DRM), and it offers tons of cheap games, but all of these features (or better, such as DRM-free installers) are easily available from various competitors. Steam’s main attraction these days, frankly, is its selection, with a bunch of games that can’t be bought elsewhere. which is a sort of market dominance that it only maintains by virtue of already being big.

“Count Dracula rises but once every century, and my role is over. But if I were to resurrect him, the battle would last for eternity!” - some asshole named Richter Belmont

“We own everything”, basically. All they want is for them to control how everyone else does things.

Also, a hearty “fuck you” to all those folks out there (I’ve run into them before) who claim that publishers should get to have absolute control over how consumers use stuff they put out.

Ahh, good ol’ price discrimination.

zing

Well, it’s not too surprising; if people are like that, and AIs learn from people…

It sounds like bluffing.

In other words, it could very well be complete and utter bullshit.

Videogame Piracy, no-install % WR strats

On the contrary, I think the incentive would be for Unity to let the pirated install keep existing because that would mean more money they can extort from developers/publishers.

An admirable sentiment.

The fact that a game is Steam-only is good enough reason to pirate it.