I appreciate the transparency tbh. Would be better if things were different but it is what it is for now.
this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
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For context, Steam is now forced to display this due to a new law passed in California: https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24254922/california-digital-purchase-disclosure-law-ab-2426
Valve is not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts.
Its pretty much up to the developer. You can have no DRM and not even require steam to be open, or you can make your game unplayable.
Imo Steam should tell people whether or not a game actually requires Steam (or another form of DRM) to run. I know they already do it for things like Denuvo, but they should also note if the game actually uses Steam as DRM or if the game can be launched without it.
Yeah that would be nice.
PCGamingWiki has that info for most titles I believe. It would be nice to see it in Steam though.
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Afaik, Steam only sells licences.
Steam sells DRM-free games too, you can download them and then uninstall Steam and they will work. In this case though, on top of purchasing the game, you are buying a license to download updates for it through Steam. It's a developer decision.
DRM is orthagonal to ownership
I do not disagree?
Did California's new law requiring this already go into effect?
January 1 2025, guess Steam preferred not waiting in this case
This is also the case for physical copies, and has been since software was first sold
According to media lawyers, maybe. But when I have a CD of music, or a game cartridge, I can sell it to someone else. For money. Because it's my copy I'm selling. So, what the fuck are you talking about except ceding the point to corporate lawyers for no good reason?
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Yeah, if a game needs online activation it doesn't matter which medium you buy...
That's a lie told by every new industry since the printing press. Books tried writing "by anonymously exchanging money for this mass-produced object, you've secretly entered into a contract that limits your" blah blah blah. Courts threw that shit out, one hundred years ago. Same thing happened for videos and music.
Only software emerged recently enough, and under enough corruption, to keep pretending that opening shrink-wrap was magically the same as ink-on-paper agreement to some negotiated tradeoff.
Moving to digital distribution changed nothing. These assholes would be the first to insist as much. They would agree, you own Factorio on Steam in exactly the same way you own SimCity on SNES. But anyone who points to the cartridge in your hands and insists "you don't own that" is being a fucking idiot.
If buying isn't owning then piracy isn't stealing.
If buying becomes owning, will people stop pirating?
People were more inclined to buy software when it was a one time purchase rather than a license subscription (for example Adobe).
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it's not stealing it's not stealing it's not stealing it's not stealing it's not stealing it's not stealing it's not stealing it's not stealing it's not stealing it's not stealing it's not stealing it's not stealing it's not stealing it's not stealing it's not stealing it's not stealing
Twitter is bad.
Gog games
Good Old Games Games
By now my GOG library has far exceeded my Steam library in size. I was surprised by how many games on my Steam wishlist are also on GOG.
I would love to do that, but GoG does not have the better regional pricing that steam does.
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Personally I think we should bring back physical games to PC. Imagine a cartridge like device that can effectively use external storage as swap memory (which copies to ram as needed), laptops and desktops can be built with this while other computers could use an adapter.
Or we could stop humoring companies that want to take people's money and pretend that's not a sale.
And hopefully it dosent require the original game drive to be plugged in all the time when you want to play
The problem is how do you do that while preventing fraud?
The same way you do it digitally: add a thin layer of DRM that gives you legal protection, but doesn't actually do much on a technical level. Check a license key from the game drive in the same way you'd check the key of software someone paid you for, then let the code run on their machine.
DRM itself isn't a very good way of protecting media. The functional protections are almost nonexistent due to the nature of it. If you want to let someone play/watch/read content, you can't also make it magically impossible for them to just take the code/video/text, and copy paste it somewhere else. The only thing DRM does is give you the legal right to invoke the state as a way of enforcing copyright law against anyone who 'pirates' your work.
Any fraud that could happen likely wouldn't be stopped no matter what they tried. (or rather, if they did nothing protection-wise)
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It's a good job Gabe Newell has made gamers comfortable with not owning their games.
You do own your games on Steam. You just aren't authorized to play them without using the Steam launcher.
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OK. I know I'm about to get blown the fuck up but... You will own nothing and be happy. But. Like. Unironically.
I really don't think most people want to manage thousands of music files on their computer. Or hundreds of movie files. Or thousands of picture files. Or hundreds of video game files.
There are definitely options for doing this, but people who go this route are usually tech elite nerds. Not your parents or grandparents. Not normies.
(I self-host Navidrome, Jellyfin, Immich, etc.)
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Thank you California law!
new law
This is solving the wrong problem entirely.
You do own games. They're products. They're mass-market goods, as surely as when they came on plastic rectangles or glass circles.
Being permitted to continue having things on your hard drive is not a service.
I hope we don't get expiration dates now...