This is in reference to a post titled Amazon Prime Video is able to remove a video from your library after purchase.. The title is kind of self-explanatory and piracy was brought up in the comments. Someone mentioned GOG and Steam granting users indefinite licenses to users regardless of whether or not the game is still being sold.
While I could see that with GOG something tells me that’s probably not the case with Steam but I can’t find a specific quote to back it up. I can’t seem to find an instance of them removing a game from someone’s library even when a game was banned in a country like in the case of Disco Elysium and Rimworld being banned in Australia.
I couldn’t see Valve removing games from people’s libraries without a good reason due to the amount of backlash that would cause but maybe under specific circumstances they would.
On a similar note I was curious if anything in the terms and conditions talks about Steam emulators. There’s a section it that says:
“… host or provide matchmaking services for the Content and Services or emulate or redirect the communication protocols used by Valve in any network feature of the Content and Services, through protocol emulation, tunneling, modifying or adding components to the Content and Services …”
But I am not sure if I am misunderstanding what it’s trying to get across.
I looked through a majority of the Steam Subscriber Agreement but it can be a bit hard to decipher. There could also be comments from Valve staff elsewhere like on Twitter or Reddit that may at least shown their thoughts on the matter.
This might be a bit boring for a lot of people but I am curious about the DRM behind Steam. I feel like people have placed a lot of trust and money into Valve and Steam so I am curious about potential worst case scenarios.
However, Valve has grabbed us by the balls by forcing use to use Steam to run purchased games. They could go out of business or whatever and people would the entire Steam games library.
I try to buy games via GOG instead if they have a similar offer for the same game.
Steam servers would have to blow up the same day it went out of business, I feel like Gabe’s dying breath would be spent hitting a killswitch for DRM before the service shut down. Maybe hyperbole and naive of me but I doubt the truth is far off.
Do you mean utilizing tools like Steam emulators? Because there’s only a few hundred DRM-free games on Steam that I am aware of. I think it’s far from a majority.
DRM free games dont need steam emus, they have no DRM just copy and paste the files and your good to go. Almost all other games that only use Steam’s DRM can be cracked by replacing the dll and in some cases patching the exe. There are tools that to all the heavy lifting for you.
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.)
It’s not DRM free at that point though. That’s like making your own decoder wheel to crack an early 2000s game. You are still circumventing something designed to prevent you from redistributing the game.
You just aren’t dealing with things like Denovo is all.
I’m pretty sure a majority of the time that still causes Steam to at least try to launch.
There are a lot of cases of people forgetting to crack their games and trying to launch the executable just to be greeted with Steam you can find in piracy support communities.
Not all games require Steam. Steam DRM exists for companies and individuals to use if they want, but it is in no way mandatory. Look for lists online of non-DRMed Steam games that can be ran completely without Steam.
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.
Totally. A not-so-current mention would be Fallout 3. For the longest time the Steam release used Games For Windows Live which wasn’t really working for years but the GOG version was DRM free.
I can’t think of a recent release where this has happened but I imagine it was either because it was typical for the team behind a game to have a specific kind of DRM or because the GOG release was lightly later than the Steam release.
"If you right click on a game in Steam, you’ll see that you can back up the files yourself. Unless there was some situation I don’t understand, we would presumably disable authentication before any event that would preclude the authentication servers from being available.
We’ve tested disabling authentication and it works."
but as far as I am aware that was just a post from a random user. It could be that they contacted Gabe himself through his email. It was 2009 and from what I recall he would frequently respond to users back then but there’s not much to back it up currently.
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.
I think there are very few accounts of them actually removing games from people’s libraries so far. When looking around I found Codename: Gordon and Order of War. Both were done for good reasons and with the permission from the developers from what I can tell.
Only times I’ve had games removed so far was because of activating a duplicate key from a keyshop, and the message I got from Valve was reasonable and non-threatening about it. Just got a replacement key to activate and nothing since.
I even activated keys I bought from keyshops for the original GTA trilogy after it was already delisted. They didn’t complain, I still have the install option.
A few people have mentioned similar things and it’s a bit of a different situation. For all Steam knows you got that code in a Humble Bundle and are just now getting around to activating it. A bit more of an extreme example would be Prey (2006) which was removed from Steam I think in 2009 (oddly enough because they ran out of keys) but yet you can still find and buy keys for the game.
What I am talking about would be more like Afro Samurai 2, Alan Awake, or Star Control where games were explicitly removed due to some kind of special circumstance and not replaced. Would there be a point where Steam simply has to remove a game from a users library?
Likely the only time you’ll have that happen are due to copyright infringement assets, finding extremely objectionable things in it, etc. Even if something was delisted because of expired licensing (see Deadpool, etc), any copies bought before then should still be installable. Like you said, pretty sure any full removal has to be under exceptional circumstances.
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As far as I can tell, every delisted Steam game I own is still in my account.
Same here with the original Metro: Last Light.
However, Valve has grabbed us by the balls by forcing use to use Steam to run purchased games. They could go out of business or whatever and people would the entire Steam games library.
I try to buy games via GOG instead if they have a similar offer for the same game.
Steam servers would have to blow up the same day it went out of business, I feel like Gabe’s dying breath would be spent hitting a killswitch for DRM before the service shut down. Maybe hyperbole and naive of me but I doubt the truth is far off.
We can only trust that Valve acts in good faith if the time ever comes…
You can play the majority of steam games without Steam.
Do you mean utilizing tools like Steam emulators? Because there’s only a few hundred DRM-free games on Steam that I am aware of. I think it’s far from a majority.
DRM free games dont need steam emus, they have no DRM just copy and paste the files and your good to go. Almost all other games that only use Steam’s DRM can be cracked by replacing the dll and in some cases patching the exe. There are tools that to all the heavy lifting for you.
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.)
It’s not DRM free at that point though. That’s like making your own decoder wheel to crack an early 2000s game. You are still circumventing something designed to prevent you from redistributing the game.
You just aren’t dealing with things like Denovo is all.
All you have to do for the most part is make a shortcut from the exe.
And yeah, a few hundred games.
I’m pretty sure a majority of the time that still causes Steam to at least try to launch.
There are a lot of cases of people forgetting to crack their games and trying to launch the executable just to be greeted with Steam you can find in piracy support communities.
That’s still a drop in the bucket.
I know to keep the Task Manager handy when I do my testing!
Not all games require Steam. Steam DRM exists for companies and individuals to use if they want, but it is in no way mandatory. Look for lists online of non-DRMed Steam games that can be ran completely without Steam.
Blame the maker of the game, not Valve.
Now I’m wondering if any team has released a game both on GOG and Steam and still enabled DRM on the Steam release…
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.
Totally. A not-so-current mention would be Fallout 3. For the longest time the Steam release used Games For Windows Live which wasn’t really working for years but the GOG version was DRM free.
I can’t think of a recent release where this has happened but I imagine it was either because it was typical for the team behind a game to have a specific kind of DRM or because the GOG release was lightly later than the Steam release.
Here is a list of DRM free Steam games for those interested
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games_on_Steam
I think Gabe said long ago that whenever steam died, you’d somehow be given all the games you owned still
Does anyone actually believe that shite?
I don’t think Gabe actually said anything. It seems like a user, over ten years ago, asked a support staff about it. The Support Tech said
Someone on a Steam forum post said Gabe said
but as far as I am aware that was just a post from a random user. It could be that they contacted Gabe himself through his email. It was 2009 and from what I recall he would frequently respond to users back then but there’s not much to back it up currently.
Gabe seems to actually respond to emails, so maybe send one asking about this
And if you believe that you’ll believe anything.
They’ve maintained a very pro-consumer stance so far; so yes, I do believe them for the time being.
If they ever go public, panic.
I certainly would. Going public is always the precursor to enshittification.
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:
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.
Reddit wasn’t evil once too and we all know how that turned out. Or Google if you need a bigger name.
I think there are very few accounts of them actually removing games from people’s libraries so far. When looking around I found Codename: Gordon and Order of War. Both were done for good reasons and with the permission from the developers from what I can tell.
Only times I’ve had games removed so far was because of activating a duplicate key from a keyshop, and the message I got from Valve was reasonable and non-threatening about it. Just got a replacement key to activate and nothing since.
I even activated keys I bought from keyshops for the original GTA trilogy after it was already delisted. They didn’t complain, I still have the install option.
A few people have mentioned similar things and it’s a bit of a different situation. For all Steam knows you got that code in a Humble Bundle and are just now getting around to activating it. A bit more of an extreme example would be Prey (2006) which was removed from Steam I think in 2009 (oddly enough because they ran out of keys) but yet you can still find and buy keys for the game.
What I am talking about would be more like Afro Samurai 2, Alan Awake, or Star Control where games were explicitly removed due to some kind of special circumstance and not replaced. Would there be a point where Steam simply has to remove a game from a users library?
Likely the only time you’ll have that happen are due to copyright infringement assets, finding extremely objectionable things in it, etc. Even if something was delisted because of expired licensing (see Deadpool, etc), any copies bought before then should still be installable. Like you said, pretty sure any full removal has to be under exceptional circumstances.