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Comment by creshal | Hacker News Reader

Steam is a rent model too, but nobody seems to mind.

It helps that Steam also works offline, or on an alleged DSL connection out in the sticks, or when you're visiting your parents who still have the same awful wifi router you told them to get replaced 15 years ago, or …

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Steam is explicitly NOT a rental model. You buy games, and then you have them, on your hard drive, to play whenever you like. You could be banned from Steam, Gabe could personally make a youtube video telling you to fuck off, and you could still start up Steam in offline mode and play all the games just fine. The only thing you could THEORETICALLY lose is the ability to re-download games in your library, but to my knowledge this has never happened aside from accounts getting hacked etc.

Stadia, meanwhile, works like Netflix. Stop paying, or just anger the Stadia gods in some way, and all your games go away. I like owning things I pay for. Many other people do to. So it's gratifying to see that this one time, we don't have to have our rights trampled on. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

> Stop paying, or just anger the Stadia gods in some way, and all your games go away.

People get banned on Steam and lose access to games too. I know Valve promised you that they aren't renting those games, but if you look at the contract you'll find all you have is a license. And there have been multiple circumstances already where Valve has kicked users and/or lost licenses to its content.

Actually, after a while being in the offline mode, Steam will ask you to go online, as far as I know.

Asks or forces? Because as far as I'm aware you can play offline indefinitely.

Depends on the game. Some games with DRM wants (requires) to call back home after a while.

Haven't tried a game on steam that couldn't be opened without steam running. Just go to the games folder and run the executable.

Those apps (assuming they aren't indie) will almost always try to communicate with the Steam client. There are hooks which automatically run Steam if it's not available.

Steam API integration is entirely optional, so it's not just indie games that ignore them or fail gracefully. Obviously you can't access Steam's online services in the game, but that's not a stopper for many games.

Almost all Steam games do use achievements and other stuff though (which works offline, but not forever). The reason I mention it is because you have to go out of the way to fail gracefully.

There are projects providing replacement Steam dll-s so these requests wouldn't crash the game (note, this isn't "cracking" the game, it just removes Steam dependency for games that were coded as such)

It's technically possible for Valve to pull access to your entire library and games that use Steamworks DRM will no longer work in that circumstance, but as far as I know it's very rare for them to do it at this point. They used to do it if you issued a chargeback, but they had to stop doing that since it was in violation of various government and payment processor policies.

It's a licensing model, not a rental model. You're not paying anybody a monthly fee to play, you have all the files locally, and the threshold for revoking your license or otherwise losing access to a title is extremely high.

Even games with components that have expired licenses are kept on the account, your access is never really revoked -- even a VAC ban won't lose you your library.

You can't mod a Stadia game...

The main difference to me is that Steam is an established platform with a reputation for not pulling games for no reason and also the fact that there's always "extralegal" ways to play that same game if Steam does pull it. That's not the case with streaming-exclusive games (and sometimes iOS games, sadly).

Exactly, and steam isn't going anywhere anytime soon, so I don't have to worry more about the game itself becoming dated or unsuccessful and pulling down their servers way before Steam decides does.

And if my memory serves me right you can still download games that are in your library but not available in the store anymore.

> Steam is a rent model too, but nobody seems to mind.

A long time ago, there was an official statement to the effect of "if steam goes down, we'll release a patch to unlock your games" or something to that effect.

I think that was before third parties could even sell on Steam.

Could also be apocryphal, or photoshopped emails and screencaps and the like. It almost certainly doesn't hold true today.

But at the very least, you can download your steam games today, and if it shuts down at some point in the future, you can modify or crack those local files and executables to be playable; multiplayer systems notwithstanding. There's a path forward. With Stadia games, there is nothing without original publisher or developer intervention.

Steam is not a rent model. Steam recently got sued because you couldn't resell your games, nor your account. You are now allowed to sell your steam account because you owe the games.

>Steam is a rent model too, but nobody seems to mind.

Ehh, I prefer to buy from GOG when I can for that exact reason.

Steam doesn't require me to pay several hundred dollars a month to have an internet speed fast enough to play a game without lag. I just run it on a piece of hardware I already own anyways.

There are also people who don't have the hardware to play latest games like Cyberpunk, but live in an area with a good internet connection.

I think it’s more the case that Steam is a known quantity by both players and developers. There aren’t many surprises ther and Steam hews closely to its core competencies. The few times they’ve tried to expand their horizons, there’s been noise, but it soon fizzled and they went back to what they do best.

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