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Comment by tokai | Hacker News Reader

You would still have your games files and be able to run them. Steam is not a rental or streaming service.

That's how GoG works.

That's not how steam works on its own. Steam explicitly a service where you buy a defined and limited license for permission to execute the files through proprietary framework that might one day disappear.

Don't get me wrong, steam is my preferred digital delivery platform and where I play majority of my games. But I am under no illusion that gives me any sort of permanence (without potential hacking and mods). If I want permanence I get a DRM free downloadable game from GoG.

>Steam explicitly a service where you buy a defined and limited license for permission

Simply not true. There is really no arguments here. You can run most games directly from the game files without steam. In the cases were you can't you would have issues with DRM in all other venues of purchase.

It may look like that from the outside because you can go to the Steam library directory and double click a game executable directly, but this will still start the Steam runtime and do a DRM check. You can run a game in 'offline mode' for up to two weeks before another online DRM check is required though.

Not necessarily. The DRM part is optional.

Runtime DRM is sometimes optional with Steam, but install‐time DRM never is.

You're not describing how Steam is meant to work, but rather how things are likely to play out for a lot of titles if Steam ever shuts down. Yes, if Steam shuts down, any game that (due to technical requirements) requires Steam to be up will be left unusable, and the customers will be left with pretty much no recourse. Not because legally they're not entitled to the products they paid for, but because it would be impractical to enforce such a right.

No, Steam sells permanent licenses.

> No, Steam sells permanent licenses.

I don't know where you're getting this from.

To quote from https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/:

> [long list of things you can obtain/do via Steam] are referred to in this Agreement as "Content and Services;" the rights to access and/or use any Content and Services accessible through Steam are referred to in this Agreement as "Subscriptions."

> Valve hereby grants, and you accept, a non-exclusive license and right, to use the Content and Services for your personal, non-commercial use (except where commercial use is expressly allowed herein or in the applicable Subscription Terms). This license ends upon termination of (a) this Agreement or (b) a Subscription that includes the license.

> Valve may restrict or cancel your Account or any particular Subscription(s) at any time in the event that (a) Valve ceases providing such Subscriptions to similarly situated Subscribers generally, or (b) you breach any terms of this Agreement (including any Subscription Terms or Rules of Use). In the event that your Account or a particular Subscription is restricted or terminated or cancelled by Valve for a violation of this Agreement or improper or illegal activity, no refund, including of any Subscription fees or of any unused funds in your Steam Wallet, will be granted.

There is zero legal entitlement to any given subscription in this agreement. The fact that they call it a "subscription", and that this is the "Subscriber Agreement" is not by accident. Rather, they explicitly reserve the right to cancel your "rights to access and/or use" their offers (aka subscriptions).

>>Steam sells permanent licenses.

I mean, no? Just no. Kindle doesn't sell you permanent irrevocable licenses and neither does steam, nor origin etc. They've each been revoked in the past and it's demonstrably true. Their TOS is clear and trivial to read. They all grant personal, limited, non-transferable, revocable and non-exclusive licenses.

You may be able to crack the downloaded steam game files to get them to run. But that's lateral to steam and irrelevant to discussion. if you're going to run cracked files skip steam and go to piratebay.

Many/most Steam games use Steam servers to authenticate ownership. It's a store, but it's also a DRM provider. Many games would require cracking to keep working.

>most Steam games use Steam servers to authenticate ownership

Not true. Maybe if you mainly play ubisoft tiles.

Can you be more specific or offer any evidence? That Valve offers DRM through Steam is unambiguously true. Here's their developer document on it: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/drm

And here's a list of games which are sold through Steam but which nonetheless do not use Steam DRM: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_g...

Why would such a list be necessary if games sold through Steam that used Steam DRM were the minority?

Any game using Steamworks behaves this way, which is a pretty massive chunk of them. Ubisoft uses their own DRM which is an entirely different system.

I think what you may be saying is the behavior if you open a Steamworks game while Steam is opened, it just executes as normal. Any authentication or nonsense happens in the background. Try opening a Steamworks game with steam closed, it will force steam to open and login before the game can be played.

You can test this. Delete steam, restart your computer and launch a title.

You'll get a message about steam.dll missing or being unable to authenticate.

You can also sign out of steam, unplug from the internet and try to launch - and again, you won't be able to except this time steam will launch and tell you to login.

Or a single last update from the servers that made every server check come back legit.

That's always just been a wishful statement of intent with no legal backing. Valve might be unable or unwilling to actually follow through on that urban legend if they do ever shut down for some reason.

Steam DRM might not easily allow this, although I trust in Valve's ethics to permit offline play if shit hits the fan.

In fact I remember reading from a community representative that there are plans for this in place (not the best source but whatever https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/18mzcn/i_asked_steam...)

It also helps that Steamworks DRM is trivially bypassed. All it takes are a couple of replacement DLL files in the games directory and it runs normally (minus multiplayer support, of course).

This isn't even a sketchy crack thing, it's an open source tool. Look up Goldberg emulator.

Not very much - many of those game files actually have Steam Runtime or Steam executables blended in. It is not a strong DRM - but you are still going to need to look for cracked copies if Steam went down.

Yes but if Steam shut down you’d have no way to get to the installers again and you’d be left crossing your fingers the machine you installed them on doesn’t die.

Think it through. Of cause you cant get the games files if the provider goes offline. You can make a backup of any of your games in steam, which will make it possible to install it again offline on other machines.

The game won't run on another machine, at best you have a two weeks time window before the DRM checks start to fail.

There's this family sharing thing though, where you can share your Steam library between 5 accounts and up to 10 computers:

https://store.steampowered.com/promotion/familysharing

I've bought a copy of Iron Dragon for the PC - I can even find the license key in my ancient google mail. It was published by http://www.antigravitybox.com/ and the game's website is http://www.irondragon.org/

I don't see too much of a difference other than Steam has more proven longevity - even if the developers that sold games on Steam don't. I can still download Dungeons of Dreadmor from Steam even though the company appears to have disappeared in 2016.

Hacks already exist to make the games not check the servers, and only stop working after new Steam updates. If Steam were to never update again it seems likely the hacked dlls would work forever.

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