Hacker News Reader

Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

I would 100% have signed up and bought games if I was assured that I'd get my money back if the service was shut down in under, say, 3 years.

View on HN

That's kinda why I keep buying on steam, because they (at least ostensibly) will un-DRM games for download if they ever shut down

My steam account is 18 years old. I can still easily download Braid, a game released in 2009, and I apparently played in 2014, install it on my Steam Deck and be playing it again in ten minutes. Considering it has cloud save support, there is a not small chance that my saves may even be intact.

It's that endurance in the platform that has me coming back. I have faith that Valve as a company is in it for the long haul to act as a game store platform and honor my digital purchases. It's allowed me to put several thousand dollars into them.

It's really the endurance of Windows more than anything. I can play stuff on Windows 11 mostly the same as I did on Windows XP. I can't play any game from Steam on Mac more than a few years old.

Proton offers some of this effect also: Wine/Proton is pretty good at playing lots of old Windows stuff, in some cases better than actual Windows is.

It's fascinating that I can just click and run a game compiled in 1996 (WINQUAKE) in Windows 11; but my ubuntu installation breaks after not touching it for two months.

Also now Wine+Proton works well thanks to Valve. Even if Microsoft dropped compatibility support in the future, some games can be run on Linux.

They can really only remove the DRM on games that use Steam's own DRM, there are plenty of games on Steam that use third party DRM that they couldn't really do much about.

However, on the flip side, there are also a good amount of games on Steam that are totally DRM free and Valve wouldn't have to do anything for those games in the event they shut down.

I believe they've stated in multiple places that they have budgeted for running the auth and entitlement systems. They set aside money in escrow to do that. Those systems are cheap compared to the CDN (which is also getting much cheaper). A small team could have a multi-year runway for running auth and entitlement.

Eh, I'm not sure that has ever been a stated policy other than an offhand remark when Steam was much smaller. Valve is unlikely to have the legal right to strip away DRM from other companies games. Especially now that everyone runs their own store front.

Maybe, just maybe they would release DRM-free Valve games, but that is as far as I could imagine they would go.

No-one at Steam ever actually said that, and I highly doubt they have the legal and contractual standing to do so if they wanted.

You have no idea who Steam's CEO would be in a scenario where they were shutting down, so you certainly have no idea whether that CEO would un-DRM anything.

It will be three years and two months from Stadia launch to cancellation. So you'd be ok with getting none of your money back in this situation?

If all the purchases were made on day 1, then sure. That's a lot more playing time than I usually get out of a game anyways. For games/accessories I bought after that – no, I'd expect a refund.

The hardware itself was cheap anyways – like $50 for a Chromecast + controller (and even cheaper with deals and bundles), and you can still use both after the service shuts down. It was the $60-80 per game that was the deal breaker.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com