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Comment by manojlds | Hacker News Reader

Because Valve wouldn't want you to emulate Steam games as well (which people do, for online stuff). Valve and Nintendo are on the same side of this.

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Pirating games. Valve doesn't care if you play games you buy not on their hardware (being their original business), while Nintendo doesn't want you playing Switch games on a computer even if you bought the game.

Can you play the same game on two devices from the same steam account without hiding offline?

At the same time? Not that I know of. But then doing so would be a violation of the game licence.

Steam's presence API only supports one playing device at a time. It wouldn't be able to understand multiple active playing games on one account.

So it claims, but many games let you click X on that dialog and play other games. I have an old laptop which is basically a dedicated Civ 6 machine. I can still play any other steam game on my desktop while the laptop has Civ open.

Many games on Steam can run without access to Steam. When you close that dialog you're denying the game access to the Steam API.

Steam doesn't enforce DRM. You can usually go to the game files and just click the launcher from the file manager and the game will run without steam getting involved. Sure its not the most officially supported, but they hardly prevent you from doing it.

I think this is incorrect. I believe most Steam releases do require the Steam runtime to be present. Trying to open the game directly will "work", but that's because it's invoking the Steam runtime - just without showing the launcher.

Examples:

* Dead Cells has Steam DRM: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Dead_Cells

* Hollow Knight does not (will run without Steam if you copy just the game files): https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Hollow_Knight

can confirm, I was trying to set up my(is it really mine?) copy of obra dinn for my mother to play. and was unable to get it to run given the time I was willing to invest in it.

I was vaguely surprised because I figured that obra dinn being a small single player indie title would not have any drm. and I don't think it does. I think just linking it to the steam dll(for steam integration) makes the check occur. I suspect the solution is a bogus steam dll. but did not find one in the couple of minutes I was looking.

Note that you can copy a game to a friends computer then authorize them to play it, so good for valve, but I did not want to set my mother up with a steam account. so did not use this feature.

Valve provides a way to use Steam as DRM but it's entirely optimonal. There are many games on steam where you can just run them directly or copy them on to another computer and they run fine. So its just up to the game publisher to decide what DRM they want.

I think https://gitlab.com/Mr_Goldberg/goldberg_emulator is what you're looking for?

I don't think it's even a requirement. Games can utilize steam apis to have a better integration with friend list / invites / drm purchasing...etc. But they are not required to. You can just upload a standalone executable without calling steam api at all, steam won't prevent you from doing so. Actually, most visual novel games is in this category. Copy the game file and run it at some other place will just work.

Another example is original sound tracks sell as game dlcs. They are simply downloaded into game directory, nothing is protected.

Steam dont require games to have any DRM. Developer might avoid Steamworks altogether and can also make it degrade gracefully: for instance disable online features if Steam API is not available.

This is entirely up to developer to decide how they use Steam.

PS: I am game developer.

Right, but OP said Steam "doesn't enforce DRM". Saying they don't require developers to implement it is different than saying they don't enforce it.

Different how? If it's not required, then it's not enforced, no?

Game developers are not required to implement Steam DRM to sell their games on the Steam store.

If a game developer chooses to implement Steam DRM, Valve will enforce it.

Yes. What is the other meaning? DRM that doesn't enforce protection?

Not sure where the confusion lies here. If the developer wants Steam DRM, then Steam enforces it. It's not just the Steam API integration, if the game has Steam DRM and you try to start it without the Steam-specific files and your cached login present on the system, it won't work.

I call that "enforcement", and most significant games on Steam use it.

The sentence "Steam doesn't enforce DRM" has only one valid meaning, that Steam the platform doesn't require you to have DRM to be on it.

The alternative, that Steam DRM is used but doesn't actually do the thing that DRM is supposed to do, ie prevent copying, is nonsensical, and thus can't be what OP meant.

Therefore, we are forced to assume that they meant that "non-enforcement" means that Steam the platform doesn't require DRM for your game to be on it, which is true, it doesn't. That's the only reasonable interpretation.

The context here is

>> Can you play the same game on two devices from the same steam account without hiding offline?

> Steam doesn't enforce DRM. You can usually go to the game files and just click the launcher from the file manager and the game will run without steam getting involved.

Giving this answer to that question indicates that OP really did mean that you can simply bypass Steam's DRM enforcement (e.g. of playing a game on only one device at a time) by clicking on the launcher directly.

It's not "nonsensical", it's just wrong.

I guess "Steam doesn't enforce DRM" can be understood to mean that Steam doesn't enforce DRM regardless of whether the game uses its API.

Oh hmm. I don't know exactly how it works, but I think Steam DRM is different from using the API for friends and things like that.

Very not sure about that, though.

This is a weird claim given all of the free work Steam has upstreamed to WINE, and released with Proton, that allow you to play your Steam games on any Linux system you want.

I'm confused. Please define "emulate Steam games".

Given how Proton works, one could even make the argument that the SteamDeck's primary function is to emulate steam games.

Wine Is Not an Emulator (that's what it stands for).

Yes we all know the joke, but it very much is an emulator. Otherwise Yuzu is not an emulator either since it mostly just translates the Switch graphics API calls to equivalent DirectX ones

There are replacements for steamapi.dll that let you play games without needing to have Steam open (e.g. "Goldberg"). These are sometimes called 'Steam Emulators'.

They're emulating the steam service itself though, not the games. That's very different.

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