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Comment by tempodox | Hacker News Reader

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That's not true, games without DRMs installed through Steam can be launched without having Steam running. It all depends on the publisher's policy, Valve is just complying.

In fact sometimes it's required to do that for modded installs, because Steam can't be convinced to launch anything without force updating first anymore and breaks everything if you're not eternally vigilant. sigh

I've resigned myself to mostly just buying anything I want to mod from GoG unless it has full Workshop integration.

Except that it is actually useful and pioneered a bunch of user friendly features that no one else bothered to implement.

It's not up to them to decide what user want.

There should be this thing called 'Free Market', where you don't have to buy whatever stupid improvement is pushed onto the folks.

But this platform was awesome for independent developers, who could use it to sell their game, get payments, do the license management, anti-piracy, some amount of support, and even make the installation straightforward for the user (so less support to offer)

I can totally get why developers would use Steam to retail their games

But let's not forget that clients can be a nuisance, and won't work if they just push features with no value. Games for Windows Live was a nightmare, for exemple

I'm stuggling to make sense of your points. To the extent that I can't tell whether you're coming down on steam or not.

But one thing that isn't relevant here is the "free market". The "free market" refers to a system where prices, production, and distribution of goods and services are determined by supply and demand, without government intervention. Examples of threats to the free market include monopolies, price fixing, government regulations, and trade barriers.

Steam is not a monopoly, indeed it's one of many ways of getting gaming entertainment. It very rarely even has exclusive games (unlike say XBox and Playstation). It does not,to the best of my knowledge, engage in price fixing or impose trade barriers on others. Government regulations are not relevant in this context because they are not a government entity, nor to they receive preferential treatment under the law with regard to permission to engage in selling software.

My point was that Steam's point was not focused on the user, it was neither the client nor the outstanding features that made it popular.

They were driven by a solid business plan, not "features".

It's just a convenient proposition to retail games, because it's easy for the developper, and securing for the buyer. This was an addition to the parent comment.

And the previous comment complained about the Steam launcher. The comment was fair, especially on lower end PCs with an old school HDD. He felt like someone was bloating his PCs with functionalities he didn't need.

So yeah, the Steam launcher is there because it's a technical requirement to retail games.

But I don't agree that it was successful for its new features. It's just ok because it sells games.

Games for Windows Live tried to do the features without actually retailing the games, and it didn't work.

And I will not reply further. As usual, there are more downvotes than actual replies. I never understood Reddit mobs on that.

>There should be this thing called 'Free Market', where you don't have to buy whatever stupid improvement is pushed onto the folks.

... you mean the free market Steam operates in? Go use another digital distributor. Go start your own. Nothing is stopping you. I will continue to use Steam because of the value it provides.

But that is how licensing works for Steam games (that require it). I don't want invasive rootkits, locked down software, or resource consuming software. Steam is light compared to other alternatives. The best option is to buy games from GOG (or another DEM-free store) or from publishers directly, assuming they don't have a crappy launcher. Epic Games Launcher, 2K Launcher, Riot Client, Rockstar Games Launcher, etc are awfully slow and consume a lot of memory and disk space. Steam just happens to be the lightest of them all and therefore people tolerate it more.

What Steam does isn't what annoys most. It's what game publishers do with their own launchers.

> buy games from GOG

I wish I could agree, but nope, noooo.

My GOG account suddenly broke (500 server response upon login) back in 2016 after adding The Witcher 3 to it, and despite repeated attempts over the years to demand that they fix it and restore my games, it remains broken. All I've got are empty promises to look at it, but no results.

You’re totally right that this is bad, unacceptable customer service and worth criticizing. Don’t take my next paragraph as an attempt to downplay your problem, because I agree with your justification.

That said: unlike Steam games, your GOG games are not lost when your account gets FUBARed, so long as you backed up the installers. GOG provides that capability; Steam does not. I do back up my GOG installers, just in case I ever get locked out like this. I can’t do that with Steam.

> so long as you backed up the installers

But assuming you don't, because it would take a huge amount of space, games are lost when you lose your account on GOG as well.

You either have the games or you don't. You can't have it both ways.

With the prices of hard drives these days, anyone that truly cares about this stuff can save up and back up game installers. You don't need a fully fledged NAS server with four drive bays loaded to the brim if all you're going to do is occasionally sync the installers with GOG.

Hard drive prices are around a cent per gigabyte these days. With today's absurd game sizes, that's a $20 "keep it after the cloud service shuts down" surcharge. Not great, but not impossible to overcome either.

Nobody backs up their installers because it's much easier to just rely on cloud providers keeping around your game installers forever. That doesn't mean it can't be done if you actually care.

Yes, I remember how happy I was when GOG was announced, that a digital store with that ethos would exist. It's a shame that it has since become soured like that for me.

Steamwebhelper.exe routinely consumes 100+ MB of memory

Steam itself is optional, it's up to a developer to require steam to be running. Steam does some things like make the default shortcuts launch Appa via steam, but honestly that's probably less confusing for the games that do enforce steam running. Without steam running, there's no access to any of the steam SDK features. Steam running also handled things like authentication, so games don't need to prompt for credentials.

That's true. I call the Steam API when my game launches and it replies with whether the Steam app is running or not.

If the Steam client is not available you simply lose Steam's Input API (customizable controller support) in the game. As a developer I would avoid requiring the Steam client to be running. That's just bad for users.

However, there's no reliable way for as a user to tell if Steam will be optional for a particular game. I've tried checking pcgamingwiki but it's not always right.

And it's usually not optional.

Ok but that's a very different problem to what you said about not being able to launch a game without launching steam.

> And it's usually not optional.

That's not Steam's fault.

Valve's own games can't be played without Steam. If Steam isn't running when you open Portal 2, Steam will be launched automatically. If you uninstall Steam, Portal 2 just won't start.

It would be one thing if Valve was setting an example that publishers were choosing to ignore, but that's not what's happening.

They might offer a small block of metadata indicating which parts of the API the change uses in its current incarnation. Would fit in nicely with the details about which platforms it can run on.

It is. But I feel like It's a compromise that works for all parties involved. Publishers are atleast calmed by the fact you can't just copy a game from machine A to B, and people who are in the know can strip steamstub with an open source tool that shall not be named here.

Very much untrue. Steam even makes it pretty easy to start a game without starting steam.

1. Install the game through steam the normal way

2. in your steam client, go to the game, hit the cog icon

3. go to "properties" -> "local files" -> "browse". This will open a file picker in the location it has installed the game.

4. Make a note of this location then close the picker

5. Go to "general" and see if there is anything under "launch options".

6. You're all set. If you want to shut your steam client down you can still run the game directly by using the path you saw in the file picker at step 4 and (optionally) passing the launch options from step 5

(I know this because I'm currently running "Song of Syx" directly using this option because it's an early access game and is broken when launching via steam for some reason).

This only works for a tiny numbers of games if the Steam client is not installed.

Way to move the goalposts buddy. The post said "without starting steam" so I replied with how you can do that, not how you can run games without the steam client installed at all. That said if you don't like steam just don't use it. I don't see what would be the point in installing steam, buying games using it and then trying to play them with it uninstalled. At that point you would already have paid valve and literally only be hurting yourself.

Most steam games use the steam api, and do something along the lines of: If steam not running, show error popup.

Often with good reason, the Steam API provides some very nice APIs (cloud saves, mods, controller input mapping, multiplayer sessions, etc.) that can be assumed to be available if you're only selling your game through Steam anyway.

You can use common Steam piracy tools to work around this problem, though. All you need to do is build (or download, if you've for faith in your antivirus software) a few DLLs and drop them into the game folder: https://gitlab.com/Mr_Goldberg/goldberg_emulator

> You can use common Steam piracy tools to work around this problem, though.

I have actually tried to use these on purchased games. They sometimes work, they sometimes obviously don't work, and they sometimes appear to work initially but then cause weird bugs deep into the game.

Somehow when I buy games on GOG I never have to worry about this.

The problem is that most games are only available on Steam.

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