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Comment by Night_Thastus | Hacker News Reader

I'll admit, many years ago I was a lot more skeptical. I didn't like the idea of not physically owning my games, being able to install them whenever and however I wanted without some middle man who could deny me what I paid for. And what if Steam went belly-up? Would I lose everything I paid for? What if a game was removed and I lost access to it? What if the internet was slow?

But years have passed and I've softened on it. Steam has been - overall - a great service. It does everything I need and never gets in the way.

Is it perfect? No. I would love a better game recommendation algorithm for starters.

But it's served me well and I have hundreds of games in it, so it's work out well for both me and them.

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> And what if Steam went belly-up? Would I lose everything I paid for? What if a game was removed and I lost access to it? What if the internet was slow?

Honestly? If that were to happen - just pirate it. Everything (well, almost) that's on Steam is also readily and easily available on the seven seas, if you know where to look.

Sure, that wouldn't be fair to you, but from a purely practical point of view you'd be able to access your games if Steam went belly-up, and still "own" them. (Although perhaps not legally, depending on where you live.)

I buy my games on Steam because it's convenient, to support the devs, and to support Valve's investment in Linux. But otherwise I wouldn't blink twice before pirating if I were, say, screwed over by Steam or by a game publisher.

I forget where I saw it but well over half of all pirated software has some sort of malware on board. I'm no longer a poor college student. I cannot afford to risk my bank / brokerage accounts and credit cards for the sake of saving $60 on a game.

The real question is, in a world of Wine/Proton, Linux emulating the Windows API, and offline games (because the company running the servers would likely be dead then too), can you sandbox a game enough to not care whether it has some old malware or not.

I wouldn't do my banking on that computer, but a dedicated gaming computer, where each malware can only see the files of its own host game and has no networking -- that might just be good enough.

This is why GOG is the better option. I think every game on there is DRM free.

>Would I lose everything I paid for?

I probably don't have access to over 95% of games I bought as physical copies 20 years ago and I don't know how many hard drives have given up on me over that time.

Valve and the contract you have with them is actually more durable than stuff physically lying around the house, it just doesn't feel that way because we don't have a good intuition about how brittle digital information stored on physical media is.

> I probably don't have access to over 95% of games I bought as physical copies 20 years ago

I don't have access to 100% of my physical games because I haven't had an optical drive since 2012 and certainly don't have any of my old hard drives.

Obviously, I know I could get one for under $20, but why?

Back when I first got an xbox, I got the Halo remastered collection or something like that on DVD. Wanted to fire it up again ... no idea where the disc is. Wish I had just gotten digital at this point.

Don't worry about finding the DVD, it would have degraded by now anyway. Normal DVDs have a lifespan of 10-20 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot

I discovered that I could actually add many of the games I bought on physical media in Steam and/or other services by using the serial key inside the case. Still it doesn't help if you can't find the case either... and not all games could be activated this way.

Hmm - that's handy. After a move, I'm sure I have the disc somewhere ... it's just in some box somewhere. I will have to give that a try when I find it.

Luckily Steam is a private company, controlled by gaben. If it were public it would have been enshitified years ago.

For now.

That's probably one of the reasons why Valve and Steam seem to never get involved in any of the usual political activism you see basically 100% of other big companies slash their userbase in half with.

I would say that GOG is a more decent service - you get the games without DRM - and I buy games there without question.

Many games on steam are also on GOG.

I like the idea of gog, but ever since steam started building in linux support with proton I can't justify it.

Critically, though, the games I want usually aren't on there.

The no-DRM thing is nice, though.

Usually... but sometimes very nice games ARE there.

skyrim, oblivion,morrowind, cyberpunk 2077, fallout 3 & 4 & new vegas, torchlight 1 & 2

>what if Steam went belly-up? Would I lose everything I paid for?

In many cases it's possible to copy the game out of the Steam folders and have it still work. It depends on how much Steam/DRM functionality it uses and on packaging issues. At least for Linux-native games, I have found the games almost always work outside Steam (once any dynamic library issues are cleared up).

If you are quick enough and it's not deleting the whole folder because a game gets somehow retracted. Happened to me once.

Steam's backup functionality could be used to handle this in advance. I don't think Steam could reach into a user's backups?

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