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Comment by smusamashah | Hacker News Reader

I have lots of games on steam (epic and Gog) too. I fear death of these platforms or removal or games that I 'own' already. I only recently started buying games, even bought the games out of guilt that I previously played pirated.

I think best is to buy a game from these platforms, and as a permanent backup, download a pirated copy of that game.

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On GOG, you can just download the standalone installers, they are all DRM-free. That's why I prefer buying there.

Don’t many of them still phone home to fetch your player data when you log in etc. often when the servers go down even if you they’re not core to the experience no one thought to make a “offline” mode work

I run my GOG games in a networkless namespace (only loopback available) for pretty much that reason, and I've yet to encounter the first game that has in-game issues about it. The worst result I've seen is that changelogs or devlogs don't render.

Phoning home isn’t wrong. Ideally in the case of the crew, if the management had an ounce of brains they would have got a couple of devs to patch that code such that it wouldn’t make the game inoperable even though the servers don’t respond. But then some idiot executive might have opposed that patch saying we cannot remove “DRM Protection” from our properties. The problem here is that company executives and leadership, especially in outfits like Ubisoft, have no vision no skill. They are just MBA grifters who are milking brands and pretending they are looking out for the shareholders. These parasites would simply move from company to company, spreading their poison everywhere. And now there is crazy talk of forcing code to be open source. Absolute madness.

Most games are still single player.

It's the big predatory names that tend to go multiplayer first, or require players being online even for single player.

Fuck you rockstar btw, for lying on the steam page that a rockstar club account isn't required for max payne 3 single player.

Gog library is very limited. Lots of games are steam only. Pirated copies are a blessing. I haven't used those in very long time but I will though whenever I felt I am about to loose my bought copies.

Steam has had a long life and will probably be here for very long from now but only for a limited time.

I worry about the future of Steam if Gabe Newell retires. He seems to be one of the few people that understands how and why piracy exists, and how to build a platform that consumers trust. Everywhere else you look in the gaming industry, companies abuse the trust they're granted and run over their consumers.

I'm sure Gabe and Valve as a whole have been pressured countless times to provide stronger DRM and guarantees to game publishers, and it's legitimately incredible they haven't bent. But I fear Valve is one leadership change away from devolving into what we see all over the industry - another shitty company treating their own customers like adversaries.

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