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Comment by sigseg1v | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. A situation similar to this happened to me with Steam over a payment issue with their service. They banned me even though I had thousands of dollars of games and an account since Sept 2003. I had to go to my bank and escalate multiple times to get letters providing the info steam wanted about my account and credit card to prove it was legitimate. Eventually after contacting them enough times they said they would do a "one time good faith" gesture by unbanning me but warned if it ever happens again they cannot help and that my account will be flagged with this. In the end I didn't do anything wrong and the bank didn't do anything wrong, it was all on steam. It was over $10 by the way.

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They've made it clear that you don't own your cloud library, so the only reasonable answer is to never pay for something with DRM you cannot remove (including things that require an online account for functionality you consider important), and treat services like Steam as a temporary convenience to download known good files that you then fix to remove any DRM. If you only treat these services as a download tool, their ban loses all teeth.

I'm not an avid gamer, so maybe this is a naive question, but how do you know these things before you buy the game?

Steam's lawyers would say that one should know by reading the terms of service for the storefront and the purchase. But in the real world, how often does that happen?

This is 90% of the reason I don't bother buying modern computer games. For me, I assume games require phoning home and use some kind of DRM unless it is otherwise advertised.

Assume everything is encrapified with “strong” DRM unless credibly demonstrated otherwise.

"encrapsulated"

You could buy from a provider that advertises non-use of DRM like GOG, or on Steam, it lists third party DRM, so you can know whether you have the tools to remove it (and whether you have the tools to remove Steam's DRM, or whether the game appears on a web list of games that don't use any DRM). You could also refund it if you can't verify you're able to successfully back it up and run the backup on a computer or user session without Steam installed. For multiplayer, if it's possible, you can find people discussing it on the web (maybe in pirate communities). Otherwise, just don't buy it.

Some recent stats indicated most gamers buy at most two games per year, so it's not a ton of work to ensure they have a working archive.

Why do you think it's different with GOG?

Both GOG and Steam allow you to use local copies of games, and both would deny you access to your account to download more games once banned. Steam allows you to install games without DRM from their platform.

Unless they've changed recently, I thought GOG's platform itself does not have DRM? Steam does provide DRM and doesn't tell you if a game uses it, though as far as I know there are generic tools to bypass it.

GOG also specifically advertises games that don't have DRM, e.g. [0]. Steam versions of the same game (e.g. Skyrim) often require Steam to be running and enforce mandatory updates that aren't always desirable with no rollback ability.

[0] https://www.gog.com/en/game/the_elder_scrolls_v_skyrim_anniv...

> Steam versions of the same game (e.g. Skyrim) often require Steam to be running and enforce mandatory updates that aren't always desirable with no rollback ability.

Yeah, but that's a developer choice. Steam doesn't force anyone to use their API for things like that. If that's a concern for someone as a gamer, they should probably support the companies that don't do it no matter the platform, not blame Steam for it.

The original question was "how do you know these things before you buy the game?" My answer was "You could buy from a provider that advertises non-use of DRM like GOG." Whether it's a developer choice is irrelevant. GOG tells you the information you need for your purchasing decision, so if you want to know what you're buying, buy from somewhere like GOG. Also, don't assume that because it's DRM-free on GOG, it is also DRM-free elsewhere like Steam.

Buying a DRM-free copy on GOG seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do even if a company has DRM on Steam; it provides an economic signal that there's some segment of customers that requires no DRM as a condition of sale. Since marginal cost of digital "goods" is ~0 and it's likely trivial to disable DRM in your build, it would be dumb not to cater to them and take your free money.

I see, thank you. That explains it better. I would imagine that's still possible to do it for steam games also with a simple internet search. :)

> it provides an economic signal that there's some segment of customers that requires no DRM as a condition of sale

Do you just assume that's the reason someone uses GOG vs Steam? People could be using GOG for other reasons, and the lack of DRM is just bonus. So how does that signal really get interpreted correctly?

What other reasons?

Steam is its own DRM on top of whatever else a developer chooses to do. I found this out one year when I spent months without internet access. At a certain point steam would refuse to run any of the locally installed single player games I had paid for through their platform until my computer phoned home to their servers. I'd already configured everything for working offline and they did successfully for a long time until one day they just wouldn't anymore.

If you don't want lose access to every game you fully paid for on Steam you'd better pirate a copy of everything you bought because on a whim they can take it all from you at any time.

There are some games on GOG that still include DRM. The one I can remember offhand is Cult of the Lamb where the game would only run until a certain milestone at which the copy protection determined the GOG version was pirated and would gate the player from advancing. There were forum posts from the developer confirming this was intended.

I'm honestly pretty disappointed that GOG is still selling the game. If they are going to sell it at all they should have massive warnings all over the page that the game is broken. https://www.gog.com/en/game/cult_of_the_lamb

Slightly off-topic, thanks for the reminder that I wanted to try Skyrim someday, seems like a good time to get prepped for it.

With GOG you can download the games's installer, vy backing up those you can still install your games even if you get banned

For purposes of backup I don't see that large of a difference between a single installer executable and a zipped folder that you'd get after installing a non DRMed game from Steam.

GOG has allowed third party backup software like https://github.com/Sude-/lgogdownloader to exist. I have a full offline mirror of my GOG library that I update monthly that will never happen with my Steam library.

The non-DRMed steam game will stop working after a while if you haven't logged into steam after a very long time. If steam ever went under, your locally installed single player games that work offline will stop working. Ask me how I know.

I've taken to getting a cracked copy of every steam game in my library so that steam can't screw me over again in the future.

>I've taken to getting a cracked copy of every steam game in my library so that steam can't screw me over again in the future.

you can trivially crack any steam DRM game yourself within minutes.

Yup, and you can find open source "cracks" if you don't trust using a binary for it. It's barely DRM.

Another issue is, how do you get your games when you're banned? Most people don't have all their games installed at any given time.

With GOG, there is at least an unofficial, supported way to get an offline installer for each of your games. With Steam, there's no officially supported way to do this, so it's likely to be a bigger PITA to archive all your games ahead of time.

In reality, though, almost nobody is thinking ahead so that they have all their games archived, and, given the size of games and collections, it's a difficult thing to do on the cheap.

How is something unofficial yet supported? Is there just no "download installer" button on the site, but can be done as long as you know how to obtain the URL?

It was supposed to be "official, supported". Oops.

When banned on steam, I believe you are still about to download and play your (offline) games.

My understanding is that your account is effectively made read-only (blocked from purchasing, community, etc) and not removed entirely. Steam's help article on restricted accounts[1] seems to agree with this, given the text description of account suspension implying that it's temporary or for legal reasons (because the account has been used for illegal activity, or to prevent the account's use until it can be restored to its owner in cases where a lock might not suffice)

Admittedly, I have no personal experience with this, nor do I even know anyone who does, but I've never heard of anyone complaining about being unable to play their existing library when banned; complaints about steam tend to be about accounts being stolen and VAC/community bans, with the occasional complaint from someone I know that lost access to an account when they lost their email address and forgot the password (this was before steam had account limitations and steamguard, and they had never bought anything).

[1]: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/4F62-35F9-F395-5C...

The best thing you can do is ask the distributor or publisher. It shows them this is wanted and gets you answers.

> never pay for something with DRM you cannot remove

I take this to mean to sail the seas but I have apprehension over running modified binaries from random people. Is there anything that can be done to alleviate this worry?

the same way you should run _all_ proprietary binaries. restricted inside a sandbox. linux makes that easy with flatpaks.

That only goes so far though. A lot of games need internet access, so essentially you are running potentially modified binaries running on your hardware/network, that gets access to the outside. Sure, blast radius becomes somewhat limited, but you still have a potential problem.

The only games that need a network connection are online games. With those you can use a application firewall (which you should anyways) like opensnitch to only allow connections to sites that make sense and block anything else e.g. internal connection.

Unless you get your cracks from google.com it will be fine.

Flatpaks would make it easy, if they ever worked when you needed them to.

Sounds like a issue with your system. I have used hundreds of them on all kinds of systems.

I'm glad it works on your machine.

It's not a great solution, but you can vote with your wallet and simply not partake in that form of entertainment. I can't say it's fun to be not up on current games, or to find indie/non-drm games to play. But piracy is just an end-around a terribly policy of non-ownership that manages to both not remunerate the folks who do the work and make no impact on the actual problem which is that we don't like the non-ownership clause in modern games.

So yeah, TLDR, vote with your wallet and give up the entertainment this time.

Sadly, the real issue here is with the banks and the payment processors. It's very likely that they have metrics for larger marketplaces about being below a threshold for fraud. Online game stores like steam live, breathe and die by payment processing.

This was the reason why free trade was removed from RuneScape back in the day and it wasn't even a Jagex issue. People would go to 3rd party gold selling websites and then pay for gold with stolen credit cards. They could easily keep the money because the trade cannot be reversed without a moderator and what they were doing was against the rules so everyone would just get banned. The payment processors saw a bunch of fraud related to a game called RuneScape and told Jagex if they dont fix this then they will be blacklisted.

> Sadly, the real issue here is with the banks and the payment processors

I disagree. The issue is these huge platforms can arbitrarily ban people and consumers have no recourse.

This sort of thing wasn't really possible before the internet age. We need new laws to deal with it.

Banks are nothing to do with this. You could have your Steam/Google/Apple/etc. account summarily executed for any reason; it doesn't have to be money-related.

> This sort of thing wasn't really possible before the internet age. We need new laws to deal with it.

Yes, it was and it always has been[1]

>I disagree. The issue is these huge platforms can arbitrarily ban people and consumers have no recourse

This is par for course with every single EULA ever. I will say in the case of Steam it's hard pressed to find your account completely disabled and unable to play the games you rightfully purchased. I think the worst-case scenario is that you will be banned from engaging with the steam online community which restricts your ability to play with other users on steam

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

Redlining is not really the same as what we're talking about (but should also be illegal).

Redlining is the example that I am giving to show this has long been the behavior of businesses and unless its racist it's not illegal. Also read your EULAs

> This was the reason why free trade was removed from RuneScape back in the day and it wasn't even a Jagex issue. People would go to 3rd party gold selling websites and then pay for gold with stolen credit cards. They could easily keep the money because the trade cannot be reversed without a moderator and what they were doing was against the rules so everyone would just get banned.

Gold farmers were paying for bot memberships using stolen credit cards, which Jagex had to refund along with a chargeback fee.

The blackmail scenario you’re describing wouldn’t make any sense since all of these gold farmers used mule accounts to launder their gold before making the trades. The changes to the trade system were intended to interfere with this laundering so that farming would no longer be profitable.

It wasn't a blackmail scenario specifically Jagex got punished either way because the fraud was enabled by their platform. I don't have the time to check but I believe this was mentioned by the one of the Gower brothers in the runescape documentary. My broader point is that even if they cracked down on fraud which was absolutely not the fault of Jagex because of the poor security options at the time from Credit Card companies, they still had the issue of people buying gold from RunescapeGoldSeller.com and chargebacks

> in the runescape documentary

The RuneScape Documentary - 15 Years of Adventure

https://youtu.be/7RNK0YBdwko?si=sei69KmyL4hb_hj-&t=2944

Discussion begins at 49:04

Which goes to show, being the nice Linux guys doesn't change they are a corporation like all others, and will behave exactly the same.

Afaik if your account is banned Valve still lets you log in to Steam and access your existing library of purchased games. You just lose access to all the other platform features. Obviously that's their policy that they can change anytime... but in this case, it's not inconsistent to their "nice Linux guys" persona.

Buy from GoG instead. It's better. At least you can download the install files and don't need to install any 3rd party software to login to play them. I have 200+ games on Steam but I have ceased purchase on Steam.

There's also grey areas with Steam like when you buy a Steam key for a game outside of Steam through places like GreenManGaming and get your reviews discounted or otherwise flagged arbitrarily based on an opaque authenticity heuristic.

https://www.greenmangaming.com

Valve get no fees from non-Steam key sales and developers can really request any reasonable amount of keys so tens and hundreds of thousands.

It make a lot of sense to discount all these reviews to avoid abuse. A lot of developers would abuse reviews hard otherwise.

Why are hundreds of thousands keys a reasonable amount for a developer? I am not in the video game business so I fail to see the use case.

Developers can sell those keys outside of Steam and they are redeemable for a copy of the game on your Steam library.

Yeah, you need a much smaller number for e.g. giving access to journalists/media pre-release. But the key mechanism is also used for any legitimate sales or giveaways that happen outside the Steam platform.

If you buy a Humble Bundle, you get a set of Steam keys for the games in the bundle. If Intel/AMD/Nvidia are doing a promotion for a free game with a purchase of their product, they give you Steam keys. Etc.

How keys are used explained in other answers already. Number of keys you can request would obviously depend on how successful is your hame on Steam. E.g I doubt Valve would generate 100,000 keys for a game with zero sales, but likely under 10,000 is possible.

Other than selling keys they can also be used for marketing. If you for instance have a game with multiplayer, lots of DLCs or IAP then giving away keys for base game make a lot of sense: even if only 1% of people who grab the key gonna play it they can still eventually buy other copy for a friend, etc.

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