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Comment by NegativeLatency | Hacker News Reader

Plenty of PC games, the linux distros that run steam are great too!

Can you backup steam games and run them without steam?

Many of them, yes. It's up to the individual publisher whether they want to release their game DRM-free on steam. https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_g...

If you want to guarantee that you can backup your PC games and run them without a client, then there is always https://www.gog.com/

Just because valve is a benevolent dictator doesn't mean they don't already have the same dictatorship powers that Sony is currently chiseling out for themselves.

I wish NFTs had taken off as a system for managing decentralized transferrable digital purchases instead of being another investment scam.

An NFT is superfluous here. If you buy a digital copy, and someone gives you DRM-free files that you can copy and run anywhere you'd like, you have about as much ownership as you can get over a digital good. In this case, an NFT would just serve as an entry in a crypto ledger that you bought the game... which is an alternative to running a digital storefront and tying game purchases to an account, but it doesn't really change the fact that you can only redownload something for so long as it is hosted at the place where you bought it.

I mean the NFT as a means of implementing standardized DRM instead of letting companies roll their own copyright laws.

At least with a PC you have control over the system. You're even freer with Valve because now have the ease of using Linux.

My entire Steam library is backed up to LTO tapes. I can get most everything running without needing Steam.

I will continue to support this business model, because I retain the power to own the system and the data.

> I can get most everything running without needing Steam.

I thought most Steam games relied on remote activation/verification? Can you install and run them on a non-networked machine? If not, your LTO tapes are close to worthless because Valve (or its buyer) can still pull the same trick that Sony did here, with the same effect.

I'm not positive whether this is what they're referring to, but you can add external games to your Steam library. This is how the Steam Deck is able to run arbitrary games without needing to be in desktop mode, and the most straightforward way to run Windows games via Proton on Linux even if you obtained them elsewhere.

Proton is open source though (and a lot of the improvements are also upstreamed to Wine, which isn't directly under Valve's control), and you can use it to run third-party games if you want (even ones that are also sold on Steam's storefront). If Valve stopped being benevolent, it would be annoying, but they wouldn't be able to undo most of the improvements we already have.

Valve has an incentive to keep being benevolent because consumers have the option of using other stores on the same hardware.

If you have invested into Sony platforms and games, you're stuck. You either write it off and move now, buying hardware during a component crisis, or you keep investing moving forward. On a PC, I might lose access to games on Steam but my hardware will allow me to buy new games on a different storefront.

NFTs never would have given you any more power than Steam as at the end of the day the platform still controls what you can access or not.

The idea would be that an NFT would provide a platform-agnostic proof-of-ownership to show that you have the right to download the game from a download provider and to satisfy its DRM protection. Basically a replacement for a license key. License keys are not transferable once redeemed, NFTs are. Modern software ownership models allow the software company to write whatever copyright law they choose, controlling length of ownership, terms of use, transferrability, backups, etc.

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