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Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

> All I'm saying is it's all digital on the PC side of things, and has been for ages, but we have means of maintaining access to the games we love over here, and it's one of the reasons I've gravitated to the PC for quite a while now.

It all depends on where you buy your games of course; GOG will let you download DRM-free installers, but if Steam goes down, your libraries goes down with it. They have made a vague promise that they would prevent that if the company ever went out of business, but who knows if they will keep that promise.

Guarantees about playability went out the window the day free, easily-obtained updates came out on PC as much as consoles.

At least on the PC side, there's a vibrant piracy community.

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Even if you get all of your games via Steam, provided you have them downloaded, you can still run them without Steam if you know where to look. Obviously GOG is far better in this regard, but preservation is not a concern on PC, outside of games that are reliant on a server.

Starting next generation when prices are going to be obscenely high, I'm really struggling to see why anyone should invest in a console as opposed to a (mini-)PC.

Depends. Steam is not DRM itself, you can open the game folder and copy the game to another computer and steam doesn’t care. The game often has its own DRM though which will stop you.

GOG is different in that they ban DRM outright.

Some games won't start if Steam isn't running but you can work around that with a fake steamapi.dll, it's not a deep DRM check.

> The game often has its own DRM though which will stop you

I think you missed the "know where to look" part. It's called a Steam emulator, for starters. Note that I speak about this strictly for preservation purposes, as people who raise Steam DRM as an obstacle to preservation have not done their homework.

Realistically, if Steam closed down tomorrow, within 4-6 hours there'd be a megathread on Reddit explaining how to get the games running without Steam. Within 48 hours there'd be an auto-crack tool floating around on GitHub.

Steam for some reason gets a pass even though it normalized the use of DRM for PC games over 20 years ago.

Most Steam games don't actually have any DRM. They just link to steamapi.dll for things like achievements, and that makes you think you can't run them without Steam.

Some have DRM, of course.

What is the command I can use to run them without Steam then? If the game links to a dll that launches Steam and won’t play without it, then that is effectively Drm.

Before I even play the game without Steam: how do I download it without Steam?

There are DLLs that remove any check of Steam running. Just keep a copy of one and use that on other games.

Regarding the download, it's the same issue with physical media. If I don't have the DVD, how can I acquire the game?

Oh there are Dlls? And as a non-technical consumer I just know this do I? I know how to dig deep into my file system and copy+paste a dll file into software I can’t/don’t understand? How do I download and install a copy without Steam?

The premise of this hypothetical is Steam's servers going away. Ping me about this if and when it ever happens and I'll write you a tool where you can select the steamapi.dll you downloaded and have it copied to where your games need it. There's a fair chance you might not even need to because someone else will have made it before me.

Has the barrier for non technical consumer gone down? Back in the 90s when some game didn't work because of some weird issue (we had two CD drives and it would refuse to detect the CD in either drive) my parents had no problem downloading a pirated one that didn't need a CD.

You wouldn't have to figure it out yourself. They didn't need a hex editor. But they did understand "download this file, go to this part of Program Files, move the downloaded file here and agree to overwrite". You'll find similar guides online. They already exist, because it's the same as if you're trying to pirate a Steam game!

People will do anything for the dancing bunnies. Both good and bad.

No my point here is that you have to download and install Steam before you can download and install any games. Now if I’m non-technical why would I want to make the extra effort to go Drm free if I have to use Steam anyways?

I know technical people can do it, but I do not believe this is a path for the non-technical user.

The proposed steps are:

- buy game on steam marketplace (no client) - download and install games (client required) - uninstall steam client and paste in fake dll file

But now I want more games… so rinse and repeat? This is a lot of work.

No you don't, you just have to plug in this USB drive and copy the files to your hard drive.

You literally just copy the cracked steamapi.dll into your game files. It's near universal and simple.

This is just piracy. This is no different than downloading a crack. This is not some great service offered by Valve/Steam, it's just a cracked binary.

Yeah pretty clearly falls under 'bypassing a digital lock' according to the DMCA. they got you when you clicked ok on the license agreement. Movies and music is a different thing: you don't need to agree to a license when you buy a disk but I'd be surprised if we don't start seeing little pamplets thrown in there saying "by keeping this disk you agree to _____..."

You can download a fake steamapi.dll from a pirate site. It will fill in all the function stubs and it isn't even illegal.

Or so I assume. I have Steam installed, so I wouldn't know.

You download it with Steam, then run Steam's backup function to back up the games you care about to physical media. Or in the vast number of cases you can just copy the game folder

Obviously if you buy it with steam you need Steam. But you only need it at the time of purchase, for the vast majority of titles

Steam's backup function creates some kind of proprietary and licensed archive files. Reality: you download it with Steam, then go to Steam's folder and copy the game folder.

Depends on the game. Stardew Valley can be run outside Steam, and I do it to be able to add mods.

How do you run an application? Depends on the application, as they all have different filenames...

I got Kerbal Space Program to run by just copying the entire folder then deleting the Steam dlls. Not sure how many games that will work for though.

If you are on Windows, you navigate to the folder that the game is installed to and double click the .exe to launch it.

https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/0/5540051992994...

Good customer service and mostly benevolent for the last two decades, it buys them a lot of goodwill they otherwise wouldn't have.

That and people simply trust steam because it has always been trustworthy (on the whole).

Yeah, I’ve been on Steam for about 20 years now and I can’t recall many bad moments with Valve.

The only one that comes to mind is the “outrage” when they decided to release L4D2 just a year after L4D back in 2008 instead of making this a free upgrade. Times have definitely changed. looks at yearly COD with barely any changes

> Steam for some reason

Currently probably because of Valve's work on Proton, and before because Steam just worked and didn't seem to exploit players.

Steam games are not required to have DRM, it's entirely up to the game developer/publisher.

It allows you to play your games offline though, so if Steam's servers go down you can still play your games. I'm not sure if that's permanent or if you need to reactivate your DRM / license every once in a while though.

Around a decade ago i had to move to another city and spent a few months without internet. I had all my favorite games downloaded on Steam and was able to play them offline with no issue for all that time. Not sure if it still like that, but it was possible back then.

It’s not possible with any Denuvo game which will require you reactivate with a drm server every so often.

Which has nothing to do with Steam...

I sort of get it. Every competitor, except maybe GOG, has come down hard in hyper-capitalist value-extraction mode quickly after pretending to do any good-will. For Valve, being a somewhat decent company is part of their ethos, for their competitors it's a means to an end.

I trust Valve not to screw me over, even though I know they totally could. Their own DRM is pretty weak (just put a modified DLL in the game directory and the game will launch), luckily.

If steam goes down you can play offline. They have a portable game console that doesn't need to be connected to play. They have big warnings on the store page of games that require online drm.

They don’t let you resell games, if you die your library is gone, if said steamdeck (or steam machine) breaks those games are gone, the list goes on. It is a digital store with the exact same limitations of any video game console full of digital purchases.

I use Steam but I also know I’m vulnerable to a rug pull. We all are. That’s why I’ve been shifting over to GOG and making sure to back up my library in an organized fashion. I wish I had done it sooner, but hey, today’s the best day.

As for warnings, I mean…come on man. That’s like hiding behind ToS. Let’s be realistic here: how many people here (including yourself) see a game they really want, see it has a little DRM note on the uttered store page, then decide never to buy it? Few people let that stop them from getting a game they actually want.

The deck and machine are not going to delete your account if it breaks? Theyre just PCs what are you on about?

I don't buy games that require third party launchers ever. Been burned losing my Ubisoft account or w/e a few times. The warnings are helpful and steam doesn't have to say anything at all.

If steam shuts down and all your games are on a valve device. I only addressed that because it seemed it was being used as an example in the prior comment, as if that protects them more than an Xbox does.

Well, the device works fine if valve shuts down. It's a PC. The games are gone, sure.

>the games are gone, sure

That’s the entire thing this conversation revolves around…

You keep bringing up devices because the threads about xbox, but valve devices are fundamentally different where they will keep working without any valve services. They can even play games.

Seeing the little DRM note kills my joy entirely. I have used steam, but the runtime anti-tamper malware has no place on my system. I don't use the word malware lightly. I trust it about as much as a random "overdue" invoice pdf from my spam folder. Maybe less.

There's a surprising amount of games on my Deck that refuse to run without internet. It's not even marked anywhere which sucks because you find out when you have no connectivity.

Is that generally caused by Steam, or by the game itself needing an online connection?

It's practically always the game - Steam has offline mode which works fine.

Steam has some backup feature. I do backups of my games. Compressed to slow HDD dedicated to backups. Faster to install than downloading again from network. Don't know though how much will that help

Can one download a backup first, then install (using usb drive) into an "offline" machine first (without steam/online?)

Yeah, if the game is set up to not use steam as drm. You can check by going to the installed files and running the exe directly - in most cases it'll still launch even if you're signed out.

Also there is a vibrant retrogaming community, with lots of games much more interesting than yet another COD or FIFA.

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