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Question, is buying games on Steam "owning"?
Depends on the game.
There's a surprisingly large amount of games on steam that are DRM free, meaning once downloaded, running the game doesn't actually require steam.
They should all be like this.
That is the main selling point of GOG
But then, how do you keep the game for later, like reinstalling it on a system that does not run steam, that won't work right?
It's just a folder. You keep the folder.
When you want to run it, you go to the folder and double-click the .exe of the game.
If you want, you can drop a shortcut to that exe somewhere convenient.
"Installing" is just putting files in a folder somewhere, and maybe adding a shortcut to the start menu so the user can find and run whatever got installed. There's nothing special about it.
Unless the .exe needs some other program to be installed, or some files that need to be available somewhere else (which these DRM free games don't), you can just move the folder the game is in wherever you like, another PC even, and it'll still run just fine.
This. I used to have a bunch of the games backed up on a hard drive because copying the files over & patching was faster than redownloading it.
Same - I used this tool which worked great for that workflow:
Pirate magic, me boy!
Ctrl + C, Ctrl + V
Sure, you can do that. It's obviously on you to figure out how you want to do it, but that's exactly what no DRM means
And I don't mean it's technically possible, you can backup the game files through steam and put them on a flash drive, and there you go
I imagine it would be for older games though?
Any dev can decide to just not code their game in a way that requires steam. Valve doesn't modify whatever the studio decides to ship in any way that would change that.
Wait... Half Life 2 is the game that forced me to install steam, create an account and wasn't playable without it is "now" in this list and is DRM free?
Removed back in 2004, seems like.
Interesting... I got the retail version back then and it was bundled with Steam and did check your account on every start (or required a steam client running with the title in the library). It even had a warning label on the box stating that it needed a steam account and that the CD key would be linked to your account. But I do not remember it using Securom. Which checks out, as I vaguely remember buying I after Christmas.
Maybe it got removed later? I can find some discussions in the steam forums arguing about the drm from about 10 years ago, and other more recent discussion where people are wondering why it has no more drm - e.g. this comment describing the same procedure as I did above
Fun fact: My Steam accounts lists that it was created in July 31st 2004, although Steam was released on September 12th 2004. I guess they just added a random date on old accounts that didn't have a date registered?
Is there an easy way to check which games in my library are DRM free?
Not currently in a place where I can check, but I believe pcgamingwiki.com has this info.
Edit: it does indeed. Lists available platforms and whether or not they have DRM, and/or what kind.
Spread that site around, cause I only came across it fairly recently and it has never showed up in web searches for me without me specifically looking for the site.
Steam has no built-in tool to filter them. You can try running them without steam, but the easiest way is likely to check the PCGamingWiki page for a given game. The "availability" section should list what kind of DRM the game has, if any.
Buy games on GoG when you can
I prefer to buy from Steam because they allow me to play my games easily and invest time and money in Linux which results in more freedom for all gamers. I've been very disappointed with GoG's record on Linux.
You still don't own them. Read their ToS.
They don't have to provide a way to install the games in perpetuity, but I'm pretty sure the ToS don't provide a way for them to stop you from keeping or running a DRM free copy you've downloaded.
So sure, the ToS says you don't own the game, but unlike ubisoft that puts that non-ownership into practice, GOG goes out of their way to make that legal non-ownership utterly meaningless. If you have a copy of the game, then you have a copy of the game.
Back them up on a hard drive and their ToS doesn’t mean squat anymore. I guess that takes a little more effort and investment but if you want to own the game without DRM that will do it.
ToS doesn't mean squat here if the law says otherwise. It's insane to me that US has this the reverse.
It's not just the US. You don't buy games from GOG, only licences which they can revoke at any time. This is not illegal.
Which doesn't matter, because you can download the DRM-free game and back it up.
Yeah, on GoG itself, it's licenses, there you are right.
Sadly no, your Steam account can be closed at any time and you have no recourse to access your purchased content if that happens. Likewise, Steam can suspend service and you lose access to your content as well.
But that's not just a Steam thing, it's digital media as a whole. Even a physical disc is not ownership, it's just a license to access the content it contains.
No, it’s not. If Valve goes belly up you can kiss your games and the infrastructure they need goodbye. Also you don’t get to resell games you already own or give them away and selling accounts is against ToS. If you die your games are gone, you can’t give your account away legally.
Yeah, that's what I thought. Not trying to be a smart ass, I just keep seeing things like this for Ubisoft and other companies and people just crap on them, but then Steam is almost never criticised for the same issue (or I am not seeing those memes). I guess Valve makes enough other things right so people are more happy to overlook this?
Steam is not a publicly traded company, so they don't pull this kind of skullduggery in service of the shareholders.
They're a company full of people who, gasp, like video games: unlike the average navel gazing, brainless, Harvard Business School CEO.
Given their track record they've been more consistently "pro gamer" than other companies and are given a lot of leeway for that.
Valve has stated that if their store was ever to be discontinued they would remove all DRM they have in place to allow for the games to be played without it. This was a long long time ago though.
Yeah, promises change over time. Hope they can keep their promise on that but not sure how that would even be feasible with a catalogue that large.
And it is only really a promise they can keep for their own games. Like I said in another comment, lots of game studios already ship their games without DRM.
If Valve goes under, the games that are gonna be a problem are the ones from the likes of Ubisoft and EA.
They wouldn't lift a finger to make sure people who bought their games on steam could keep playing them if steam disappeared
In fact they've been taking their games back even while steam is still around. Lots of people own unplayable games on steam because the publisher screwed the servers or something.
I fear for valve when Gaben dies. I hope he picks someone good.
Steam gets a pass because their business practices are consumer friendly.
Eh, their business practices regarding selling games are fairly consumer friendly, but overall they have quite a few issues themselves that aren't great. I wouldn't hold them up as a great company but rather a better company than the competition, which is a fairly low bar.
But you can, write your ID and Password on a paper under your keyboard and "forget" it before death.
It’s possible, sure, but if pressed Valve will ban the account.
Just don't let them be pressed ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You can run them only a limited time without Valve giving their ok. I do say "no".
No. Do you prefer subscription services?
May be an unpopular opinion but I don't care what happens to my games when I die because I will be dead. If I want to pass something on to any kids I have it will be memories.
Not unless it's DRM-free. You don't own games that have DRM. You just have a license to use them, which can be revoked at any time.
So in other words, no, since it's impossible for a Steam game to be DRM-free. Some have less DRM than others, but unless they let you download an installer that you can use without connecting to their servers then there's still DRM.
It's definitely possible for Steam games to be DRM-free, especially older ones. https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_games_on_Steam
For those games, you can literally just make a copy of the game directory after downloading it, and back it up somewhere. Just run the game EXE (or equivalent on Linux) to run it, even on a system that doesn't have Steam installed. Everything you need is in there. That's all Steam is doing when you 'install' a game - downloading its files and extracting them. It also installs any required runtimes like MSVC or .NET, but you can do that yourself too.
Of course, the best idea is still to buy games on GOG instead.