YglorbaNov 30, 2023

I feel like the Steam Deck is the best proof of Gabe Newell's quote that "piracy is a service issue."

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/9447833

I feel like the Steam Deck is the best proof of Gabe Newell's quote that "piracy is a service issue." - Divisions by zero

They could have easily crammed the Steam Deck full of stuff to make it hard to use for piracy - locking down everything, making it usable only to play games you legitimately own, force you to go through who knows what hoops in order to play games on it. That’s what Nintendo or Apple or most other companies do. But they didn’t, because they realized they didn’t have to. It’s 100% possible to put pirated games on the Switch - in fact, it’s as easy as it could reasonably be. You copy it over, you wire it up to Steam, if it’s a non-Linux game you set it up with Proton or whatever else you want to use to run it, bam. You can now run it in Steam just as easily as a normal Steam game (usually.) If you want something similar to cloud saves you can even set up SyncThing for that. But all of that is a lot of work, and after all that you still don’t have automatic updates, and some games won’t run this way for one reason or another even though they’ll run if you own them (usually, I assume, because of Steam Deck specific tweaks or installed that are only used when you’re running them on the Deck via the normal method.) Some of this you can work around but it’s even more hoops. Whereas if you own a game it’s just push a button and play. They made legitimately owning a game more convenient than piracy, and they did it without relying on DRM or anything that restricts or annoys legitimate users at all - even if a game has a DRM-free GOG version, owning it on Steam will still make it easier to play on the Steam Deck.

Show threadoce 🐆Dec 1, 2023

they did it without relying on DRM

Steam itself has some kind of DRM. You need to login to Steam to get access the games you bought (sure there’s offline mode but then you can’t download your games, update or buy more, so it’s only temporary convenience). If Steam dies one day, so will your Steam games library.
However, the service is great, so it’s not annoying.

Show threadcorship

That is absolutely not correct.

Steam policy is if valve shuts it down, they’ll give you enough time to download all the games and run them without drm.

Dec 1, 2023 at 12:37pmWeb
Show threadKazumaraDec 1, 2023
That’s a good policy. As long as the right people are still around to enforce it, it’s a little reassuring.
Show threadcorshipDec 1, 2023

Yeah I mean that’s a fundamental problem.

We can a) trust people/companies as long as they don’t give us a reason to not trust them.

Or b) we can never trust anyone but then this discussion is pointless anyway.

Show threadKazumaraDec 1, 2023

If there was no DRM we wouldn’t need to trust anyone to undo it.

Or if that emergency release of the DRM was a contractual guarantee we had at point of purchase, we’d also need less trust.

Show threadKyrinarDec 1, 2023
Uh…ALL of them? I’m gonna need more storage.
Show threadoce 🐆Dec 1, 2023
You mean the last part is not correct. I did forget that I heard that point before. However, it is still a DRM and you are relying on a promise made by a for-profit company that it will be removed if necessary. I don’t think history showed this kind of trust to be deserved. Steam is doing good right now and has a strong founder and leader. What happens when he’s gone in 20 years, and the company has financial troubles?
Show threaddangblingusDec 1, 2023
Yeah, I too can make wildly lofty promises that probably won’t need to ever be verified.
Show threadpreludeofmeDec 1, 2023
Things can definitely change, but I’ve got half a dozen games that still run that you can’t get on steam anymore. You can also add games that steam doesn’t sell so I get the skepticism but so far they’ve been good
Show threadLemmchenDec 2, 2023

can’t get on steam anymore

Can’t buy or can’t install anymore? Because that’s a huge difference in my book.

Show threadWarmSodaDec 2, 2023
You can reinstall any game you’ve purchased even after it’s no longer being sold.
Show threadLemmchenDec 3, 2023
That’s what I meant to imply.
Show threadseaturtleDec 5, 2023

They can revoke stuff from your library.

They just usually don’t have a reason to do so.

Show threadWarmSodaDec 5, 2023
They can’t revoke anything if it’s not installed where they think it is.
Show threadseaturtleDec 7, 2023

😈

Well they can revoke your ability to use the Steam client to install and access it.

But of course, fuck that. Steam doesn’t need to monitor what we do with our games 24/7.

Show threadTattorackDec 1, 2023

Valve is one of the few companies I would someone trust with this promise… So long as the current people in charge are still in charge.

Whoever takes over might have very different ideas.

Show threadAsafumDec 1, 2023
This is exactly my issue with every single company. They start off great and then the original owner/CEO croaks and we get Mr/Mrs Chicago Business School asshole who swoops in For The Shareholders™ and burns all the goodwill to the ground in the name of Profits!™©®
Show threadPyroDec 1, 2023
Valve is currently a private company, which is likely why they’ve been able to avoid enshittification for so long. All we can do is hope that whoever eventually takes over when Gabe steps down also has his ideals at heart.
Show threadWarmApplePieShrekDec 2, 2023
They won’t. It will go to the highest bidder. Every company does. Stop thinking your favourite one is a special exception.
Show threadMangoDec 1, 2023
That’s my problem with all of patent and copyright. The people who make something matter are not the money people who claimed it all.
Show threadKallioapinaDec 1, 2023
Usefull idiot talk.
Show threaddrathvedroDec 2, 2023
There’s literally no way they could do that without being sued into ashes.
Show threadskippedtocDec 2, 2023

They can do that for games using steam drm. Even for games using custom drm they can let it remain on your pc if you have already downloaded it, it’s not their duty to remove games from your pc even if devs pull games from steam. Whether custom drm games continue to work or not will depend on if they phone home are not.

Anyone can be sued obviously, but there will be no ashes, they aren’t random Joes to be afraid of legal trolls.

Show threadcorshipDec 2, 2023
Explain
Show threadseaturtleDec 5, 2023

So thanks to not having signed in for a couple months, I actually still had notifications from the last time I chatted about this, and here’s the information they found when looking into it.

leminal.space/comment/2351525 (see this excerpted comment chain)

In summary, this “policy” is at best someone (maybe even GabeN) stating back in 2009 and 2013 that games will still be (somehow) made available to customers if Steam shuts down.

As far as I know (please correct me if I’m wrong), there’s nothing in the Steam Subscriber Agreement that obligates Steam/Valve to do it. And even if there were, there’s nothing saying they can’t just update the SSA to remove such a term.

Furthermore, even if Valve wants to do this if Steam ever shuts down, considering Steam’s size I’d say it’s less likely to be shut down and more likely to just get sold off if Valve ever does become insolvent, and the new owner of Steam can’t be held to this promise anyway.

So, while it’d definitely be good if this were the case, this seems to be more wishful than written-in-stone.

According to Steam's terms and conditions can they remove games from your library and are Steam emulators allowed? - Leminal Space

This is in reference to a post titled Amazon Prime Video is able to remove a video from your library after purchase. [https://leminal.space/post/1113224]. The title is kind of self-explanatory and piracy was brought up in the comments. Someone mentioned GOG and Steam granting users indefinite licenses to users regardless of whether or not the game is still being sold. While I could see that with GOG something tells me that’s probably not the case with Steam but I can’t find a specific quote to back it up. I can’t seem to find an instance of them removing a game from someone’s library even when a game was banned in a country like in the case of Disco Elysium and Rimworld being banned in Australia [https://www.pcgamer.com/rimworld-is-officially-banned-in-australia-but-it-probably-wont-affect-pc/]. I couldn’t see Valve removing games from people’s libraries without a good reason due to the amount of backlash that would cause but maybe under specific circumstances they would. — On a similar note I was curious if anything in the terms and conditions talks about Steam emulators. There’s a section it that says: > “… host or provide matchmaking services for the Content and Services or emulate or redirect the communication protocols used by Valve in any network feature of the Content and Services, through protocol emulation, tunneling, modifying or adding components to the Content and Services …” But I am not sure if I am misunderstanding what it’s trying to get across. — I looked through a majority of the Steam Subscriber Agreement [https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/] but it can be a bit hard to decipher. There could also be comments from Valve staff elsewhere like on Twitter or Reddit that may at least shown their thoughts on the matter. This might be a bit boring for a lot of people but I am curious about the DRM behind Steam. I feel like people have placed a lot of trust and money into Valve and Steam so I am curious about potential worst case scenarios.