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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
ToS doesn’t mean squat here if the law says otherwise. It’s insane to me that US has this the reverse.
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.
Steam gets a pass because their business practices are consumer friendly.
But you can, write your ID and Password on a paper under your keyboard and “forget” it before death.
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.
