When I was forced to download steam after I bought empire total war only to find unlike previous games there was no physical disk, steam had to be downloaded, spied on you constantly, and drained your battery and cpu, and constantly made you ask for permission to use the game. You could play it offline but it would constantly give you error messages about needing to check online to play offline or something.
Point being, in that case the real purpose was to foil software pirating, video game developers are very aggressive in combating piracy, to the point of denying legitimate users the right to use their games, in effect justifying piracy of that particular game in my opinion.
It is to foil piracy, but in this case, not software piracy, but piracy of your personal data. One drive is a cloud storage platform similar to Dropbox.
Saying bad things about valve/steam will get you hate on here. Its not fair but because of what they’ve done for linux recently people on this website don’t appreciate valid criticism thrown in their direction.
Surely that comment is just getting downvoted for being irrelevant rather than for criticising Steam? It’s barely connected to the post, totally unconnected to the comment it’s replying to, and blaming Valve for decisions made by the Total War devs
The original comment is also describing DRM. Look I know and understand that steam works great and is easier than piracy but that doesn’t mean it isnt DRM.
Okay, sure. I don’t think either I or the parent comment said it wasn’t DRM, I just read the parent comment as explaining the sentence that was described as ambiguous. The question remains: how is that DRM Steam’s fault?
One drive DRM isnt their fault but steam itself is DRM for any of the games you bought there. You cannot access your steam games without your log in and that is DRM. On the spectrum between spotify and bandcamp, steam is much closer to spotify in terms of your ownership of the media you payed for.
Edit: if you’re confused about conversational tangents then I cant’t explain that to you
There are a lot of DRM-free games on Steam. You have to log in to download them in the first place obviously (they haven’t figured out how to make downloads magic yet unfortunately) but once they’re downloaded you can just launch the executable however you want.
Any game on Steam that has DRM has DRM because the publisher wants it that way.
Early steam was pretty shit. But Valve doesn’t need to answer to shareholders, and so made their product better every year for the sake of making it better. Which also made Gabe rich as fuck.
I’ve been a loyal customer on steam for 16 years and have over 400 games on there. Valve has never abused their power and I trust them for the time being. However none of that changes the fact that I don’t really own any of the games I bought through them because I have to log into steam to access them. And that kinda sucks and criticism of that is valid.
You only need to log into steam once to download it. After that you can go offline forever, and, unless I’m missing something, the game will always be playable.
Offline mode works on prior authentification. If you know of a way to access your steam games (even if you have them downloaded) on a new OS without using the steam client, I would be delighted to hear about it.
It depends on a game, some, rarely, you can just start, but most will check for a steam account to see if the game isn’t just copied. As far as anti-piracy measures go, it’s quite a tame one. You want them to allow you to just copy a game and start it, and it never how it worked.
So yeah, like I said, you need to login into steam once, and then you can go offline.
When I was forced to download steam after I bought empire total war only to find unlike previous games there was no physical disk, steam had to be downloaded, spied on you constantly, and drained your battery and cpu, and constantly made you ask for permission to use the game. You could play it offline but it would constantly give you error messages about needing to check online to play offline or something.
Point being, in that case the real purpose was to foil software pirating, video game developers are very aggressive in combating piracy, to the point of denying legitimate users the right to use their games, in effect justifying piracy of that particular game in my opinion.
It is to foil piracy, but in this case, not software piracy, but piracy of your personal data. One drive is a cloud storage platform similar to Dropbox.
Saying bad things about valve/steam will get you hate on here. Its not fair but because of what they’ve done for linux recently people on this website don’t appreciate valid criticism thrown in their direction.
Surely that comment is just getting downvoted for being irrelevant rather than for criticising Steam? It’s barely connected to the post, totally unconnected to the comment it’s replying to, and blaming Valve for decisions made by the Total War devs
Its relevant because it describes a company that uses DRM for you to access your stuff which is exactly what the post is of.
That’s the connection to the post, but it’s not a connection to the parent comment and also not Valve’s decision
The original comment is also describing DRM. Look I know and understand that steam works great and is easier than piracy but that doesn’t mean it isnt DRM.
Okay, sure. I don’t think either I or the parent comment said it wasn’t DRM, I just read the parent comment as explaining the sentence that was described as ambiguous. The question remains: how is that DRM Steam’s fault?
One drive DRM isnt their fault but steam itself is DRM for any of the games you bought there. You cannot access your steam games without your log in and that is DRM. On the spectrum between spotify and bandcamp, steam is much closer to spotify in terms of your ownership of the media you payed for.
Edit: if you’re confused about conversational tangents then I cant’t explain that to you
There are a lot of DRM-free games on Steam. You have to log in to download them in the first place obviously (they haven’t figured out how to make downloads magic yet unfortunately) but once they’re downloaded you can just launch the executable however you want.
Any game on Steam that has DRM has DRM because the publisher wants it that way.
Early steam was pretty shit. But Valve doesn’t need to answer to shareholders, and so made their product better every year for the sake of making it better. Which also made Gabe rich as fuck.
So yeah, we all love Valve and Steam now.
I’ve been a loyal customer on steam for 16 years and have over 400 games on there. Valve has never abused their power and I trust them for the time being. However none of that changes the fact that I don’t really own any of the games I bought through them because I have to log into steam to access them. And that kinda sucks and criticism of that is valid.
You only need to log into steam once to download it. After that you can go offline forever, and, unless I’m missing something, the game will always be playable.
Offline mode works on prior authentification. If you know of a way to access your steam games (even if you have them downloaded) on a new OS without using the steam client, I would be delighted to hear about it.
It depends on a game, some, rarely, you can just start, but most will check for a steam account to see if the game isn’t just copied. As far as anti-piracy measures go, it’s quite a tame one. You want them to allow you to just copy a game and start it, and it never how it worked.
So yeah, like I said, you need to login into steam once, and then you can go offline.
Buy your games from GOG and you can copy them over as many times as you like, they’re your files.