This is in reference to a post titled Amazon Prime Video is able to remove a video from your library after purchase.. 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.
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 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.
You can play the majority of steam games without Steam.
Do you mean utilizing tools like Steam emulators? Because there's only a few hundred DRM-free games on Steam that I am aware of. I think it's far from a majority.
DRM free games dont need steam emus, they have no DRM just copy and paste the files and your good to go. Almost all other games that only use Steam's DRM can be cracked by replacing the dll and in some cases patching the exe. There are tools that to all the heavy lifting for you.
It's not DRM free at that point though. That's like making your own decoder wheel to crack an early 2000s game. You are still circumventing something designed to prevent you from redistributing the game.
You just aren't dealing with things like Denovo is all.
If you have to crack the DRM, it's not DRM-free anymore.
The ones that are copy-and-paste-the-files-and-run-them, sure. But just because DRM is easy to crack doesn't mean it's not DRM.
(The one exceptions might be those super old forms of DRM which basically just need the manual and that's it. Sometimes, those were actually done in creative ways that made narrative sense in the game, too. So those are like, obsolete DRM that's auto-circumvented.)
All you have to do for the most part is make a shortcut from the exe.
And yeah, a few hundred games.
I'm pretty sure a majority of the time that still causes Steam to at least try to launch.
There are a lot of cases of people forgetting to crack their games and trying to launch the executable just to be greeted with Steam you can find in piracy support communities.
That's still a drop in the bucket.
I know to keep the Task Manager handy when I do my testing!