Technology

59440 readers

3623 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

324

Do you actually own anything digital? (www.theregister.com)

submitted 11 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

154 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Do you actually own anything digital?::From ebooks, to videos and software, the answer is increasingly no

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] cynar@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Fyi, steam doesn't add additional DRM to games. So long as the maker hasn't added anything significant, you can often just copy the game folder out, and run it independently. There's nothing (in theory) to stop you backing it up yourself.

[–] MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works 4 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Steam itself is drm though. If you have a pc that can't connect to the internet or is no longer compatible with steam (like an XP pc for example), even if you have the game files, you can't play then without first installing and updating steam.

I have an XP pc for period-era gaming and I can't touch anything steam related for it so instead I have to either look for them on the internet archive or hope there is still a torrent for such an old game. Or failing both, actually find a physical copy. This still means I can't really play Valve's XP games though because of their requirement of Steam no matter how you bought the game.

[–] my_hat_stinks@programming.dev 9 points 11 months ago

Sort of, but only if you're launching through Steam. You can launch DRM-free Steam games through the executable file without launching Steam if you already have the files downloaded.

Games on Steam don't require Steamworks or any other DRM, if your game won't launch without Steam running that's a choice by the game developer and not a restriction imposed for Steam.

[–] DragonOracleIX@lemmy.ml 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

There is a whole list of drm-free games that will work without the launcher or with instructions on how to make them run without the launcher. If a game makes use of Steam's APIs, it won't run without proper authentication when opened with the launcher even if it is drm-free. You would need to launch it directly from the game's files in that case.

[–] MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works 2 points 11 months ago

I'll look into it, saves me buying a game again on gog

[–] daniskarma@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

There're few games that work like that. Many use the steam basic drm, making the game not launching if a valid steam session is not running.

That's why I have the generic steam crack. In case they pull the plug some day.