this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2024
674 points (98.7% liked)
Games
32960 readers
1335 users here now
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Weekly Threads:
Rules:
-
Submissions have to be related to games
-
No bigotry or harassment, be civil
-
No excessive self-promotion
-
Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
-
Mark Spoilers and NSFW
-
No linking to piracy
More information about the community rules can be found here.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Thankfully if GOG goes down I don't lose anything.
Now if Steam goes down, I lose my entire library
Gabe Newell has promised that if Steam goes down you won't lose your library, but we only have his word as assurance.
Gabe Newell is much more likely to go down before steam does. his words mean nothing for the future.
No doubt the corporate drones that take over after his death will shit all over his legacy.
It's one of my biggest fears, but I guess there's always piracy especially for old games.
As great as Gaben and Valve are his word doesn't mean anything (it's not a personal attack either, it's just that it isn't anything binding). Luckily if they fail to keep their promises (or legally cannot) then the crack community will step in. I'm pretty sure they cracked Steam DRM ages ago. I remember a friend using it for Left 4 Dead back in the day.
Do you have a source for this? People like to repeat this rumour but I've never found out where he promises anything like that.
In addition to that forum archive, here's a Steam support response via Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/18mzcn/i_asked_steam_support_what_happens_to_my_games_if/
https://web.archive.org/web/20170521113731/http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showpost.php?p=16095809&postcount=7
There's this, the original comment lost to time, but a link to an alleged direct quote from GabeN.
Anything that uses steam apis and services won't work without steam and steam offers a lot of that to game devs
But the APIs are public, so they can be reimplemented in open source. There just hasn't been any reason for it since currently that would only be used for piracy (in fact some "cracked" games have a mockup of the steam API that just returns the expected things as if it had contacted the servers). But the moment steam goes away I give it a couple of weeks until there's a GitHub implementing most of the basic stuff.
And have been since years: https://mr_goldberg.gitlab.io/goldberg_emulator/
If steam goes down I'm sailing the high seas from then on.
A lot of steam games dont have drm
You would lose only most of your library, not all of it
I would lose some of my library, but I think most of it would still work.
If a game has multiplayer, it most likely has DRM
Terraria and Cuphead are games i know dont work because of that
Can you not connect by IP in Terraria? I had though I had multiplayer running without even starting steam at one point...
Because steam multiplayer is implemented into the game, you cant open the app if steam is not installed
I thought I had it running without starting steam before... That was pre-1.4 and the windows version though, so things may have changed. I know there used to be a wrapper that would start the game outside of steam, but that was ages ago.
I don't think this is because of multiplayer though, as you can just not use steam services for multiplayer and connect directly to IPs. In my case trying to run without steam started causing crashes with windows forms, so steam linux runtime is probably being used for at least a few things.
Copying terraria to a windows VM (which was far more work that it needed to be) results in something similar, with a TypeInitializationException, so Steam is needed for what looks to be some social API, maybe for grabbing social links? It's quite possible that there are more things, but I don't think Terraria requires steam multiplayer services, especially as the GOG version runs without steam.
I don't think that counts as DRM, but the end effect is similar: steam needs to be running. If steam ever dies, I'm certain a simple wrapper will be made to run Terraria and probably many similarly integrated games, but it is not ideal.
Plenty of games don't rely on any Steamworks API at all. For the remaining goldberg_emulator exits.
But he's not talking about those ones.
You can play the game without the steam client