TBF I never liked Steam for the fact that I don’t own the games. If Valve vanishes, all the games people ‘buy’ are also gone.
I’m an old PC user that started with DOS and played BASIC games, and I’ve never been a fan of Valve or Steam. They did progress tremendously under Linux and brought a gaming revolution to the system, but they are still a capitalist corporation selling digitally locked products that we don’t really own.
I agree. I buy any game I can on GOG or physical media, but still use steam. The only reason I’m fine using steam is that I have backed up every game I own, and there are piracy tools that can break steam’s DRM. This way, if valve disappears, I can still play all my games without worry, except for the multiplayer parts of games that had multiplayer using steam servers exclusively.
However, there already exist emulators that let you play those multiplayer games on LAN without a connection to steam or the internet, so I’d imagine folks will figure out a hostable version for over-internet play if the need arises
TBF I never liked Steam for the fact that I don’t own the games. If Valve vanishes, all the games people ‘buy’ are also gone.
I’m an old PC user that started with DOS and played BASIC games, and I’ve never been a fan of Valve or Steam. They did progress tremendously under Linux and brought a gaming revolution to the system, but they are still a capitalist corporation selling digitally locked products that we don’t really own.
I agree. I buy any game I can on GOG or physical media, but still use steam. The only reason I’m fine using steam is that I have backed up every game I own, and there are piracy tools that can break steam’s DRM. This way, if valve disappears, I can still play all my games without worry, except for the multiplayer parts of games that had multiplayer using steam servers exclusively.
However, there already exist emulators that let you play those multiplayer games on LAN without a connection to steam or the internet, so I’d imagine folks will figure out a hostable version for over-internet play if the need arises
however much consumer friendly drm free products would be.
as long as we have capitalism, drm free content will always be a niche thing, if available at all.