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.

  • XEAL@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Same here with the original Metro: Last Light.

    However, Valve has grabbed us by the balls by forcing use to use Steam to run purchased games. They could go out of business or whatever and people would the entire Steam games library.

    I try to buy games via GOG instead if they have a similar offer for the same game.

    • coughrelief@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I think Gabe said long ago that whenever steam died, you’d somehow be given all the games you owned still

      • Corroded@leminal.spaceOP
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        1 year ago

        I don’t think Gabe actually said anything. It seems like a user, over ten years ago, asked a support staff about it. The Support Tech said

        “… measures are in place to ensure that ll users will continue to have access to their Steam games.”

        Someone on a Steam forum post said Gabe said

        "If you right click on a game in Steam, you’ll see that you can back up the files yourself. Unless there was some situation I don’t understand, we would presumably disable authentication before any event that would preclude the authentication servers from being available.

        We’ve tested disabling authentication and it works."

        but as far as I am aware that was just a post from a random user. It could be that they contacted Gabe himself through his email. It was 2009 and from what I recall he would frequently respond to users back then but there’s not much to back it up currently.

        • Dettweiler@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          They’ve maintained a very pro-consumer stance so far; so yes, I do believe them for the time being.

          • db2@sopuli.xyz
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            1 year ago

            Reddit wasn’t evil once too and we all know how that turned out. Or Google if you need a bigger name.

          • seaturtle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            1 year ago

            IMO Steam is only “pro-consumer” in comparison to some of the really nasty DRM schemes out there. In recent years they’ve done a bunch of annoying things, including:

            • making it harder to access older versions of games
            • gradually changing the fundamental operation of the Steam client to become browser-dependent for everything (it used to be a much lighter and faster application that ran using their own code before it became basically Chrome)
            • basically orphaning the Steam skins feature with update after update successively breaking more and more things (related to the above)
            • making it harder to use older versions of the Steam client (okay, this might be hard to avoid technically, but still)

            And of course, it’s still basically DRM-agnostic for any additional layers of DRM, such as and including Denuvo. As well as having no convenient way to just turn off updates, which means that if you don’t take your own precautions and a bad update got installed, well, good luck.

            To be fair, Steam’s own DRM is still relatively light (compared to some other schemes), and it sometimes does technically have DRM-free games (if Steam acting as a downloader doesn’t count as DRM), and it offers tons of cheap games, but all of these features (or better, such as DRM-free installers) are easily available from various competitors. Steam’s main attraction these days, frankly, is its selection, with a bunch of games that can’t be bought elsewhere. which is a sort of market dominance that it only maintains by virtue of already being big.

    • doktorseven@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Not all games require Steam. Steam DRM exists for companies and individuals to use if they want, but it is in no way mandatory. Look for lists online of non-DRMed Steam games that can be ran completely without Steam.

      Blame the maker of the game, not Valve.

      • XEAL@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Now I’m wondering if any team has released a game both on GOG and Steam and still enabled DRM on the Steam release…

        • Corroded@leminal.spaceOP
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          1 year ago

          Totally. A not-so-current mention would be Fallout 3. For the longest time the Steam release used Games For Windows Live which wasn’t really working for years but the GOG version was DRM free.

          I can’t think of a recent release where this has happened but I imagine it was either because it was typical for the team behind a game to have a specific kind of DRM or because the GOG release was lightly later than the Steam release.

        • seaturtle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 year ago

          For a while, Recettear and Chantelise were sold on GOG, but I don’t think the Steam versions ever stopped using Steam DRM. But the GOG versions appeared a good long while after the Steam releases.

          Also some older Ys games had DRM when they first appeared on Steam, but I don’t remember whether the DRM was patched out by the time they were sold elsewhere (on GOG and formerly on GamersGate). I do know that pretty much all the games developed by Falcom are available DRM-free these days, and I know those that are published by XSEED are the same versions on GOG and Steam. Whether this is the case for the games published by other publishers (NISA, Aksys, and Mastiff) I’m not sure yet. A likely candidate worth checking in this regard is Gurumin. It’s on GOG, and it’s old, and it was published by someone other than XSEED (specifically, Mastiff); I vaguely remember Gurumin on Steam being unable to start without Steam.

        • junusdenised420@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • Corroded@leminal.spaceOP
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            1 year ago

            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.

          • seaturtle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            1 year ago

            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.)

        • WarmSoda@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          All you have to do for the most part is make a shortcut from the exe.

          And yeah, a few hundred games.

          • Corroded@leminal.spaceOP
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            1 year ago

            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.

            And yeah, a few hundred games.

            That’s still a drop in the bucket.

    • Chimaeratorian@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Steam servers would have to blow up the same day it went out of business, I feel like Gabe’s dying breath would be spent hitting a killswitch for DRM before the service shut down. Maybe hyperbole and naive of me but I doubt the truth is far off.

      • XEAL@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        We can only trust that Valve acts in good faith if the time ever comes…