seaturtle

Do you happen to know how well this works for old Windows games? We're talking about random indie things that run in little windows and are native to like Win98. A good lotta old doujin games are like this.

This was the case for me, to some extent, for some time. But then, the more I used of Steam, the more I realized there are a variety of issues, ranging from minor inconveniences like having to deal with the Steam client (and its interface and footprint) to being at risk of losing access to all of my Steam games due to losing access to the account for a variety of possible reasons (some of which could happen even if I didn't do anything wrong on my end).

These days, if I buy, I buy DRM-free. That's an arrangement where publishers/developers properly respect customers. If it's not available DRM-free, it's ethically justifiable to pirate.

I can agree that Valve has done some good things, such as making digital distribution go big, making indie games viable, and doing a lot to advance gaming on Linux.

But I'd also argue that that doesn't obligate me to spend money to patronize them, particularly when I can get a better (by virtue of being DRM-free) product elsewhere.

Fundamentally I don't really know how it'd be viable to truly "own" a specific copy of something, when it's always possible to make infinitely many copies of it. Any such "ownership" is at best essentially just conceptual, aside from perhaps the legal right to annoy other people about the copies they are in possession of.

So instead my personal take is that I'd rather everything just be offered DRM-free. I don't necessarily need transferable ownership as much as I just need proper and guaranteed access under my own control after I purchase the product.

Sidenote: I tried getting something off APKPure the other day and it only came in the form of XAPK files. Do you know how to get the APK out of them? (A cursory check suggests that XAPK might be a proprietary thing made by APKPure that only works with their own APKPure app, which feels pretty dirty to me...)

Pardon me for living under a rock, but what's wrong with uTorrent?

Thanks for looking into that.

Still something that's merely word-of-mouth promise, not in any sort of legal documentation, and easily ignored if Valve does go down or change ownership. And that's assuming the information is still current, which itself is questionable.

(Not your fault; I don't mean to sound like I'm arguing with you.)

The Steam client (which, as we recall, is not optional, unlike e.g. GOG Galaxy) is gradually becoming bloatier in terms of technical concerns (due to moving to a browser-based engine), less accessible (due to that move breaking keyboard usability to do things like navigate through the game selection and launch them), and also bloatier in terms of features (a great example is the What's New shelf, but more generally, the interface prioritizes looking pretty than being responsive or data-dense with metadata about one's games).

On top of that, in recent years Steam basically shut off a way to access older versions of games (using a depot downloader). This is on top of Steam generally making avoiding game updates to be a pain anyway. (Yes, updates are often good things, but sometimes it's useful to have an older version, for a variety of reasons.)

As icing on the cake, if you try to suggest any of these features on the forum, be prepared for forum regulars to endlessly argue your thread into the ground, telling you why your idea is oh so wrong for Steam and how you should not have the right to play games you bought unless you do so in and only in the ways expressly authorized by the publishers who control all rights forever and always with zero recourse to you if anything goes wrong such as an errant update that breaks functionality.

Yeah, piracy is better than that shit.

I do wonder how pirated games can somehow stop working after a while. I'm guessing there's some sort of anti-piracy thing that hasn't quite been fully removed. I had this experience with one game which was known to have Denuvo; a newer crack fixed it.

Ironically, Steam being shit is a major reason I've come back to seeing the value in piracy.

I know to keep the Task Manager handy when I do my testing!

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.)