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Steam keeps on winning
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this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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In a similar vein, I'm still surprised that so few people care about possible long term issues of digital distribution generally.
I can still legally buy Atari 2600 games that are pushing 50 years old, but a whole bunch of games are gonna disappear from the legal market if Steam shuts down. Similarly, I can give away the old box of Atari games to my kids, and they can keep playing them after I die, but I can't even fucking give away my digital games. Sure, I can give them the password, but that's not even technically allowed. And they're probably gonna figure out the account isn't being used by the original owner and delete it when it's 120 years old or some shit.
The whole thing is a good temporary solution, but it's a shit long term solution. It basically relies on pirates for preservation. Thankfully, they're doing a pretty good job for most games.
Also, in theory a VC firm can buy up someone like Steam or EGS and start charging a monthly fee to access the games you already bought. You will have the option of giving up your collection or paying.
Well, hold on. Why shouldnt we rely on pirates for preservation?
Valve is the only major PC game store that isnt public. Possibly the only PC store period, tho I dont know that for a fact for the smaller distributors. The private nature is why they currently operate as the best option for users, and the odds of the other stores going private is basically zero. So when valve shifts winds, they will be the end of an era.
Do you expect us to be able to request or rely on public companies to ever do better for game preservation and user to user trade than a private company does? You already arent pleased with valves stance, and there is no indication anyone will ever do better than them.
Who else would ever do better? Pirates are the best option.
Historically, it was possible to preserve games without pirating them, just like museums can legally preserve paintings and archeological artifacts (even if copyright applies).
I think it would be best if something similar was still possible for games / software, but, AFAIK this would require either physical copies (that could be preserved without making an unauthorized copy) or sufficiently permissive licenses.
To put it another way, we didn't have to rely on pirates when physical copies existed. I mean, real physical copies that work without external services. There were still software pirates, but it wasn't a requirement. Now it's basically a requirement, because there's nothing to preserve except bits that you're not allowed to copy.
Also, copy protection is getting better, somewhat surprisingly. Last I looked, the number of games that can't be pirated was getting longer and longer. If a game can't be pirated, and we're relying on pirates for preservation, then it can't be preserved, and that seems like a problem. At least, from a preservation standpoint. There used to be a subreddit that kept track of uncracked PC games, and it's actually quite long!
Ok, but thats still also not about steam. Steam is a store, but they dont make much product. Game devs do that.
Game devs are the ones no longer making physical copies of their games. We should be pushing for the producers of games to be offering these.
As I said, it's a problem with digital distribution generally. It's killed physical copies. Even physical copies of PC games that do still exist are mostly just Steam or EGS installers and a CD key.
More specifically it's a problem with the way digital distribution is commonly handled. In theory, there could be no launcher requirement and consumers could be given the ability to transfer licenses and archive software. This would allow digital preservation to be handled mostly the same as physical was, and the games could be freely (and legally) passed down through the generations, and the games would work even if the original launcher shut down. I'm not aware of any distribution platform that offers those terms, though.
Preservation is a joke. Sure, for super old games sold on cartridges it works. But for anything around.. 1998 to 2010 or so? Forget it.
Even when you owned the original PC CDs with the box, the game updates are no longer available (Developer might not even exist anymore, site is shutdown). And if you get the wrong DRM like SecuROM you can't start your game at all. Valid CD key or not (I tried it with Sacred 2, couldn't get it to run due to the DRM servers being gone. Support from the shop I bought it years ago just gave me a Steam key afterwards, lol). And of course even if you get things to run, the online servers are no longer available, so that limits it to singleplayer games mostly.
Looking back at all the games I bought right now Steam is doing the best job when it comes to actually keep them running. GOG is a good second place. Hell, my PC doesn't even have a DVD drive anymore, it's simply not necessary.
Having played on PC for the last ~27 years I really don't understand the nostalgia. PC gaming back then was a major hassle between physical media, manual game patching (version 1.01a to 1.01b to 1.02 to 1.1 to ..) and shitty DRM that barely worked. We can only hope Steam isn't going down the gutter, but for now they rake in tons of cash and it's a privately held company so it should be fine.
This has not been my experience at all. The vast majority of my PC games from 1998 to 2010 are still working well. I still play NOLF and NOLF 2 every once in a while. The original Deus Ex still plays fine from the discs. Yes, it is sometimes a pain to find updates, but my experience has been that many games from that time period worked acceptably well straight off the disc. And, for most games I want to play from that time period, I can still find legal copies of on eBay or elsewhere.
In contrast, a number of newer games have already been delisted from Steam and are only available to pirates or people who bought them before they were delisted.
Preservation isn't just about keeping it running. You can't transfer licenses of Steam games. Anything that's delisted will, outside of piracy, die when the account holders die. In contrast, I can buy legal, working physical copies of games that haven't been sold for 20+ years. Games not being legally available is a problem. Everyone assumes that piracy will continue to work as a solution, but copy protection is getting better at outright blocking piracy, and, given the influence of media companies and others over copyright law, I wouldn't be surprised if sometime in the future it's too dangerous to pirate, because the punishment is that you have to go work on Disney slave ships or some crazy shit.
I've gamed on PC for about the same period as you, and I've concluded the opposite. I don't understand why people want launchers. It's clear that it's going to be an unsustainable model over the long term. They're charging one time for unlimited access. It's going to turn out like lifetime VPN and lifetime cloud storage. It'll work while the company makes money, but as soon as they don't you're gonna be asked for more money (or kicked off when the company goes broke). We've seen this in other industries with the old DRM music stores. They went broke and everybody lost everything they bought. I just can't see why I'd want that when they were offering a solution that didn't have that issue 25 years ago...
Well, physical media breaks, discs get scratched and you might no longer find the updates.
If you want to preserve your games nowadays your best option is buying from GOG and backing up your installers (it's DRM free and with no launcher). But it's a massive hassle compared to just using Steam and having auto updates. The GOG launcher that does updates for you exists, but it's a bit meh.
Not totally true, it's allowed to bequeath your account to someone through your will. At least for your Steam account. Of course you have to take care to do that before you die..
Valve isn't going broke anytime soon, they get around a 30% cut of every game sold and on top of that they also get a cut from all the steam market transactions. Valve is a privately owned company, which means no shareholders who want constant growth for any price, so for a company worth around 7.7 billion USD in 2022 I'm really not afraid Steam will go away anytime soon.
And even if Steam has to shut down, Gaben at least made the promise to give you downloads for all your purchased games. You can decide how much that's worth.
This is true, but, and maybe I'm weird, I've lost more games due to account issues / services shutting down than I have from damaged discs. Plus, it's fair use (in most countries) to make disc images of your own discs, so you actually have an option to legally preserve your games beyond the life of the media.
I agree about GOG.
No exception was provided for this last time I looked through the subscriber agreement. I'm not real keen on reading through it again. Can you share the relevant portion?
I tried to track down the source of this comment years ago, and I'm not convinced he ever said it. It goes back to someone on the Steam forums saying that he said it. Others on Reddit tried to track it down and I'm not aware that anyone ever succeeded.
Ah, it's unfortunately not in the contract. They do it (See for example this answer where another family member got the account after their little brother died), but it looks like it's not a guarantee.
As for the big red button at Valve, I can only find snippets of information. The only "official" one: https://imgur.com/4sa1Ln6 Most information is just from interviews or private messages, claiming there is an inner senior circle at Valve and they do have a contingency plan.
They actually have terms that cover that. You can't sell or transfer accounts, and upon the death of the owner of each account, the account will be closed and licenses to games revoked. So yes, effectively, they will have accounts with a general "time limit" for existing, although they're still coming up on the first time they might invoke that, at being a 20 year old service. The oldest people who have bought games on Steam are probably in their 50's and so they may be facing it soon. As the user base ages, you might see more "end of life" account options. You know, so you can make sure all those anime porn games disappear and your grandkids won't be dealing with that after you're dead.
How does that work with the family share games option in the Steam client?
If they're playing a shared game does it just disappear on them all of a sudden?
I'm guessing it disappears. Is it possible to family share a game and then get a refund / remove it from your library? I'm guessing whatever happens in that case is the same thing that would happen here.