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Steam keeps on winning
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this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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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.