Comment by protimewaster
1 day ago
> Steam doesn't make the games on it use the DRM, and the DRM isn't hard to bypass.
It is good that Valve doesn't require the DRM, but it's not like they've historically encouraged people to make games completely available offline. I think they've finally changed course, but their own single player games used to have the DRM requirement, plus "offline mode" was unreliable and broken for like the first 7 years of Steam's life.
> What's hard to preserve about steam games as a group?
From a legal standpoint? A lot, though it probably depends on what country you're in. If you're willing to preserve by relying on piracy, not as much. (Though some games that use external DRM have not been successfully pirated and thus cannot be preserved at all.)
Overall, part of my issue may be that I'm sensitive to how many problems Steam caused over the years, which might be different than the types of issues people are having now. But I still remember how broken Half-Life 2 was for a long time. It was a single player game (at least at launch), and you had people that worked on internet-less submarines and places like that writing in to Computer Gaming World pleading for advice on how to get the game to work reliably offline. There was no reason for the service to cause problems like that, and there was no reason for them to take years to make offline mode reliable.
> From a legal standpoint? A lot, though it probably depends on what country you're in. If you're willing to preserve by relying on piracy, not as much.
How are you defining "preservation" here because I'm just thinking about backing up the game files the same way I would back up just about anything else. And that's not complicated by Steam.
I guess I'm more focused on the "legal" part.
The separation of the license and the content, plus the inability to transfer the license, makes things legally muddy. I can copy the files, but I can't copy the license. So you eventually end up in a position where the data for the game itself has been preserved, but there's no one alive that's actually got a license to legally play it (unless new licenses are issued into perpetuity, which seems unlikely given a bunch of content already is in a position where new licenses aren't issued).
In contrast, every person that ever bought a new Atari 2600 game could be dead, but the license just transfers with the cartridge. So a museum could get some Atari 2600 cartridges and an Atari 2600 in the year 2100, and there wouldn't be any legal hurdles to playing the games.
If they just get the files to some Steam game, what do they do about the legal aspect of the fact that no one has a license for the game? The museum doesn't have a license to the games unless it purchased them new when licenses were still being issued. Should we just rely on the fact that, when push comes to shove, we can just use the software without a license? That just doesn't feel like a good solution to me.
I guess the limited lifetime of copyright does kinda solve this in a way, but it seems weird to just leave it so that games are in a state where they legally can't be played, and possibly the files can't be legally kept, for years on end until copyright expires.