Comment by eru

10 hours ago

Steam has been (mostly) a good citizen. But there's not much in the way of legal or technical hurdles to them going down the same path. It's all goodwill and reputation.

I hope it's enough.

If steam ever goes up in smoke, there will be infinite justification to never trust download only ever again.

You can at least make local backups of your Steam games. If a game is removed such that you can't even download it anymore, you can always just install it manually.

  • That's what GOG offers. And I'd advise anyone to use GOG over Steam for their principles alone. Every game you purchase through their platform is DRM free and they go to a lot of effort to preserve retro titles that would be difficult to play nowadays without a lot of tinkering. They also put no limitation on how many family members you can share your games with.

  • Steam has DRM,so no. Easily cracked yes, but then you can just go the full pirate route.