this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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All the physical games i ever owned went up in flames when my house burned down. I can still play games i bought on steam in 2008
That's what house insurance is for.
"Have you considered Game Insurance?" - Ubisoft, probably
You could have made digital backups of your physical games and stored that somewhere safe.
You cannot make backups of DRM'd Steam games that work without Steam.
Please don't fucking tell me you mad digital backup of your 50 xbox games and 40 playstation games and have a modded playstation and xbox laying around where you can just burn them whenever you wanna play them.
Exactly. Some of the replies in this thread are so disingenuous.
Just because you don't care about backing things up doesn't mean nobody else is.
I can promise the number of people backing up their Xbox/SNES/Sony/whatever games at the time/era of release, are a rounding error number of people who purchased at all. And even if that was the case, how are you gonna do that for the discs that have DRM? Obviously it can be cracked, but how does that help you in that specific time of need (referencing the house fire), when the tech to crack that DRM didn't even exist?
Nobody is arguing with "physical copies have better security" (digital storefronts closing, keys being revoked, etc), they're only arguing with you for pretending everyone is seemingly clairvoyant, with pools of money and compute hardware, to make backups of these things. There is no way you can possibly think that all one needed to do was "copy da files dumbass" when even the hardware to do that, didn't exist (for the public or at all), or was itself prohibitevly expensive.
Don't need to burn them, you can play them off a USB! Or over an SMB share.
Homie, I've made backups of thousands of games.
How do you think PS2 ROMs are uploaded?
You can't make digital backups of physical games with drm either since you need the original disc to play (or atleast that was the case last time I bought a physical game which is probably around 2005 or something lmao)
You are spot on, DRM is the problem at the core. That's why I prefer DRM-free stores like GOG over Steam whenever possible.
Luckily many of the old games I own on CD are also available on GOG.
Steam doesn't enforce DRM, your game can use Steamworks even without DRM.
The no-DRM policy sure is very good, but in the end any game on GoG is there by choice of the publisher, who could also choose not to use DRM on Steam.
Many games on Steam use Steamworks DRM despite being available DRM-free on other stores, one prominent example being Batman Arkham City.
Digital backups of my Steam games exist on torrents. If Steam ever becomes shitty like this I can stop purchasing from them and reacquire it from the Jolly Roger.
You can make Steam offline mode and you absolutely will have access to any game installed on your machine.
Not any game. Games that depend on third-party DRM may still demand a brief internet connection during offline mode.