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Do you actually own anything digital? (www.theregister.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

170 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Do you actually own anything digital?::From ebooks, to videos and software, the answer is increasingly no

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago (13 children)

The only certain way to own digital products is apparently to pirate it illegally.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (5 children)

Fyi, steam doesn't add additional DRM to games. So long as the maker hasn't added anything significant, you can often just copy the game folder out, and run it independently. There's nothing (in theory) to stop you backing it up yourself.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Steam itself is drm though. If you have a pc that can't connect to the internet or is no longer compatible with steam (like an XP pc for example), even if you have the game files, you can't play then without first installing and updating steam.

I have an XP pc for period-era gaming and I can't touch anything steam related for it so instead I have to either look for them on the internet archive or hope there is still a torrent for such an old game. Or failing both, actually find a physical copy. This still means I can't really play Valve's XP games though because of their requirement of Steam no matter how you bought the game.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

There is a whole list of drm-free games that will work without the launcher or with instructions on how to make them run without the launcher. If a game makes use of Steam's APIs, it won't run without proper authentication when opened with the launcher even if it is drm-free. You would need to launch it directly from the game's files in that case.