Comment on Has the Deck turned *off* any other Steam users?
danielquinn@lemmy.ca 3 days agoAbsolutely. This is less a criticism of the Deck (which I love) and more about my own coming up against this annoying DRM that I never even knew existed because I only had one place to play.
Subscript5676@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
Welcome to the painful world of DRM that we live in :’)
And to be fair to Steam, they did recently issue a statement and tried reflecting it in their stores to say that you don’t actually outright own all the games you “bought”, as, for some, you are merely purchasing the license to play games that the publishers have decided to put behind a DRM. This has always been the case since the dawn of DRMs, and it was implied that people should understand it, but recent events have made it clear that a lot of people aren’t even aware of it. So you’d be forgiven for not knowing.
danielquinn@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
It’s funny, I flocked to Steam because I was under the impression that I was owning the games. While other companies were trying to get me to sign onto their “play everything” subscriptions and Google had their “Stadia” (remember them?), Steam let me download the game and install it on my (Linux!) computer with no license key checks, working offline etc. etc. I feel like the assumption that I was in fact buying my games, rather than a license to play them when Steam saw fit was a reasonable one. This discovery was quite enraging.
Subscript5676@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
Again, you’d be forgiven for that. The design language around these sorts of license purchase has been frequently framed as a straight purchase by many companies on the Internet that it’s become essentially the norm that many don’t question. DRM is also proposed without ever stating that it essentially makes the end user purchase a license, as it frames itself as a way for the publisher to retain some control over the product that’s in their interest, and that the end user don’t even need to really know until the rights are exercised. It’s an infuriating piece of technology that is straight up designed to be a rug pull from the get-go.
But, again, to be fair, not all games on Steam have DRM from some info I’ve gathered before. It was impossible to tell, but I think Steam actually shows a little info box now to clarify that DRM is in place or not.
pory@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Steam notifies for third party DRM, but not for the games that do/don’t use Steamworks DRM. There are games on Steam that are completely DRM free and will launch from the exe file without Steam running at all, but there’s no way to tell if Game X is one of those other than word of mouth.