seaturtle

If you have to crack the DRM, it's not DRM-free anymore.

The ones that are copy-and-paste-the-files-and-run-them, sure. But just because DRM is easy to crack doesn't mean it's not DRM.

(The one exceptions might be those super old forms of DRM which basically just need the manual and that's it. Sometimes, those were actually done in creative ways that made narrative sense in the game, too. So those are like, obsolete DRM that's auto-circumvented.)

For a while, Recettear and Chantelise were sold on GOG, but I don't think the Steam versions ever stopped using Steam DRM. But the GOG versions appeared a good long while after the Steam releases.

Also some older Ys games had DRM when they first appeared on Steam, but I don't remember whether the DRM was patched out by the time they were sold elsewhere (on GOG and formerly on GamersGate). I do know that pretty much all the games developed by Falcom are available DRM-free these days, and I know those that are published by XSEED are the same versions on GOG and Steam. Whether this is the case for the games published by other publishers (NISA, Aksys, and Mastiff) I'm not sure yet. A likely candidate worth checking in this regard is Gurumin. It's on GOG, and it's old, and it was published by someone other than XSEED (specifically, Mastiff); I vaguely remember Gurumin on Steam being unable to start without Steam.

Steam can definitely remove your access to games in your account. Though, to be fair, it generally doesn't, as it has little incentive to do so (outside of such cases as credit card chargebacks). There are a few cases though.

(Note of course that games delisted from sale in the store are generally not removed from accounts.)

To be fair, other stores certainly could too. But something like GOG is limited in what it can do, if you've been properly backing up your files, since you can still access your own offline installers even if you completely lose access to your account.

That said, as far as dangers to your Steam account go, I'd say that individual games getting removed is probably less likely than one of the following:

• you losing access due to not being able to login for whatever reason (e.g. forgot your stuff and also lost your phone but you had Steam's 2FA going so you can't login)
• getting your account stolen by a hijacker (which there are TONS and there have been for years due to the profitability of virtual item fraud and account fraud and the synergies between these two activities). If Steam screws up their side of things, this might even happen through no fault of your own -- for example, a bunch of people got hijacked several years ago when hijackers discovered that Steam's password recovery page would accept a blank input.
• having your account banned for whatever reason. Probably less likely if you're well-behaved and don't cheat and don't talk about piracy on Steam, etc., but it's worth noting that this could happen. Also, if you dabble in cheats and your account gets VAC banned, I'd imagine that having to use a new account ends up being kinda similar to being banned from your old one, due to the hassle of having to switch accounts.

There's an old story about Gabe Newell saying that if Steam ever shuts down Valve will make sure players are able to access their games, but there's a few problems with this:

• It's not actually in the Steam Subscriber Agreement.
• This is old info anyway.
• Given how big Steam is, it's more likely to be sold off than to go dark if Valve finds itself in financial trouble. And even if GabeN has truly promised this, the new owners of Steam are not beholden to such a promise.

As for Steam emulators, like SmartSteamEmu, I'm pretty sure they're not allowed but Valve just largely turns a blind eye to them and will do so unless they become a very significant issue in some way.

IMO Steam is only "pro-consumer" in comparison to some of the really nasty DRM schemes out there. In recent years they've done a bunch of annoying things, including:

• making it harder to access older versions of games
• gradually changing the fundamental operation of the Steam client to become browser-dependent for everything (it used to be a much lighter and faster application that ran using their own code before it became basically Chrome)
• basically orphaning the Steam skins feature with update after update successively breaking more and more things (related to the above)
• making it harder to use older versions of the Steam client (okay, this might be hard to avoid technically, but still)

And of course, it's still basically DRM-agnostic for any additional layers of DRM, such as and including Denuvo. As well as having no convenient way to just turn off updates, which means that if you don't take your own precautions and a bad update got installed, well, good luck.

To be fair, Steam's own DRM is still relatively light (compared to some other schemes), and it sometimes does technically have DRM-free games (if Steam acting as a downloader doesn't count as DRM), and it offers tons of cheap games, but all of these features (or better, such as DRM-free installers) are easily available from various competitors. Steam's main attraction these days, frankly, is its selection, with a bunch of games that can't be bought elsewhere. which is a sort of market dominance that it only maintains by virtue of already being big.

"Count Dracula rises but once every century, and my role is over. But if I were to resurrect him, the battle would last for eternity!" - some asshole named Richter Belmont

"We own everything", basically. All they want is for them to control how everyone else does things.

Also, a hearty "fuck you" to all those folks out there (I've run into them before) who claim that publishers should get to have absolute control over how consumers use stuff they put out.

Ahh, good ol' price discrimination.

zing

Well, it's not too surprising; if people are like that, and AIs learn from people...

It sounds like bluffing.

In other words, it could very well be complete and utter bullshit.

Videogame Piracy, no-install % WR strats

On the contrary, I think the incentive would be for Unity to let the pirated install keep existing because that would mean more money they can extort from developers/publishers.

An admirable sentiment.

The fact that a game is Steam-only is good enough reason to pirate it.