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

    • stoy@lemmy.zip
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      10 months ago

      Gog provides DRM free installers when buying games at their store

      • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        And plenty of steam games are DRM-free too.

        I really wish steam made it clear though. Should have to come with a tag stating DRM/no DRM. Shit, let us filter games by its DRM status.

          • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            Nah, it’s optional

            However, because steam doesn’t tell you which games are DRM, and companies have been known to arbitrarily add DRM in updates, I generally treat steam games as being DRM games

    • The Menemen!@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Nah, you can buy it legally and break the drm illegally. That is what someone I know very well does with my, ahm, their ebooks.

      • gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        10 months ago

        Removing DRM from content you bought is actually legal

        What’s illegal is doing so for the purposes of sharing whatever was DRM’d in the first place

        Not that it stops me

    • cynar@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      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.

      • MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works
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        10 months ago

        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.

        • my_hat_stinks@programming.dev
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          10 months ago

          Sort of, but only if you’re launching through Steam. You can launch DRM-free Steam games through the executable file without launching Steam if you already have the files downloaded.

          Games on Steam don’t require Steamworks or any other DRM, if your game won’t launch without Steam running that’s a choice by the game developer and not a restriction imposed for Steam.

        • DragonOracleIX@lemmy.ml
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          10 months ago

          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.

      • daniskarma@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        There’re few games that work like that. Many use the steam basic drm, making the game not launching if a valid steam session is not running.

        That’s why I have the generic steam crack. In case they pull the plug some day.