Why do I play all these games? Because it’s important that they’re played.
Because every game is a story, a world, a moment in time crafted by someone who cared enough to create it.
Because each one teaches me something new—about design, about culture, about myself.
Because in a sea of pixels, there’s magic waiting to be found.
And because, honestly? Sometimes I just want to escape, explore, and lose myself in different worlds.
So yeah. I own thousands of games, and I’ll keep playing them.
The funny thing is, you don’t own them.
But the vast majority can be played without steam. Mostly by force coughcough but still. I know, still no legal ownership.
Say what you will, every game I’ve bought—I can still play. And I’ve been buying Steam games for over a decade.
Meanwhile, none of my GameCube discs work on my Switch.
You can still play them on your GameCube or Wii though, or take copies of the discs and play them on anything that runs Dolphin
While you’re not wrong, by that logic, it’s actually fairly trivial to take my Steam downloads drive and run it on any computer even without my Steam account.
Does that work? I always assumed games with DRM wouldn’t work if they couldn’t authenticate to your Steam account.
It works in the same way that dumping your GameCube games and running them on Dolphin works… It’s quick and easy, but it’s against the ToS and requires breaking DRM.
Steam’s DRM is weak, and in some interviews some Valve developers even gave hints that this is on purpose. Many Steam games will simply run without Steam if you just double click the .exe in the install folder, and the vast majority that only rely on Steam’s DRM can be opened by running a free “Steam Emulator” software that pretends to be an active Steam account with a correct license.
You can still play it but increasingly games are becoming very different from what you bought.
I’ve started noticing a disturbing trend. More and more games that are older being sold at steep discounts or “free to play” and simultaneously jampacked with invasive telemetry and/or ads/microtransactions. And since Steam won’t let you play older versions, those games are effectively dead.
FYI if seems you can access older versions of Steam games, it’s just a bit hacky
That is what firewalls and sinkholes are for. Stupid telemetry.
Yet I never noticed such a “trend” in direct combination with steam. The whole industry goes to shit, but it’s not steam’s fault.
Out of the thousands of games I have, not once have I noticed anything like you describe.
Oh well if you haven’t experienced it, it must not exist then 🤷
hmmm that doesn’t ring a bell here either. Which games do this ?
The most recent ones I’ve noticed are Riders Republic and Borderlands 2. Helldivers also introduced a bunch of new microtransactions years after it’s launch.
And what there is steam’s doing? Borderland’s a greedy IP from a greedy company. What do you expect?
I have to say I never played those. Do these microtransactions lock content that was previously available out of the box?
I mean, if it’s a trend, you’d think I would have noticed it by now.
And I suppose my experience doesn’t count? Or you think I’m making this up?
I don’t know, you haven’t pointed out multiple examples.