In a move that has once again sparked backlash within the gaming community, Sony now seems to be placing advisory stickers on PlayStation 5 consoles, warning players that physical games will soon be discontinued.
PC allows you to (mostly) own your games once you buy them, at least the offline functionality. Sure it’s legally still just a “license to play the game” but technically you can back up your Steam library, move it to a new PC, whatever. Steam can’t really “take the game back” from you (again, at least the offline functionality).
Meanwhile on console if Sony decides to remove some game from their store, well, that’s it. IIRC it will even become unplayable on your console if you have it downloaded.
Same difference as buying & downloading MP3/FLAC files vs subscribing to a streaming service.
Steam can’t really “take the game back” from you (again, at least the offline functionality).
I mean…sort of. Steam will only run in offline mode if you first run it in online mode and ask Steam to allow the machine to enter offline mode. I imagine that this is to keep people from simply installing games on many PCs and then taking them all offline.
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Yeah, sounds like a maximum of one host can be offline for an account, and I imagine that they fingerprint hosts.
Some games don’t require Steam to be running. Like, Steam just downloads them and launches them, and they still work even if you launch them without Steam running, don’t use Steamlib. For those, yes.
There are other PC game vendors who do explicitly support this mode of operation, like GOG.
PC allows you to (mostly) own your games once you buy them, at least the offline functionality. Sure it’s legally still just a “license to play the game” but technically you can back up your Steam library, move it to a new PC, whatever. Steam can’t really “take the game back” from you (again, at least the offline functionality).
Meanwhile on console if Sony decides to remove some game from their store, well, that’s it. IIRC it will even become unplayable on your console if you have it downloaded.
Same difference as buying & downloading MP3/FLAC files vs subscribing to a streaming service.
I mean…sort of. Steam will only run in offline mode if you first run it in online mode and ask Steam to allow the machine to enter offline mode. I imagine that this is to keep people from simply installing games on many PCs and then taking them all offline.
checks
Yeah, sounds like a maximum of one host can be offline for an account, and I imagine that they fingerprint hosts.
Some games don’t require Steam to be running. Like, Steam just downloads them and launches them, and they still work even if you launch them without Steam running, don’t use Steamlib. For those, yes.
There are other PC game vendors who do explicitly support this mode of operation, like GOG.
Huh, that’s fair. I mostly play non-DRM games (or I guess games which don’t check steamlib to start?) so never noticed this.