Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish Gog made a Steam Deck.
Me too. It’s coming to Linux though. https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/07/gog-confirm-they-are-w...
Until then we use this: https://heroicgameslauncher.com/
Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
51–60 of 797 posts
Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can say pussy on the internet
The word was "piracy" HN is the propaganda arm of a billionaire enrichment company, so it's understandable that someone might be unsure whether you're allowed to say that word here.
We all know what the word was, it was a joke to replace it with another word that has the same first/last letters that obviously wouldn't fit here. A joke about how words are censored all over the internet as a way to appease advertisers on various platforms.
Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
#53> All I'm saying is it's all digital on the PC side of things, and has been for ages, but we have means of maintaining access to the games we love over here, and it's one of the reasons I've gravitated to the PC for quite a while now. It all depends on where you buy your games of course; GOG will let you download DRM-free installers, but if Steam goes down, your libraries goes down with it. They have made a vague pro…
Steam for some reason gets a pass even though it normalized the use of DRM for PC games over 20 years ago.
> Steam for some reason
Currently probably because of Valve's work on Proton, and before because Steam just worked and didn't seem to exploit players.
Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Steam has some backup feature. I do backups of my games. Compressed to slow HDD dedicated to backups. Faster to install than downloading again from network. Don't know though how much will that help
Can one download a backup first, then install (using usb drive) into an "offline" machine first (without steam/online?)
Yeah, if the game is set up to not use steam as drm. You can check by going to the installed files and running the exe directly - in most cases it'll still launch even if you're signed out.
Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
#55> All I'm saying is it's all digital on the PC side of things, and has been for ages, but we have means of maintaining access to the games we love over here, and it's one of the reasons I've gravitated to the PC for quite a while now. It all depends on where you buy your games of course; GOG will let you download DRM-free installers, but if Steam goes down, your libraries goes down with it. They have made a vague pro…
If steam goes down you can play offline. They have a portable game console that doesn't need to be connected to play. They have big warnings on the store page of games that require online drm.
There's a surprising amount of games on my Deck that refuse to run without internet. It's not even marked anywhere which sucks because you find out when you have no connectivity.
Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Steam for some reason gets a pass even though it normalized the use of DRM for PC games over 20 years ago.
Good customer service and mostly benevolent for the last two decades, it buys them a lot of goodwill they otherwise wouldn't have. That and people simply trust steam because it has always been trustworthy (on the whole).
Yeah, I’ve been on Steam for about 20 years now and I can’t recall many bad moments with Valve.
The only one that comes to mind is the “outrage” when they decided to release L4D2 just a year after L4D back in 2008 instead of making this a free upgrade. Times have definitely changed. looks at yearly COD with barely any changes
Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
#57Yea, but there are bigger problems coming, this outage is just a temporary preview of the future. What happens to game preservation in 20 or 10 years when the authentication servers for this generation are permanently shut down? Millions of physical discs will instantly turn into e-waste.
The same thing that happened with all the Denuvo games so far: some hackers remove the DRM.
That would be possibly illegal, requires someone highly specialized to care about each and every one of your games, and assumes there won’t be a crackdown on the openness and anonymity of the Internet that currently allows the distribution of pirate software.
We need to have this right codified into law before we lose it.
Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
#58After weeks of discourse where the physical token of the Compact Disc had become the all-important object of the fight, it's reassuring to see that we're back at the beginning, where it was clearly understood that you don't meaningfully "own" a game if you need to be online to use any of it.
You need to be online to prove you own it, which now means you don’t?
Unless the party you prove it to is obligated to stay up forever and has service guarantees, yeah
Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
#59Even if the games are played off the internal hard drive with updates, there's a bit of "legal grey area" where enthusiastic fans of the game rebuild the code, and run the game with assets from the original media. "Technically" only folks with the original media in their possession will be able to play the original game.
For example the Ship of Harkinian PC port of Ocarina of Time. This requires a legal or illegal copy of the original game to run, so the copyright authorities don't crack down on it yet.
Are we sure that this is the reason the authorities aren't cracking down on it, and not that a game released in 1998 that also has a newer release on the 3DS just isn't financially valuable enough at this point to try to protect now? And it's getting an even newer remake, which is where Nintendo's concerns would be, I'd assume.
Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
#60If buying ain't owning, then p****y ain't stealing.
Just go two routes at once