From a different point of view than your own, your stance has the potential to 'actively harm' other people, too, as I already pointed out. And not just the people in favor of Steam, since your extremism is doing the DRM-free movement a disservice. Because you're blowing things out of proportion here, since the access to DRM-free software is no human right. Just because your idea of software is that you should be free to do with it whatever you want to does not mean that you are wronged if you don't get what you want. Software with DRM is a market offer that you can choose to refuse. It's inconvenient, but you won't die for a want of Windows, Skyrim and GTA. And if a majority chooses not to refuse DRM, because they aren't as opposed to it as you are, your refusal and your insults toward that majority won't change a thing. If you want the industry to change, you need to try and convince that majority that DRM is potentially more inconvenient for them than they think, instead of telling them they're idiots because they inconvenience you. You certainly have the right to express your opinion, and you have the right to rant all you want against those "idiots", but it's pretty pointless and won't cause others to take your opinion seriously.

Steam isn't a rental service, so marking it as such would be wrong. It's possible to bend the term "rental service" enough to fit Steam into it, but it's not the way rental is used in common language, so it would be misleading. When people rent something they expect to either have to return it in a short period of time (a day to a month) or pay for it based on time of use when using it for longer.

Neither case is true for Steam. You buy a product and it's available indefinitely, predicated only on being able to access Steam. Basically, Steam is selling you a revokable license, which is pretty standard for software products, even store bought ones. The difference between Steam and non-online product licenses is that Steam makes it easy to revoke the license and its existence is a condition for the license.

It would ask you then too. But still wouldn't go.

It never was a matter of 'when?' but here's 'why?' : Because opinions are not facts. If you can't grasp that, it factually makes you more of an idiot.

Yes, it would improve my opinion of Steam.

However, I don't rent games so it still isn't going to make me want to join Steam.

I saw at least one post saying that some games can be run outside of the Steam client, and should thus be regarded as DRM-free. However, I'm sure most Steam games, if not all, don't include offline installers. So if they're really old games that don't create registry entries and all their installation files are contained in the game folders only (so that you can simply copy & paste those folders to a new PC), then I'd agree that those games could be seen as DRM-free.

Edit: replaced "unless" with "if". Yes, my logic was a bit iffy.

As a non native english speaker, I make a distinction between "leasing service" and "rental service". And I would be more inclined to consider steam a leasing service, but am I misinterpreting things ?


Edit : I just read a thing about the differences regarding real estate, I might have erroneous definitions in mind after all.

and that's all there is to it.

Actually you can move DRM-free games anywhere you want without ever installing Steam. It's true that Steam doesn't download installers, but for DRM-free games you can take the game data and move it to any PC you want without ever installing Steam. You only need Steam to download the game, but once you have the data, you can remove Steam and never install it again. If that's not DRM-free, then i really don't know what it is.

Even HL2, the game that pretty much started Steam, is DRM-free now.

It's quite funny. I would have bought Half-life 2 when it first came out, but luckily I noticed that it required Steam, which was something rather new and unexpected back then.

But now I have no real desire to play Half-life 2, and I'm not sure why. All I'd have to do is find a spare PC, install Steam, buy the game, download the game, archive the game to removable storage, restore the spare PC to its original state, and then restore the archive to my gaming PC... but I just have no desire to do so... even knowing I could get a DRM-free copy of Half-life 2.

How is the Steam offline mode these days? Still a broken mess?

I don't approve of the business model for a number of reasons I've stated elsewhere on this forum. Calling it by its name would make Valve more honest, but wouldn't change my opinion.

Don't know if Netflix misrepresents its business, as I've never looked into it exactly because of the nature of its business model.


Well said, +1.

no, it works nicely now. Much better.

If the current version of the Steam client works well, do Steam users have any means of preventing it from updating whilst still being able to buy new games and update existing games?

It would change nothing for me, I know steam is a glorified rental system and that they can withdraw that rented game at basically any time of their choosing, however that is not in their interests to do. I mostly get steam things in the sales with a few exceptions. If I can i use GOG or buy retail.

If steam decided to make it blatantly clear you only have a rented version and at any time steam could withdraw from you the right to play the game I think it might turn a good number of their users who are ignorant of this away from the service. Steam are legally a rental company but you are likely just as safe using steam as any other service, GOG may be the exception to this as I think they are the only ones that said that should the company go under they will try to keep the servers up for as long as they can allowing people to download and store their libraries.

there is conflicting views, some says it works, some have problems with it. However, the options are there (see attached). You will need to set the updates to "off" for each game, the global settings are "on".

To be honest, I personally do not know, as I never turn off updates (I like to always have the newest versions installed).