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Conina on 01 May 2026
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firebush03 said:

I will keep my thoughts short-and-sweet: The service Steam offers is a highly predatory one that needs to be regulated. By tying your "ownership" of titles to a single platform, Steam is able to cultivate an audience of loyalist who will fight any-and-all threats to Steam's marketshare (because if Steam ever lags so far behind the competition that they need to close shop, then all those who have been invested in the Steam ecosystem will be without a major component of their video game library, potentially losing thousands of dollars in video game purchases).

- Most PC games on Steam are also available on other PC stores. Steam isn't a monopoly. So it is your own choice for most titles if you buy them on Steam or in other PC stores (or for many older PC games on disc). 
- Many Steam games don't have any DRM. Those games will be still playable in case of the (very very unlikely) possibility that the Steam ecosystem leaves the market within the next decades
- Even without Steam as an active platform, the Steam client software would still exist (there are millions of copies ion the internet). So most Steam games which need the SteamWorks APIs to start, would still work in Steam offline mode.
- The Steam offline mode has no offline time limit for games (you can try it out by going offline and then change the calendar date of the system years or decades into the future)
- most popular Steam games with Steam-DRM would get cracks very fast that remove the Steam-DRM... heck, probably most popular Steam games are already cracked

firebush03 said:

This is distinct from the ownership present on Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft as these platform holders offer a physical option which may be used to dump your games and save data onto PC , running through an emulator, well past the collapse of their storefronts. 
Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft as platform owners also offer a lot of digital games and without a physical option. Not only third party content, but even first party content.
Where is my physical option from Sony for "Horizon: Call of the Mountain" or half of the "Gran Turismo 7"-content which ain't on the disc?   
Where is my physical option from Microsoft for more than half of the "Forza Horizon 5"-content or most of the "Microsoft Flight Simulator"-content which aren't on the discs?
Where is my physical option from Nintendo for most of my "Mario Kart 8"-content which ain't on the cart? Where is my physical option from Nintendo for "Famicom Detective Club 1 + 2"?
   
firebush03 said:

Additionally, AFAIK it is not possible to dump files from your Steam library onto your PC like how one can dump their Nintendo Switch (physical and digital) library onto PC.

Steam games don't NEED to be EMULATED, they are already PC games. You can save/backup/ZIP any file folder of your Steam library you want, if you don't trust Steam for a redownload.They aren't in copyprotected folders like many Microsoft-Store-games.

All you need to play the games in these folders is a cracked EXE-file, in some cases additionally a registry-entry which you can export. For DRM-free Steam games you only need the files in the game folder.

And why exactly do you give Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft a pass for that preservation issue? They are binding the digital games they offer to their platform accounts AND their gaming hardware. The emulation options are against their will and they are trying to stop emulation of their games as far as it is legally possible for them (Nintendo more aggressive than Sony and Microsoft).

Last edited by Conina - on 01 May 2026