Wman1996 said:
It is tougher to get banned from Steam and by extension tougher to lose access to your digital games compared to consoles. Steam has no written right to brick your computer or even your Steam Deck. The console corporations can brick your hardware for severe violations. Steam is not perfect and still has DRM but is more secure for purchases over time. For instance, the Wii Shop Channel and DSi Shop had an outage from mid-March until July 6, 2022. Over two and a half months and people could not download their purchased games. I see the ability to use those two shops to download games getting discontinued in the 2030s or at least around 2040. Additionally, I don't think Xbox 360, PS3, Vita, 3DS and Wii U will survive into the 2040s to download your games. I could see Switch, PS4 and Xbox One still supporting downloads in the 2040s given how popular digital games are on them. |
Technically Steam itself has no DRM, although many games on Steam do, and I think Steam DRM is also an optional thing for developers to use, but supposedly it's quite easily cracked, and I don't think it's terribly common. Still, Steam has a good amount of entirely DRM-free games as well. For most people, I'm sure this is just nitpicky, but it's still good to be aware that Steam itself as a service doesn't enforce DRM (nor lack thereof, unlike GOG).
