this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2026
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Yes, if we want to get technical, we don't legally own those games, obviously. However, so long as they are DRM free, we can always install them on whatever hardware we choose, as long as its supported. Thats why people say DRM takes away a player's ability to "own" their games.
if steam prohibited DRMs in the first place, we'd have a reality, where steam is either pretty small, or entirely dead, and its niche is separated between small anti-consumer marketplaces such as UPlay and battle.net, where the publishers can stuff anything up your ass, not only DRMs, to their greedy hearts' content.
Piracy and independent game preservation initiatives still exist despite DRMs tho
For a lot of games, Steam is just an installer. They start fine on their own if you copy the folder.
Yeah, I have a few games like that. That means they're DRM free. The issue with Steam is not that it forces all games on it to have DRM, but that is doesn't make games that DON'T have DRM easy to identify.