This is in reference to a post titled Amazon Prime Video is able to remove a video from your library after purchase.. The title is kind of self-explanatory and piracy was brought up in the comments. Someone mentioned GOG and Steam granting users indefinite licenses to users regardless of whether or not the game is still being sold.
While I could see that with GOG something tells me that’s probably not the case with Steam but I can’t find a specific quote to back it up. I can’t seem to find an instance of them removing a game from someone’s library even when a game was banned in a country like in the case of Disco Elysium and Rimworld being banned in Australia.
I couldn’t see Valve removing games from people’s libraries without a good reason due to the amount of backlash that would cause but maybe under specific circumstances they would.
On a similar note I was curious if anything in the terms and conditions talks about Steam emulators. There’s a section it that says:
“… host or provide matchmaking services for the Content and Services or emulate or redirect the communication protocols used by Valve in any network feature of the Content and Services, through protocol emulation, tunneling, modifying or adding components to the Content and Services …”
But I am not sure if I am misunderstanding what it’s trying to get across.
I looked through a majority of the Steam Subscriber Agreement but it can be a bit hard to decipher. There could also be comments from Valve staff elsewhere like on Twitter or Reddit that may at least shown their thoughts on the matter.
This might be a bit boring for a lot of people but I am curious about the DRM behind Steam. I feel like people have placed a lot of trust and money into Valve and Steam so I am curious about potential worst case scenarios.
Well SteamDRM is trivially easy to crack. It’s really more of a basic preventative.
In regards to Steam removing users licenses - effectively no. The only instances I’m aware of that even come close are cheap scam games that distributed malware and weren’t really games in the first place, and I think I recall that happening twice. You can restore licenses you remove and I think you have to reach out to Valve after you’ve removed the game from your library to remove it from your account, and even scamware games where the publishers get removed are still downloadable.
I don’t think Valve has any instances of a license being removed from a users library.
However, not Valve can absolutely render your licenses worthless. Online only, pushing an update to remove/kill content (like GTA, or an online only games final update)