This month, I bought 226 PC games for C$185.82 ($134.58)
Now are those a lot of games? Yes, it’s a silly amount of games. Perhaps I’m addicted to good deals that deliver fun.
We all have a vice, and this is mine. I don’t drink, or smoke, or gamble – but I buy lots and lots of video games.
Though back when I was a console gamer, I’d might get eight games for that price – if I were lucky.
My apologies, 76% 😂
Do you have a goal where you’ll stop and catch up? More games are being released than ever, if you get every deal you see those numbers won’t meaningfully converge.
It’s not just DRM, the platforms have carte blanche to change the terms of your license at any time. For example, they could start charging per download, completely remove offline library access, remove/censor games, delete your account at any time, etc… Gaben pinky promising to release all games DRM free if Steam goes under isn’t the same as having them.
Inheriting a Steam library is already against TOS, if they start strictly enforcing that your collection dies with you. GoG is slightly better at the moment, but only if you download all games on purchase (the DRM policy could change at any time).
I don’t personally pirate, but it’s the only way to really ensure access and ownership of your library. The hassle factor was true, but there are a lot of new tools in the space that make managing a library painless (a quick search shows Playnite as the game library equivalent of Plex/Jellyfin).
And all of that is putting aside the fair-value argument for creators. They’re getting ~$0.40 from your purchase, not enough to sustain themselves unless they have a massive number of sales.
By all means, enjoy your library and deal hunting games, but your methods run counter to your stated goals.
If Valve does something evil, then I’ll adjust when that time comes. For now, I have full access to my entire library, and this has been the case for the past 12 years I’ve had my account.
As far as I’m concerned, you’re thinking so hard about the legal risks of buying games legally, you’re not taking into account the legal risks of piracy.
You think game publishers haven’t sued the living tar out of pirates?
There’s a guy named Gary Bowser who was sent to prison for selling tools that hacked the Nintendo Switch. And when he got out, he still owed $10M.
So if you’re worried about risk, at least acknowledge where the real hammer comes down.
Sure, there are risks both ways but one can be mitigated more than the other. The piracy hammer has always come down on distributors with very rare exceptions. With proper precautions (VPN, usenet, foreign seedbox, etc…) nobody would ever know or care about the private individual self hosting a media server on a closet raspberry pie.
Legally you’re covered with Steam but you have very little actual control over your collection. The ideal is legal physical media that you can digitally copy and store but that’s basically impossible these days.
Legally, I can download all my installers from GOG, store them to a hard drive, and make a duplicate of that hard drive as a redundancy.
And believe me, I’ve thought about that.
What keeps me from doing that is the price of storage. One title alone can be 120GB.
This is ultimately why I don’t pirate. It costs me $20 for a 128GB SD card. But if I’m buying that game for $4 off Steam, it’s cheaper to store that game in the cloud—especially if I only average a couple hours of play per game.
There’s also the convenience of knowing the game will likely work, I (mostly) don’t have to edit DLLs, and malware is unlikely.
The only reason to pirate is for some bizarre moral reason, which I don’t share. It really is easier to just pay a couple bucks—store indefinitely, get to work immediately.