Subj : Steam
To   : Nightfox
From : Arelor
Date : Wed May 14 2025 18:12:27

  Re: Steam
  By: Nightfox to Arelor on Wed May 14 2025 12:26 pm

 >
 >  Ar> If that is true, that is yet another reason not to trust your games to
 >  Ar> cloud services of any kind.
 >
 > Steam is just a marketplace to buy games. The games themselves could have
 > security issues if they use online services, but that's their own issue.

Steam is a marketplace, but it is not JUST a marketplace. Any time the merits of different game marketplaces are thrown into a discussion, somebody will quickly point out that Steam is also a provider of social functions, mod distribution, DRM enforcement, and an online services enabler for game features.

In other words, many game builds for Steam are so integrated with Steam that the games themselves would lose a good chunk (if not all) of their functionality if you happened to have them installed and then Steam went *pooff*.

But here is the thing, none of this matters because due to the way Steam operates, most people buys tons and tons of games at a discount and they don't bother to download/install them until they are going to play them. If you have 200 games in your collection you might have 3 of them installed. If Steam goes *pooff* then most people's collections will be gone because most people won't have a copy of their stuff and Steam does not facilitate a way of achieving that (in comparison to places such as Gog, itch.io or Zoom, which make it a no-brainer to install games independently from their services).


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