Acknowledging DRM free games on steam is absolute proof that steam is not DRM, you cannot hold both views at the same time, they’re contradictory. Either all games on steam have DRM or steam is not DRM. Again, replace steam with an actual DRM software like Denuevo and you’ll see why.

“Any” has those two meanings, the fact that you chose an ambiguous phrasing is your fault, and the fact you haven’t apologized while making clear what you meant, but in fact doubled down in the aggressive tone tells a lot about you.

Also the phrase doesn’t mean what you think it does, you should have said"you can play all games on steam without steam", which would be correct, not all games can be played without seam, but some can, you yourself recognize this when you say that the odds are against me when picking a random game, therefore there is a chance. And this is the thing that seems hard to comprehend to everyone who claims steam is DRM, they that same phrasing with Denuevo or other actual DRM things and you’ll see why it’s bullshit.

In other words, a software is DRM if and only if every game that contains it is DRM protected. Let’s go back to logic school: if A then B is negated as A and not B, for example"If a dog then an animal" is true, so the negation would be false: “dog and not an animal” is in fact a contradiction. Or on the other side “if animal then dog” is false, so the negation animal and not a dog" must be possible, and indeed it is.

In this case what you’re stating is that steam is DRM which means “if it’s on steam then it’s DRM protected”, that statement is false because the negation"game on steam and no DRM" is possible. On the other hand “if it has Denuevo is DRM protected is true” and the negation “has Denuevo and is no DRM” is an impossibility.

Yes, in the sense that every store online is a digital right management, but people wouldn’t consider itch or GoG DRMs, and if you go to this level of what DRM is it becomes impossible to sell software, because the mere fact of having someplace that allows some people access to something and others not it’s a form of DRM.

Writing is hard, huh? According to the dictionary Any means “some, or even the smallest amount or number of”, therefore “you can play any steam game without steam” means “you can play even the smallest amount or number of steam games on steam”, or in other words “you can play one steam game without steam”. And like I said you can in fact play more than one steam games without steam, therefore you’re wrong.

claiming […] you can play any steam game without Steam is flat out wrong.

You should go inform yourself, many games on steam can be played without steam. I’ve even shared my copy of a game with a bunch of friends and we all played together in LAN, with a single copy of a Steam game, and only I had steam installed since this was at work.

Steam does not enforce games to require steam, it is not a requirement, it’s available for those who want to use it.

Not necessarily your fault, some games make the steam library a hard requirement by not implementing safe guards against it not being present. Others use some of the API there to ensure the game is owned and steam is logged in, but that’s not enforced by steam, so if a game doesn’t work without steam it’s by design of the game devs.

You must sign into steam the same way you must sign in to GoG, i.e. to download the game the first time. After that you can just run the binary. In fact you can copy that binary to another computer without steam to play there. However Steam is not against DRM, therefore some games there do have DRM and need either steam or in this case PSN to run.

That’s an important thing, games CAN use steam as DRM, but they’re not forced to, so there are games in Steam without DRM, therefore Steam is not a DRM by definition.

If for every 41 games that had Denuevo one didn’t had DRM Denuevo wouldn’t be a DRM software. However Denuevo is a DRM software, a game cannot both have Denuevo and not have DRM, however a game can be on Steam and not have DRM, therefore Steam is not DRM.

Btw, I think the ratio is way off, the vast majority of games on steam are Indy which don’t usually integrate with DRM.

Did you actually tried to launch the game? What error did you get? What game was it?

Steam launcher is not needed unless the game is programmed to fail if it doesn’t detect steam, not all games do, it’s usually a sign of a badly programmed game. Also the game might have had other DRMs.

But for example grab Crusader Kings or Stellatirs which tries to use the steam API bit if it fails it just keeps going without, and you can copy it to another computer and play without steam installed.

There’s a HUGE difference between a platform having optional DRM and a platform being DRM. Also it’s not opt-out, it’s opt-in, so by default games don’t have it, if they do it’s because someone on the game studio decided to add it, Valve does not force it or even encourage it, they just have it available.

It’s very unfair to say “Steam is DRM”, and a more accurate description is what I used “Steam has optional DRM”.

Because if you consider Steam to be DRM by the same token you also consider itch and GoG and any way of buying games DRM, which makes the term almost meaningless since companies should be allowed to charge for their products.

Steam vs GoG is a turf war, Epic vs anything will make people side with anything. The problem is that Epic has a shitty store with shitty features, and the only way it can compete with the others out there is to pay piles of money to game devs so they make their game exclusive to their store for some time. So usually people just ignore the game until it comes up in another store, and most of us have completely forgotten about it by then so when we find out just add it to the wishlist and wait for a 90% discount in a while. The game has been out for years at that point so a massive discount is expected soon and you already waited years to play, you can wait a bit more and save money, plus that teaches companies that signing exclusivity contracts is a shit deal.

Every time… No, Steam is not DRM. I mean, technically it is, but if you consider Steam DRM you must also consider every other game store DRM.

Usually when we talk about Drams we’re talking about things that try to prevent copyright infringement, steam does not do that. It does offers an API which games can implement which has a naive form of DRM, but games are not forced to use it, and a lot of games don’t. More often than not you can simply copy the game folder from steam to another computer without steam and run the game there, therefore no DRM.

One important thing, ensure the drive is CMR, the reason is that you likely want a RAID, and non-CMR disks take so long to read the entire disk that the chances of a second failure while recovering from a disk failure is significant.

That being said, how are you keeping track of the disks state? I built my RAID recently, and your post made me realize that I have nothing to notify me if one of the disks shows early signs of problems.

My drives in the early 2000s were SCSI, the connector was a flat wide grey cable. I remember my first SATA disk as being a great improvement, still had jumpers though.

In any case, the game is not older than CD burners, like I said, I was buying burned CDs before that, and I lived in a small South American city, so they should be very accessible for North American/European folks.

Just a small correction (that makes things worse):

It is sort of surreal to see someone so young they don’t know what burning a CD is writing an article about a game older than CD burners.

The person asking the question here is correct, the phrase in the article makes no sense, and it’s likely written by someone who heard the lingo “burn” in reference to discs but it’s too young to have use it themselves (otherwise they would have said they ripped the intact CD, or they burned copies of it)

Edit: Also I think CD burners came out around the same time (I remember a store that sold copies in my city back in the 90s), although I personally didn’t had a disk burner for many years (but also I didn’t played Half-life for many years after it came out, so I guess it evens out)

Now there are clowns everywhere throwing pies at each other

Until there’s an AGI that won’t happen in any meaningful way. Why? Because here’s something that matches your criteria of:

a mystery detective RPG in the style of Sherlock Holmes but set on a cyberpunk styled city on a space station like the Citadel from Mass Effect

You get a text based game where everything you try to do ends up with you dead because a corporation kills you unless you discover that if you look at the ground where you start there’s a penny from the year the murderer is from, and then you need to discover who’s the murder (changes every time) based solely on this, because that’s the sort of thing Sherlock Holmes would do. No, it’s not fun, it’s frustrating, it’s essentially luck, if that’s fun to you I have an infinitely replay able game, flip a coin and see how many times you can get heads in a row, if you get to 16 you win.

The thing is LLMs don’t understand “fun”, they’re just auto-completes, so they will just do boring or unfair stuff. And you would need to go very deep into the specifics of your game, to the point where you’re essentially programming the game, so at the end of the day it’s not something an end user would use.

That’s not to say there aren’t interesting uses for it inside games, but the moment you can prompt an entire game that’s actually fun to play on an AI, that same AI would be able to replace almost every job in the world.

Nope, never bought any of the NFTs that were sold to idiot speculators because I understand the technology and see no value in owning a token representing a digital image. I feel that the rage of downvoting comes from people who got scammed because they didn’t understood the technology and now see it mentioned and think it’s all a scam, similar to how old people used to think emails were a scam because they sent money to a prince in Nigeria.

Cool, I’ve been out of the loop on crypto for years, just checked and you are correct, now the full Ethereum network, capable of beating visa in TpS runs at 0.0026 TWh/yr, i.e. 1/100x of the energy consumption of PayPal, therefore proving my point above.