this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
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For me the answer is 847 USD over 14 years …

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[–] Agent_Karyo@piefed.world 20 points 23 hours ago (3 children)

Many steam games are DRM free and would work even if Steam shuts down. It's been like this at least since 2011 or so (that's when I discovered this, it could be earlier).

I guess the impact would depend on the types of game which one buys on Steam.

[–] 64bithero@lemmy.world 14 points 23 hours ago (3 children)

If you had them downloaded yes. But if you didn’t and they disappeared?

[–] agentTeiko@piefed.social 3 points 13 hours ago

Steam has a back up feature I have my steam games backed up on my NAS

[–] Agent_Karyo@piefed.world 26 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

I would just a get pirated copy.

I haven't pirated games in a very long time, but this seems like a fair thing to do in such a situation. If the game is cheap and/or I like the studio, I would probably just rebuy on GOG.

[–] mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca 1 points 10 hours ago

yep. the game exists somewhere. I've bought it. I have no issues pirating it to get access to it again. nobody has been hurt by this.

[–] Zarobi@aussie.zone 5 points 20 hours ago

Same here. Steam is the last "digital library" I'm ever really going to use or trust. I've been screwed over by everything else, so if that shuts down too, I'm basically just done, and will buy a NAS or something to hold all my games from GOG.

[–] bigbangdangler@reddthat.com 2 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

And, friendly nudge:

It's not hard to back up games from Steam. Especially those with no DRM. Just keep them on a drive somewhere.

[–] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 3 points 14 hours ago

Pretty expensive though, given the prices on storage. And many of them will be out of date in a few months. Face it, we can download from the high seas at any time, the only reason most of us are buying on steam is convenience. Whatever we could backup on steam today we could just retrieve from elsewhere at any time.

[–] chunes@lemmy.world 8 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (3 children)
[–] missingno@fedia.io 3 points 8 hours ago

It looks like this list is manually curated, so there's probably more that just aren't documented as such.

[–] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 3 points 14 hours ago

Probably depends on your definition of drm free. You could start steam in offline mode and the vast majority of games would work forever. Their drm is also a known quantity and easily bypassed.

[–] Agent_Karyo@piefed.world 1 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

Didn't know it was that low, I knew it was a smaller share, but I thought it would be double digit percentages.

That being said, many critically acclaimed games are indeed DRM free on Steam.

[–] piskertariot@lemmy.world 3 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Steam Offline mode is your best friend for archiving games forever.

[–] huey_m@reddthat.com 1 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

Yeah, I suspect if Steam shut down, not only would we see a bunch of cracks released for games that now have no way to update to try to kill the cracks, but we'd probably see something like emulation of steam to get around it without even needing individual cracks.