Steam has an incentive to make sure that the rebuild effort for their games is very low.
One way they could do that is require game developers to upload source code to some source code repo (perhaps a 'code holding company', whose expertise is looking after source code). Code in the repo could be built automatically, ensuring that at any time a hotfix could be made with little friction. When publishers upload to steam, they are also giving the right for steam to make bugfixes if the original developer wont/cant.
The could release the source to steam and let the community fix the issues with it (since they've struggled so much with this.)
The problem is that one of the primary selling points to publishers is that it prevents you from running games you might have on your machine (DRM.) That is: The biggest feature of steam besides configuring Wine for you is that it doesn't work most of the time.
Valve could use their market power to prevent this kind of rug-pulling behavior by publishers. Customers expect Valve to ensure that the software they provide is free of viruses, spyware, and harmful defects; this seems like a similar type of defective and/or malicious software that they should prohibit from sale.
I'm surprised to hear that there are non-DRMed games on Steam. Do you have an example? I thought it was standard that every game released on Steam that doesn't have some awful third-party DRM like Uplay has the Steam launcher code patched into the executable. Valve has some tooling for doing this even to existing legacy exes that can't be rebuilt from source.
A nice way to solve this would be for steam to require all games provide a drm free version to valve and in the event where the DRM breaks and the publisher is gone steam will replace everyones copy with the drm free version. Although these days I don't think valve is really in the position to demand such a thing.
I don't see why. If the Steam-DRM'd version of a game requires Steam installed in order to play, they can just add the Steam package as a dependency.
Possibly a bigger issue would be that Steam has incremental updates (fixing a bug in a game requires downloading a fixed binary but not the multi-gigabyte data files) while most Linux package managers do not support incremental updates (when Debian releases a new LibreOffice package that fixes some dependencies for the s360 archictecture, I still have to download hundreds of megabytes of changes on amd64).
That (maybe) would have worked in the olden days of physical disks or catridges.
Today it is trivial to keep the game on steam with zero sales (or almost zero).
If lawmakers wanted to pass a law that actually made this happen they needed to stipulate a cut off date (and potential compensation) as well as rigid rules about what one can do with the released code.
Steam (and other stores, to a lesser extent) already does this voluntarily. There's an ecosystem of key sellers of various levels of sketchiness - greenmangaming, g2a, cdkoffers - check isthereanydeal.com. It's almost always cheaper than steam, and you get a steam key. Steam gets most of the upkeep cost, and none (?) of the revenue.
It seems reasonable for developers (as I’m not a developer) as Steam was just selling licenses.
It would be the equivalent of Walmart saying they would let people buy copies of games and run them forever.
So it makes sense that Steam would be able to make it so the games sold keep running without Steam existing. It seems pretty simple technically too as they would just update their client to no longer phone home to Steam.
Valve rarely has to pull games in this case, the agreements they have with developers seem to protect them. I can't remember the last time a game was removed from people's Steam libraries.
However, developers do have the ability to replace games in your library, so often an original game will be replaced with a low-quality remaster.
Steam only hosts the code incidentally. It manages your licenses. This is a big difference, and it's one publishers are free to work around if they wanted to.
I hate steam, and love gog. But there is one issue that makes me buy certain games on steam.
Games that get released full of bugs and that then get fixed with frequent updates.. This tends to happen with ambitious indie games from small teams (the best games!).. I fully trust the team to fix the game, but when it releases usually there are a lot of bugs they didnt find as they have no QA.
Eg. I just bought ' Frozen Synapse 2'
Steam seems to get updates earlier and more frequently. Why is that? Is it cus the devs dont bother updating gog? That doesnt seem likely from these teams. GOG should definitely do everything they can to have update/patch parity with steam, if that means making it part of the contract when u release a game there, so be it. Then I would never buy anything on steam.
ps. Why do I hate steam?
1. Its an unnecessary program on ure system, that wants to always be on, always be updating, have all kinds of access it doesnt need jusr for u to play games.
2. It has a lot of social features and whatnot (that I dont care about cus I only play single player games) but at its core it is simply a DRM system and DRM is terrible.
3. It obfuscates the game files, putting them all in a 'steam' folder. So you cant easily manage / back them up.
4. Double click game icon .. loading steam.. updating steam..
I feel like there were a few cases where this has happened, and Steam actually still had the game stored for people who had purchased to download, it was just that no one else could buy the game. Not sure if those cases were the publisher not wanting to generate bad will among its customers, or if Steam's contract with the publisher states outright that even when the game is pulled from the platform it must remain available for people who have already purchased it. Either way, it would certainly be the case that any future patches wouldn't be pushed to Steam.
>Steam's cut is 30%. However, for that 30% you get to update your game whenever you want, and virtually as often as you want. By that I mean they don't impose any direct limits on how often you update, but the general rule is no more than once a week aside from hotfixes and the like.
I feel like at this point Valve have proven themselves to be good stewards of the Steam platform in this regard. Games aren't retracted and they're very reasonable with refunds.
I assume their contracts for listing on Steam are quite different in order to support this. I'd be interested to hear more about the inside of these sorts of things.
As someone who released a game on steam, they never checked it. We could have released a game that crashed on start up and they wouldn't have known before hand.
One way they could do that is require game developers to upload source code to some source code repo (perhaps a 'code holding company', whose expertise is looking after source code). Code in the repo could be built automatically, ensuring that at any time a hotfix could be made with little friction. When publishers upload to steam, they are also giving the right for steam to make bugfixes if the original developer wont/cant.
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