94
Steam is basically a PC gaming monopoly, so why isn’t anyone mad?
(www.digitaltrends.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2026
94 points (100.0% liked)
Gaming
34615 readers
399 users here now
From video gaming to card games and stuff in between, if it's gaming you can probably discuss it here!
Please Note: Gaming memes are permitted to be posted on Meme Mondays, but will otherwise be removed in an effort to allow other discussions to take place.
See also Gaming's sister community Tabletop Gaming.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
That's not true though. For many games, after you installed it you can even uninstall Steam or copy/backup the game to another computer without Steam and play it forever. Yes, many games have DRM that will prevent you from doing that, but that's the game developers doing. Steam does not have any DRM by itself, nor does it require to be running or even installed to run games you originally got from it.
Again, unless the game developer went out of their way to add DRM.
It does, and the default practice is to enable it, even when DRM-less versions are available elsewhere. It might not be as fancy as Denuvo, but it is there and it doesn't allow you to run games without also launching Steam.
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/drm
I am aware they offer a feature. It is up to the game developer to implement it though if they choose to, Steam does not force DRM onto anyone.
But Goldberg emulator has been widely and easily available basically forever and they've done nothing to try to stop people from using it or shutting it down. People are also able to add pirated games to their steam library and run them without fear of banning or retaliation on platforms like SteamOS or the steamdeck. Without being able to launch (pirated) games from within steam, using proton or gaming on Linux at all would be much harder.
For all I know, Goldberg emulator only works with multiplayer titles to enable local multiplayer capabilities. If the game is SteamDRM protected, it should not work and is very illegal.
Illegality is a general issue with piracy to begin with - Valve can snap on it any time, leaving us empty-handed. It is not a sustainable solution - just the only one we're left with. Instead of not suing emulators and certain tools just yet, I'd rather see them actually removing the damn DRM. I mean, we had enough Nintendo drama, didn't we?
On my end, I make sure to purchase DRM-free games and yarrr the hell out of the DRM-protected ones, but personal activism can only get you so far.