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While they can revoke purchases, they've only done that for fraud (e.g.: stolen credit card, chargeback, etc.). I have plenty of games from publishers who went

While they can revoke purchases, they've only done that for fraud (e.g.: stolen credit card, chargeback, etc.). I have plenty of games from publishers who went off Steam, unsupported titles taken off the store, games no longer sold due to expired music licenses, etc. -- and they're all in my Steam library to this day. AFAIK most game platforms resort to just delisting and respecting purchases, with the notable exception of P.T. becoming unavailable for redownload even if you already claimed it[1]. (Except it was a free mini-game and not a purchase) The system isn't even meant to remove owned content to the point that P.T. is still in people's redownload lists, but the download itself results in HTTP 404. And with Steam, there's always the "option" of downloading your entire library and archiving that. IIRC Steam's DRM is notoriously easy to crack (simple DLL replacement) and things like first-time-setup (additional registry keys, redistributables, etc.) are stored per-game in simple JSON-like files. That wouldn't cover game-specific DRM but it at least covers Steam itself. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.T._(video_game)#Removal_and_remakes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.T._(video_game)#Removal_and_...

xuhu 6y ago
They can also lock you out for 'fraud' such as starting the game twice on your pc for split-screen multiplay, running some Wine fork or virtualization that they see as anti-theft circumvention, and so on.
- smileybarry 6y ago
  No, that's not what I meant and they don't lock you out for fraud either. By "fraud" I meant: buying a game with a stolen payment method, that's it. If someone does that, the specific game gets removed from their account and this message[1] is shown. The rest of their account remains untouched. About the rest of your scenarios: They don't look at how many times you launch a game (I launched 2+ copies of a game many, many times). If a game bans you for whatever reason -- like anti-cheat misdetections -- the multiplayer-only ban is only for that game and done by the publisher (not Steam). You're confusing Valve/Steam with EasyAntiCheat, BattlEye, etc. Steam doesn't even phone home if DRM fails, the game just doesn't launch; DRM meddling doesn't get you banned or anything. [1] https://i.imgur.com/Ye6Ee2Y.png https://i.imgur.com/Ye6Ee2Y.png

xuhu 6y ago

They can also lock you out for 'fraud' such as starting the game twice on your pc for split-screen multiplay, running some Wine fork or virtualization that they see as anti-theft circumvention, and so on.

smileybarry 6y ago
No, that's not what I meant and they don't lock you out for fraud either. By "fraud" I meant: buying a game with a stolen payment method, that's it. If someone does that, the specific game gets removed from their account and this message[1] is shown. The rest of their account remains untouched. About the rest of your scenarios: They don't look at how many times you launch a game (I launched 2+ copies of a game many, many times). If a game bans you for whatever reason -- like anti-cheat misdetections -- the multiplayer-only ban is only for that game and done by the publisher (not Steam). You're confusing Valve/Steam with EasyAntiCheat, BattlEye, etc. Steam doesn't even phone home if DRM fails, the game just doesn't launch; DRM meddling doesn't get you banned or anything. [1] https://i.imgur.com/Ye6Ee2Y.png https://i.imgur.com/Ye6Ee2Y.png