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Archiving Steam games for fun and profit
- jesprenj 3y agoProfit?
- raspyberr 3y agohttp://www.phrack.org/issues/49/14.html#article http://www.phrack.org/issues/49/14.html#article
- jesprenj 3y agoWow, I certainly did not know this is the origin of the phrase! thank you. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/25205/what-is-the-origin-of-phrase-for-fun-and-profit https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/25205/what-is-th...
- LorenDB 3y agoYou could technically profit by selling pirated copies of your games, but please don't :)
- cybrox 3y agoIf you intend to - and are able to - create and distribute cracks, downloading the game's depot in the first place should probably not be an issue you're facing. :)
- test6554 3y agoProfit can mean gaining personal benefit of any kind. Time savings, etc.
- madeofpalk 3y agoThere's also DepotDownloader as a more generic tool that lets you download anything from steam, including past version. https://github.com/SteamRE/DepotDownloader https://github.com/SteamRE/DepotDownloader. Being more generic, it probably can't archive your whole library in one go. I use this to download historical versions of a game to help with reverse engineering to archive dialogue trees from a game https://dialogue.destiny.report https://dialogue.destiny.report
- techdmn 3y agoOne thing that drives me crazy is the current trend of never calling a game "done". It's one thing to ship bug fixes, but I'm talking about a constant stream of updates that add elements to the game, change the rules, change the balance, etc. I blame Minecraft for starting the trend, but Among Us and Polytopia come to mind as additional recent examples. It's weird when I start playing a game at, say, v1.6, really like it, then suddenly it can't be had anywhere because v1.7 is a different game.
- throwuxiytayq 3y agoThere’s more games that can be called “done” now than ever before. Stop playing live service games and games that aren’t actually finished, and you’re good to go. There’s more finished games on my Steam account that I’ll ever have time to play, and I don’t even have that many games. If you’re annoyed by games that were better before an update, that’s on you. Before online distribution you’d never even have a chance to experience them before they’re “done”. Now it’s your own choice that you’re complaining about.
- devnullbrain 3y ago>I blame Minecraft for starting the trend >It's weird when I start playing a game at, say, v1.6, really like it, then suddenly it can't be had anywhere because v1.7 is a different game. Counter Strike immediately comes to mind but I'm sure there are earlier games than that.
- madeofpalk 3y agoI think Minecraft is a poor example to point to for this. Minecraft is a sandbox game, and doesn't have a story. While you can certainly decide your sandbox game is 'done', it doesn't have a endpoint that a story-driven game has. Minecraft also 'incredibly' has first-party support for downloading and playing any previous version of the game. There's and incredibly vibrant community playing the game on years old versions of the game (mainly for modding).
- bombcar 3y agoMinecraft is perhaps the quintessential example of how to do it right - you can play today on the latest, or you can download still-developed 1.7.10 modpacks (and play them on Java 21 if you want muahahah). Contrast this to World of Warcraft where you cannot play anything but the current latest (except via the now-released Classic, which still isn't the same as "preserve this version forever"). Factorio has also been "never really done" but they work hard to make the modding interface (and especially save games) stable.
- politelemon 3y ago> Seriously, while I don’t expect Steam to disappear tomorrow So this has me curious but what if Steam did disappear tomorrow, or they banned your account accidentally... wouldn't the archive be un-runnable? Or is there some way to run those archived games without Steam?
- fsmv 3y agoMost steam games other than AAA ones with their own launcher and extra DRM actually run perfectly fine without steam if you just click the executable in the folder
- admax88qqq 3y agoTry it without steam installed, I think most of them still load steam.dll if steam is not actively running.
- notpushkin 3y agoThere are libsteam_api replacements that stub API calls to Steam. It should be possible to use those to let your games run without Steam. (Obviously, you should only use this on the games you own and make sure you don't break your local copyright laws.)
- politelemon 3y agoInteresting I did a search and found this, it seems to try to emulate the Steam 'environment' https://gitlab.com/Mr_Goldberg/goldberg_emulator/blob/master/README.md https://gitlab.com/Mr_Goldberg/goldberg_emulator/blob/master...
- dns_snek 3y agoI've tried this before - it works for games that don't go out of their way to add more than the baseline level of protection offered by Steam (which, I think, is most of them). It's easy to test, just exit Steam and try to launch the game (.exe) with Goldberg installed. If Steam doesn't open, it's working.
- chaostheory 3y agoGog?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- LorenDB 3y agoI don't use GOG, but somebody on Reddit linked this: https://github.com/MattMills/gog_content_system_downloader https://github.com/MattMills/gog_content_system_downloader
- sumtechguy 3y agoI need one for bigfishgames
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y agoGiven how slow GOG downloads for me, that is going to take a while.
- m463 3y agoI have used this tool: https://github.com/eddie3/gogrepo https://github.com/eddie3/gogrepo I have a system with a bunch of VMs on it. I run this script and sync all games to a games partition on the machine. Then I can mount the disk in a VM and install and play the games. For example, I have a windows 11 vm without a network device, and can play with no annoying updates, no nags, no games phoning home. I got annoyed because some games phone home (anything built on unity), and others have spyware (check out kerbal space program) I have a steam library from years ago, I wonder if I can do something similar to play offline
- MoSattler 3y agoOnce everything is downloaded and archived, will this enable me to play the game without it having to talk to the steam servers?
- madeofpalk 3y agoDepends on the game. Often the main exe still launches steam for bootstrapping.
- RunningDroid 3y agoIIRC, this is mostly because the example for initializing the steam API library causes a crash when the library isn't available. As a result, a fairly common "crack" is to drop in a DLL that provides dummy functions.
- test6554 3y agoI've accumulated quite a few steam games over the years (300+) and one thing that bugs me is how only one player can play any game in your library at a time. I can't play one game while my son plays another even though I bought both. I've tried setting up different accounts for each game I buy, but switching between accounts crashed my computer. Ideally there would be a steam launcher launcher where you pick the game and it launches steam into the correct account for you. It sets any settings/preferences as well. Each game would be installed in different locations on the file system. If I have 10 games, I have 10 accounts. I play on one pc with one account and my son plays with another account on his pc. But then I can switch to a different game my son was just playing by using his account after he stops and he can play a different game on yet another account. All rightly and fairly paid for. As it stands, I've bought a couple games from Steam competitors just so I could for sure play them when my son is gaming.
- pjc50 3y agoThat's odd, I thought the intention of Steam family sharing was precisely to enable that use case.
- fooqux 3y agoMaybe it should, but that's not how it currently works. You share at the account level, and only one user can be using (read: playing a game) an account at a time. Personally, I get around this by using Offline Mode, but I know that workaround doesn't work in all cases, such as playing an multiplayer game while you kid plays something else.
- parasti 3y agoI think this was the original idea that quickly mutated into "how do we stop the rampant account sharing enabled by this feature".
- LeifCarrotson 3y agoA feature that works at the intersection of actual parents who want to let their actual minor children in their actual household play games and random friend groups who are unrelated to each other except for shared Netflix passwords is really hard to locate.
- Arroyommerel 3y ago> Games 1 through 9 aren’t on the platform anymore I would just like to add that Steam assigns ten IDs to an app, making appID 10 the first game, 20 the second, and so on. Though Steam has delisted games, they are still available from one's user library, provided they have a valid license for it. If, for any reason, it's not visible in the library, one could use the DepotDownloader[0] to download any version, past or current, directly from Steam's servers. I've had some fun with it, visiting release versions of favorite games, seeing how much they've changed. Great script! This will definitely help some game archiving enthusiasts. [0]: https://github.com/SteamRE/DepotDownloader https://github.com/SteamRE/DepotDownloader
- jquery 3y agoI mean, this is one way to archive. The way I did it was just to use the steam client and shift-right click install everything I wanted to backup on a compressed drive. The games aren't actually installed until you run them for the first time. Gog, on the other hand, doesn't let you do this, so I resorted to lgogdownloader.
- LorenDB 3y agoAs I mentioned in my post, I wanted to archive directly to my server and due to the (rather unique) circumstances I wasn't able to run Steam on the server.
- aperrien 3y agoYou can download the independent installers for all games on GOG either through their website directly, or through the GOG launcher. I regularly do this to have the installers for my games on my local NAS.
- jquery 3y agoYeah. I use lgogdownloader to do this in bulk. It's very configurable from the command line. It can be run in Windows with WSL.
- butz 3y agoIs anyone removing launchers from games for fun and profit?
- ProfessorZoom 3y agoIIRC, Steam removes games from the store, not your library. I have tons of games, like Deadpool for example, on Steam that have been removed from the store for like ten years but I can still download it
- RecycledEle 3y agoThe human race will not go extinct because someone lost some old file. The human race will go extinct because some lawyer saw a chance to make a buck by denying people access to that old file.
- xrd 3y agoMy son (11) has started playing games using Steam, on Linux. It works great. I've now got two other Linux machines set up for my daughters (7 and 9). I'm not excited about purchasing the same games for each kid. Can I use the same account on three computers independently? Or, would something like this script come in handy? I don't want to run afoul of the Steam license. And, I feel it would be fair to let one kid play a game while the other kid isn't, on their own independent computer system. Any advice here?
- claytonwramsey 3y agoYes, this is doable. Sharing an account across multiple devices is kosher to my knowledge. Steam also has family library sharing, which allows games to be shared across accounts (with some restrictions).
- ok_dad 3y agoHave you tried Steam family sharing? I don’t use it, but it looks promising. I think you can only play a game once per license simultaneously though, so if they want to 3-man some dungeon together you’ll have to buy three copies of games. https://store.steampowered.com/promotion/familysharing https://store.steampowered.com/promotion/familysharing
- sb057 3y ago>The oldest game still available (counting by which date it was made available on Steam) is the original Counterstrike with a game ID of 10. Games 1 through 9 aren’t on the platform anymore, and I’m sure they are far from the only games deleted from the platform. For what it's worth, IDs 1 through 10 are a mix of test depots, libraries, and such.