Even without getting into piracy territory, yes. You need a subscription for online play on console, and there’s a lot of competition among PC stores to keep prices low during sales, including bundles of games. So for perhaps most use cases these days that involve some amount of online play and playing a certain number of games per year, PC ends up cheaper.
Well you shouldn’t buy into any company that can unilaterally remove access to all your games, but Valve’s kinda been a breath of fresh air in terms of how they treat their customers.
GOG’s the alternative if you want to keep your games forever, as they’re DRM free so you can just keep the installers. Even if they close down you’ll retain access as long as you kept a copy.
And you can also lookup which games are DRM free on Steam and copy those for a backup.
Don’t get me wrong, I love GOG and own many games and have backups of my own, but if you’re that paranoid(that steam will go belly up and everything deleted) then you might as well not buy any games and just pirate everything.
They still bring up a good point that you don’t necessarily own the games you buy on Steam.
Steam could “pull an Apple” and remotely delete games from the Steam library for licensing reasons or something similar.
The thing I do like though is that the hardware is not locked, it’s somewhat repairable meaning they can’t lock us in the Steam ecosystem even if management changes and wants Steam to become the Apple of gaming.
Question; is it nowadays cheaper to just get a good gaming PC for long-term? (Including when someone does piracy related stuff).
Nowadays, I can’t recommend any console except the Steam Deck (OLED). I do always say “just get a good Gaming PC and for handheld the Steam Deck”.
Even without getting into piracy territory, yes. You need a subscription for online play on console, and there’s a lot of competition among PC stores to keep prices low during sales, including bundles of games. So for perhaps most use cases these days that involve some amount of online play and playing a certain number of games per year, PC ends up cheaper.
Don’t go all in with Steam. The people in charge right now are kinda old and the vultures are already circling.
All companies everywhere have old people. So don’t buy into any company!
Stupid comment
Well you shouldn’t buy into any company that can unilaterally remove access to all your games, but Valve’s kinda been a breath of fresh air in terms of how they treat their customers.
GOG’s the alternative if you want to keep your games forever, as they’re DRM free so you can just keep the installers. Even if they close down you’ll retain access as long as you kept a copy.
And you can also lookup which games are DRM free on Steam and copy those for a backup.
Don’t get me wrong, I love GOG and own many games and have backups of my own, but if you’re that paranoid(that steam will go belly up and everything deleted) then you might as well not buy any games and just pirate everything.
They still bring up a good point that you don’t necessarily own the games you buy on Steam.
Steam could “pull an Apple” and remotely delete games from the Steam library for licensing reasons or something similar.
The thing I do like though is that the hardware is not locked, it’s somewhat repairable meaning they can’t lock us in the Steam ecosystem even if management changes and wants Steam to become the Apple of gaming.
Yeah, every store everywhere has that same conundrum.
If you really wanted to “own” the game, then pirate it and keep a copy on a NAS somewhere.
But at that point we’re just arguing semantics.
That’s the case for nearly every storefront. Besides, there’s a lot of games on Steam that actually are DRM-free, it’s just not advertised.