Steam?

[thrasher_565]

6 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

Well actually... Most CDs came with a code... So literally online drm The only difference now is steam not giving you the code, which should imho be illegal, but apparently isn't otherwise G A B E would be in jail and not the Bahamas, no? 

 

You definitely can't, typically there's a 3-12 month "grace period" where either the drm or steam itself will simply "forget" that you're logged in and force you to go online or else no play whatsoever.

 

(yes I tried that, many times, over the years, ie my 2017 Lenovo laptop is offline since at least 3 years at the moment, there's no "Steam play" for me even though I never logged out or fully shut down the laptop afaik and steam is actually still running)

 

^only game I can play is Colin Mcrae 2 or something, which isn't even on steam, from DVD lol...

ya what do you do...

i use to be big to to cd ied had a cd drive and installed windows 7 that way... but i got a windows 10 laptop and was attempting to install it... i  needed to slip some m.2 driver in there so i made a boot drive. never looked back.

 

i also only used wired headphones and a long cable...i made kinda blue tooth adapter to the head phones and game me freedom...so i gave in and got wireless headphones and love em.

 

its nice to have the disc but also nice not to need to swapped it or add lag when it spinns up. but most games dont come on cds...

 

ya theres consoles but there basically done with cd these days anyway. and they cost way more...but could resell it or triad it.

 

you can find dvd and cd cheap these days i bet they will go up...

thow i do like full screen vs 6 inch back bar bs.... "oh it looks better"

[Avocado Diaboli]

2 minutes ago, Corporate Drone said:

What I'm about to explain is- as far as I know- not piracy, and I read the thread and I do not see it explained elsewhere.

 

As others have stated the Steam client must (functionally) always be installed on the machine which you intend to play a Steam purchased game on. So assume that every computer that you wish to play a game on, has Steam on it already- but- does not have the game which you want to play on it and for reasons you cannot download the game again (like you are at Grandma's house, and they allow you to install Steam but don't have the space to leave a 500gb install of Ark with mods on their PC when you're not visiting and it's a 3 hour download on their connection- or maybe you don't want to use 500 gb of your data cap to download games to play during a weekend somewhere).

 

It is possible to select the install of all your Steam games to not be C:, perhaps you install them to S:.

 

S: could be a USB 3 enclosure with a 1 tb SSD in it or even an NVME- the form factor will depend on what is available to your PC and the destination PCs. In my case, I have an NVME enclosure that connects to USB C. Once in Steam you make certain that you make a note of the drive letter which Steam calls your drive.

 

When you take it to where you want to play the game at, plug in the drive, use Windows to call that drive the same drive letter as whatever this drive is on your PC (if it's S: on your PC, make sure it is S: on the new PC. I recommend picking something "late" in the alphabet because people could be "using" A: through G: already but they are unlikely to be using R:, S:, T:) and then log into steam on that PC. Follow the instructions for Steam to activate the drive as a Steam drive, give the PC a minute or two to think about the new apps installed on it and to sync with the Steam cloud, and you should be able to play your games again. Then when you want to leave, sign out of Steam, shut down the PC to ensure there's nothing being written to the drive, and then take it home.

 

Again, this will not bypass the requirement that you log in to Steam to play the game. Steam has to be installed on both PCs, and there is only one copy of the game that exists and it can only be used by one person at a time. I'm 99% sure that this is what influencers are doing when they are testing PCs, they have an SSD that is loaded with a suite of their games and then they just point to that SSD when it's time to test with their new PC.

This is a really roundabout way of doing it. You just tell Steam where the game is installed, even if it's on an external drive and it detects it automatically. Maybe you need to run the command to verify the game files, but you don't need to match the drive letter at all.