Or at least I’m going to avoid paying for DRM-hampered software or games. I’ll definitely keep using software with Digital Rights Management because my day job obliges me to use a work laptop that can only run, say, Adobe PhotoShop^*, not GIMP or Krita. Also I’ve got a huge library of Steam games and I see little point in arbitrarily refusing to play things I already own.

^{*The laptop can not currently run PhotoShop either, as it was broken by a recent Windows update.}

There are a few reasons I’ve decided to do this, but before getting into those it would probably be worth a really quick run-down of what Digital Rights Management (DRM) actually is. Long story short, it’s any tool that a company uses to try and confirm that the people using its digital product actually paid for it (though as I’ve covered before, it’s absolutely useless for ebooks and not much help for anything else either). The Steam client – which requires you to sign into the account you used to to purchase games before you can play them – is a handy example. CD keys – printed numbers that come with a physical disc and must be entered to install the contents – are another, though probably much less familiar nowadays. These tools are intended to prevent piracy, but tend to cause problems for paying customers more often than pirates.

That brings me to the first reason I thought I’d give this a go:

Reason Number 1: Keeping Hold of My Stuff

Recently I got to thinking about how to preserve my games and writing (and all the other people’s things I care about) long-term, and one of the problems with DRM is that – if it relies on some company’s server to confirm you own the thing – then your thing will stop working if that server ever closes down. I ran into a similar problem about ten years ago with OnLive: an early(ish) cloud gaming company. I liked their service enough to buy their “microconsole” (at a vastly discounted price). It was great while it lasted, and then the company went belly-up and literally everything stopped working.

Steam will be less prone to this (since it’s not actually offering to run the games itself, and also it’s huge), but if the service ever shuts down then there’s no reason to expect anything you bought from it will ever work again^**. You might manage to download all your stuff beforehand and keep starting it up in offline mode (at least for a little while), but Steam’s support pages say that “If the Steam client is requiring a login, there is no option to bypass that without going online.” They also say that games with external launchers may not work offline to begin with. Steam have dropped a few hints that they’d make an effort to keep games working even if they shut down, but their own Subscriber Agreement says “The Content and Services are licensed, not sold. Your license confers no title or ownership in the Content and Services.” Personally, I’m not inclined to trust anything else they say without a line farther down that document that says “In the event we close down, we’ll agree that you do in fact own the stuff that you paid for and we’ll guarantee that you can keep using it.”

^{**Technically there are DRM-free titles available through Steam – and lots of them – but this isn’t something that’s made obvious on any given game’s store page. Also, a lot of those must be modified to run without Steam, which is still a pointless hurdle that could be avoided by buying DRM-free.}

This isn’t to say that Steam is terrible – thanks to Proton they’re making it much easier to run Windows games on Linux, they typically make online multiplayer a breeze, and their cloud saves are very handy indeed – but OnLive wasn’t terrible either. The fact remains that if you sink a ton of money into things that you explicitly do not own, and that you can only run in a client that some company has to actively maintain, you can’t act surprised if someday those things go up in smoke. And I’d like to avoid that.

Reason Number 2: To Prove That You Can

Back when the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality was running – a bundle of over a thousand games in exchange for $5 to charity – itch.io ended up coming to the attention of a lot of people who I can only assume had never come across DRM-free software before. The response was baffling. There were people on Twitter saying “Oh, sure – it looks like a great deal but you don’t get Steam keys, so you don’t actually own any of it” and it would be so hard to articulate my reaction that I’m just going to sum it up with a gif:

In a way, though, I get it. If you’ve only ever got hold of games through Steam – or especially if you’ve also chipped in for Humble Bundles, which nowadays typically offer Steam keys rather than direct downloads – then you might come to believe that having a title in your Steam library is the only way to “own” it. You might be so used to installing games through Steam and no other method that the things in that library seem permanent, and the DRM-free downloads from this itch.io place (with the deal that sounds too good to be true) probably seem ephemeral in comparison.

The irony is that the exact opposite is true. Any day now, Steam could be bought up by some billionaire Tony Stark wannabe who immediately says “Herp derp, I can do a videogames” and runs the whole thing into the ground. Fundamentally there’s nothing stopping the same thing happening with itch.io, but there’s also nothing stopping you from downloading everything you bought through the site, backing it up in a few different places for good measure, then continuing to use it until the sun explodes. Steam explicitly tells you that you don’t own anything, while itch.io not only promises that “Users shall retain a license to this content even after the content is removed from the Service,” but physically could not take it away even if they wanted to. This is the advantage of DRM-free software.

Reason Number 3: It’ll Be Mildly Entertaining

This is, to be honest, the biggest reason. I may have a huge Steam library, but I got it mostly through Humble Bundles so paid very little per game, a chunk of that went to charity, and though I’d be steamed^*** if all those games went down the drain I’ve always been mindful of the fact that they genuinely might. I will almost certainly be paying for Steam games in 2024, and might actually cave in 2023 if a particularly good Humble Bundle comes along.

^{***Pun not intended but I’m leaving it in anyway.}

In fact, the vast quantity of Steam games I already own is partly why I’m planning to see if I can ditch DRM altogether just for this year. It’s an opportunity to make a dent in that big backlog of games! Or at least be a little more choosy about what I add to the pile. Rather than paying for bundles and skipping most of their contents (albeit usually having paid less than the price of one game), I’ll try and keep an eye out for individual titles that I’m interested in, then forking out money in places that let the developers keep a bigger cut (and let me keep the thing I paid for!).

In the spirit of that, it would be great to have some suggestions. Do you know any great games available DRM-free? Have you worked on one yourself, perhaps? I’m not promising to shell out for everything that’s suggested, but I will at least think about it – and who knows? Maybe someone else is reading this and thinking “Hey, I should try and opt for DRM-free stuff…” and maybe they’ll also read the comments below!