Archiving Steam games for fun and profit | Hacker News Reader

Archiving Steam games for fun and profit

lorendb.dev

153 pointsLorenDB82 comments

> 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

There's also DepotDownloader as a more generic tool that lets you download anything from steam, including past version. 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

> 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?

Most 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

Try it without steam installed, I think most of them still load steam.dll if steam is not actively running.

There 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.)

Interesting 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...

I'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.

There are a few of these and Goldberg is my preferred method. Most games that enforce a check beyond this default are also trivially bypassed with another application that simply rips the validation out in the first place.

There are also quite a few games that don’t institute any validation and will happily run without steam at all. It’s up to the developer to enable either level of validation and many don’t.

The only games on steam that have any meaningful DRM are the ones that go out of their way to do so. Nothing about steam is actually meant to serve as DRM that is more than paper thin. Valve tried to make a push a lot time ago with the custom executable generation technology around the time Civ 5 came out (2010) and it didn’t hold up for long and the appetite was not there.

Broadly speaking only Denuvo and very niche solutions for obscure games that are completely homespun (so the demand just isn’t there for people to properly crack them) are the only pure DRM being used on steam now.

(I own over 1500 games on steam to be clear, I do however often pirate games to try them out because 2 hours is a pretty narrow window for most games, especially the ones I enjoy. I buy what hooks me.)

https://github.com/inflation/goldberg_emulator#but-it-breaks...

> It doesn't break any DRM. If the game has a protection that doesn't let you use a custom steam api dll it needs to be cracked before you use my emulator. Steam is a DRM as much as any API is a DRM. Steam has actual DRM called steamstub which can easily be cracked but this won't crack it for you.

That being said looks like steam themselves don't consider their DRM to be very useful

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/drm

> The Steam DRM wrapper by itself is not an anti-piracy solution. The Steam DRM wrapper protects against extremely casual piracy (i.e. copying all game files to another computer) and has some obfuscation, but it is easily removed by a motivated attacker.

I haven't tried that all that much but I don't remember that being my experience. PCGamingWiki has a list for games for which this is true https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_Big_List_of_DRM-Free_G... and you can check individual games if the steam store version has DRM and it feels like a small minority of games.

cyberpunk 2077 doesn't need steam after you've downloaded it

CDPR leadership has repeatedly gone on record about their loathing of DRM, so that doesn't surprise me.

They also run GOG, which is mostly DRM-free games. Another major recent title available DRM-free on GOG is Baldur's Gate 3 by Larian.

The common theme for both studios seems to be that they don't use a publisher, which is the likely reason neither add garbage like Denuvo to their games. I feel like DRM/no-DRM might be a good indicator for whether developers or MBAs were in control of a project.

I had no idea CDPR also owned GOG!

"GOG.com is a digital distribution platform for video games and films. It is operated by GOG sp. z o.o., a wholly owned subsidiary of CD Projekt based in Warsaw, Poland."

"Most" is factually wrong. Some yes, most on fact need a crack, most do not have any kind of other DRM other than the trivial steam DRM so they need a steam emu to actually run. You can use steamless and goldberg emu to crack and basic game on your own without actually downloading some exe someone else touched if you are paranoid. But you have to actually do this for most games, the amount of games that just run without that is NOT "most", AAA or not.

Once everything is downloaded and archived, will this enable me to play the game without it having to talk to the steam servers?

Depends on the game. Often the main exe still launches steam for bootstrapping.

IIRC, 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.

IIRC, 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

Is anyone removing launchers from games for fun and profit?

My 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?

Yes, 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).

Have 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

>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.

Gog?

I don't use GOG, but somebody on Reddit linked this: https://github.com/MattMills/gog_content_system_downloader

I need one for bigfishgames

Given how slow GOG downloads for me, that is going to take a while.

I have used this tool: 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

The 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.

I 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.

As 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.

You 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.

Yeah. I use lgogdownloader to do this in bulk. It's very configurable from the command line. It can be run in Windows with WSL.

Profit?

http://www.phrack.org/issues/49/14.html#article

Wow, I certainly did not know this is the origin of the phrase! thank you.

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/25205/what-is-th...

You could technically profit by selling pirated copies of your games, but please don't :)

If 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. :)

Profit can mean gaining personal benefit of any kind. Time savings, etc.

I'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.

That's odd, I thought the intention of Steam family sharing was precisely to enable that use case.

Maybe 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.

I think this was the original idea that quickly mutated into "how do we stop the rampant account sharing enabled by this feature".

A 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.

Channeling Johnnie Cochran:

"If the IP addresses are the same you must let them game."

You can play someone else's shared library if they're offline ;)

And you can be offline and still play most singleplayer games, so enjoy!

Unfortunately the Steam client is simply abysmal offline. Even basic functionality such as caching game title thumbnails and viewing screenshots appears to be nerfed on purpose. You can't view your own achivements. Some games simply won't launch on the Deck offline. Now I will always try to buy a game on GOG first if it's available to avoid this sort of DRM.

So your plan is to stop using a client that is abysmal offline in order to avoid a problem that's only "better" on the other client because it doesn't implement it at all ?

Yes, on principle, against user-hostile software development practices.

Recently I was playing a game on my Steamdeck through family share for a week. I only used suspend and wake feature while in the game, and never closed the game process. I later found out the owner refunded the shortly after purchase, but Steam did not kick me out of the game. I finished the game, and I was online the whole time.

On a separate occasion, I played a game for 10 hours through family share, and then decided to get a copy of my own. Wanted to return it after 15 min, but Steam won't let me because it is considering prior 10 hours play time makes me ineligible for 2 hour refund window.

I was under the impression you could lend games to another account. So you and your son each have your own account, you lend him one of your games, and he can play it while you are playing a different game.

Not that I know, only family sharing. My wife and I have the same issue

Yes, however the 'leant' game to your friend can only be played whilst you yourself are not playing any games on your account.

Basically the rule is you can share and lend your games, but only 1 game from your account can be played at any one time.

For a lot of games you can simply copy out of Steamapps/common and run the exe and it'll run like a standalone copy.

For games that use steam features, you can drop in a steam emulator[0] to shim the API calls. I use this for when I want to run multiple versions of the base game with different mods.

Typically this works fine as long as there's no real Drm/anticheat (which is common in multi player games but rare for single player).

So this should allow you to clone parts of your library for your son to play (as well as consolidate your many accounts).

[0] https://gitlab.com/Mr_Goldberg/goldberg_emulator/blob/master...

I buy games via Steam and then grab a DRM-free backup elsewhere. Same with movies and music. I own my media just like the good old days.

Good to throw GOG some money too, to support selling games with offline installers and no DRM.

Epic Games store only has a 15% cut vs Steams 30%

I like Steam, including the work they’ve done with Linux/Proton and their hardware access. I wouldn’t give Tencent Epic Games a single penny.

A similar gripe I have with a lot of games is the lack of local multiplayer support in PC ports of games (even ones that have local multiplayer in their console versions).

Nintendo is still King when it comes to local multiplayer but they unfortunately haven’t upgraded their hardware in quite a while and the switch was a little anemic even for its time.

It has led to a weird situation where for most games it’s only really feasible for us to play together if we are hours apart and playing over a network. Back in the ps2 / Xbox 360 era it felt like almost every game had a local split screen mode.

Companies can earn more profit by differentiating themselves from their competitors rather than trying to be the same. Microsoft brings the broadest ecosystem combining Windows and Xbox and all their cloud chops. Sony tries to be cutting edge wihth VR and exclusive high fidelity AAA titles. Nintendo caters to people who play for fun rather than the best graphics, usability over cutting edge, casual gamers and families, etc.

This is all just to say that Nintendo can't compete on hardware performance and graphics so it focuses on other things to be best at.

One 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.

There’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.

>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.

I 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).

Minecraft 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.

Can you actually run 1.7.10 modpacks on Java 21? I thought 1.7 was stuck on Java 8

You can, because 1.7.10 modders are insane.

https://github.com/GTNewHorizons/lwjgl3ify

https://wiki.gtnewhorizons.com/wiki/Installing_and_Migrating...

Ah, makes sense it would be the GTNH people figuring that out

Paradox - Stellaris would be a good example of this.

However, this gets into a question of game economics and "how do we keep paying developers?"

The "buy, one and done, no patches ever, bye" model for game development gets "this game is abandoned" and the initial sales splurge doesn't always cover the cost of development. Thus you've got DLC. If there are servers to be hosted for multiplayer lobbies, that expense needs to be paid somewhere.

So a constant trickle of updates / fixes / DLC / changes keeps the player base interested, and can provide the revenue stream to maintain those updates, fixes and servers.

On the other hand, looking at Stellaris DLC (or Crusader Kings) and you go "I'm gonna pay how much for that game?" while players who started from the start see it more as a "pay $20 / year for something new added to the game".

The usual way that is handled is every few years release a "catchup pack" for $x that gets you to a DLC or two behind, which looks like a good deal to new players and old players can ignore because they have most of it already.

Aka "Steam {season} sale"

This season didn't put Stellaris on sale, but I not infrequently see 50% off on it.

It has some advantage, The games are growing with the community, improving on what the players are doing with it. And the company is usually making more money long term, as the constant improvement creates more attention and satisfied customers who will spread the message. I think to some degree this is also mirroring what the players often are doing unofficially with mods. Among Us, bus also Minecraft is very guilty of this.

Indeed. Most games seem to be targeted at folks who have all the time in the world and play games daily. If I'm very lucky I get a few hours on the weekend and maybe an hour or two during the week. It's frustrating to sit down and think, "OK, time to have some fun" and then be met with "game has 500MB of updates" and so forth.

It is as old as MMORPGs, at least. In 2001 you couldn't play Ultima Online like you did in 1998.

Starcraft was doing that in the 90s including the tweaks to balance the different races. IMO it made the game better as clear imbalances got fixed over time.

Interestingly the balance was for multiplayer and they didn't update single player missions to accommodate the changes. I liked to replay the single player campaign periodically, and there was one base infiltration mission that became insanely difficult due to the balance changes. I'm fuzzy on the details but it was related to static defense buffs (protoss cannons if I recall), that meant the limited number of units you were stuck with for the mission couldn't reliably get past what was supposed to be a simple blockade without significantly upping your micro game.

Starcraft is mostly fine since the place where the changes really matter was multiplayer and those games are ephemeral.

Awhile back I was playing through darkest dungeon and they did two rebalances that changed how most characters work. I had spent time leveling up characters and building teams only to have the game change out from under me. It was annoying even if the final rebalance was better since I made decisions that were based on obsolete information.

Stellaris

I've lost track of how many times I've had to relearn that game.

Totally true-- but that went from a game I could barely stand to one I really love. It is a much deeper game today then the one they first released. I am OK with them updating it for that reason.

Software and products changed fundamentally when ubiquitous internet access rolled out. Now every such product comes with a string attached (figuratively but literally), be it a game, a robot vacuum or a car.

This is a trend because it's an incredibly successful business model and most gamers want new content delivered monthly or so. They might not like the company or pricing, but Gaas/live service is popular for a reason.

There's also plenty of new games that are "one and done" outside of patches, probably more than ever.

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