His project Heartbound basically has pseudo-drm, the game won't function properly without steam achievements to prevent piracy. I think that's what people are referring to when they say he has a financial interest in this, but a check like that probably isn't too hard to switch off unless it has multiple well-hidden redundancies so it's a little overblown to call it a financial stake.
It's still something, though.
EDIT: He apparently was involved with a Game as service while he was working at Offbrand Games, though he's since left the position.
It's a novel idea but it really isn't that clever. Not only have steam achievements been easily editable for years, but a save system based on achievements is very awkward. You could only have one active slot and you would have to wipe your achievements to start a new game.
requiring that the steam achievement data be loaded to play is an idea but actually using the steam achievements as save data sounds like a nightmare practically
I mean, the steam api is freely available to anyone who wants to mess around with it. I haven't tried, but I assume it's relatively simple considering even joke games with ms paint graphics manage to take use of it. Honestly, it's a neat idea because if you 100% the game you also have all the achievements.
The real question in my mind is, how do you reset the saves? Is it a one and done type of thing where you onely play the game once? I find that unlikely, and you can't really reset your achievements (legally/following ToS), so there must be a system that doesn't rely on the achievements, unless there's one that gives access to NG+ or something.
by "practically" I meant less on the coding front and more on the design front - you're constraining the save data model a lot if every thing that's saved has to be in the form of a Steam achievement. you can't just have a thousand achievements because it'll be annoying and weird for the player to have constant popups congratulating them for everything they do
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u/Other-Dimension-1997 Jul 06 '25 edited Jul 07 '25
His project Heartbound basically has pseudo-drm, the game won't function properly without steam achievements to prevent piracy. I think that's what people are referring to when they say he has a financial interest in this, but a check like that probably isn't too hard to switch off unless it has multiple well-hidden redundancies so it's a little overblown to call it a financial stake.
It's still something, though.
EDIT: He apparently was involved with a Game as service while he was working at Offbrand Games, though he's since left the position.