Silly me removed about 70 games from Steam library years ago. Today I have restored most of them via Stem support page and with purchases history.
Yes, removed games are not really removed, just hidden. And for the reader here, we are not talking about hiding in the client. If you go to support page of game at https://help.steampowered.com/en/wizard/HelpWithGame and click “I want to permanently remove this game from my account”, then its like you wouldn’t own the game anymore.
Not many know you can go to same page and restore the license. It’s noted that you get the same license of game than before, not a new license. I don’t know why Steam has the permanent removal, if its not permanent at all. But now you know; you can restore. And that is what the user in this post is talking about.
Edit: I thought about why that maybe. It makes sense to keep the license bound to an account, so the key cannot be activated again by someone else. Otherwise people could sell their activated keys like that.
I feel like the main reason would be money laundering prevention. It’s slightly harder to create new accounts than it would be to have one account repeatedly buy, remove, and repeat for new licenses.
The bigger issue to me are games that were removed from steam and I can no longer get.
Which is why I don’t bother buying on steam anymore. If I’m buying, its DRM-free only.
I have multiple delisted games in my library that I can still download and play anytime I want. They just don’t have a store page anymore.
I’ve yet to have that happen, I think. What games have you experienced that with?
Nearly 900 games have been delisted.
There’s also Fable 3, which you can’t buy anymore because it used Games for Windows, which resulted in no more CD keys.
Right, but Steam still let’s people who own delisted games download and play them forever. (Well, assuming they’re not live service games with no servers, but that’s not a Valve problem.)
I believe you can still activate keys for delisted games. Meaning if you find a shop that sells them, you might be lucky. I never did that, just read reports of this. So can’t actually verify if this is true. Provided there is no additional third party launcher or activation that hinders this.
One example are most telltale games which still are still playable but not purchaseable (poker night at the inventory being the most recognizable for me since the associated tf2 items are also now that much harder to obtain)
Honestly don’t remember the names, its been… Quite a while. I’ll have to open and check.
Iirc it was also some I stored as gifts that became unknown or something, and I wasn’t able to send them.