*Showerthoughts*

Steam downloads games over plaintext, so can I whireshark a game and get it for free then?

*Showerthoughts*

For real?

@gitpush
I dont know about the whireshark part but it is downloading stuff over http :)

Daheck.

Question is, how does steam handle games using their api but not registered in your library?

it may have a internal encryption instead of ssl

Some good showers you are having, I see.

It's done like that so that the nodes in the path to your computer can cache the data.
One can't cache connections over https.

Fetch the URL from Wireshark, fire up wget, fetch the file.. profit $$
(No idea if it'll work though, I'm not a Steam user)

I mean technically you could install it this way. You'll still need a steam account that has said game registered under your account before you can run it though.

Source : have tried to bum steam games off friends before without luck

You'll probably want to send authentication headers with it... ;)

That is what greenluma and other hacked steam clients do. And downloading the game is not protected. Playing it is.
There is also a squid proxy setup that caches steam games. I have used that in a lan party it worked great :D

@gitcherry
Yeah Squid works because it is over http :)

@mngr
Yeah, that is probably the case. It is somekind of .part format

Isn't this the same as just copying the downloaded files?

@cvonderstein
Yeah it is :p

Well, Steam games aren't locked to a certain account. You could log in with another account, and if any game in your library was already installed, it would be playable. When launching a game it connects to the Steam launcher to verify your identity (and possibly also the game integrity)

And then there are also those games which use BattleEye, which complicates shit even further. Would be fun to try though.

Same as downloading a torrent of it, if it's not NoSteam'd you won't have much luck with it, also easier to just mitm steam cache proxies, many gaming cafes iirc use those.

@ScriptCoded try to remove the owner account then it will bitch at you that you're not the owner of said game, has happened before, both in owned and downloaded games.

@JoshBent Haha, didn't know that, but thanks for the heads up! 😅

@ScriptCoded haha steam is a bitch when it comes to that, have seen a lot about it, because I once tried to offline copy all games that I own 😁

@JoshBent It was better before. Nowadays when playing those old ported games, they will close if you stop Steam. Back in the days they didn't and you could play on a LAN and just buy it once 😅

@JoshBent But like a portable install?

@ScriptCoded the good old DRM free times 😶

@JoshBent Hehe... 🙈 Open Source ftw, right?

Yhee it's pretty useful for big lan partys. They add cache servers so they don't lose bandwidth because everybody is downloading the same game