Disc-based PC games: Do I always need to put the disc in my drive after install?

Billspear

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Sep 26, 2014
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I do not have a disc drive but I can borrow an external one from a family member.

If I buy physical copies of PC games, after the initial install, do I always need to use the original disc to play? I'm not interested in importing games to online services like steam and uplay. I suppose I'm old-fashioned.
 
Solution
GFWL games are kind of in limbo right now. Some of them had GFWL removed by the developers in a patch and simply run with no DRM at all, or had their DRM replaced with something like Steamworks, it varies from game to game. Some games did not get taken off of GFWL before that service went down, and the developer did not bother migrating the game to another service, in which case you may not be able to activate them anymore, in which case you may need to find a way around that.

Older games will vary, stuff from around 10 years ago will have a disc check most of the time, some stuff from 2006-2007 might have a disc check, it will vary from game to game, 2006-2007 was around the time that disc checks started to disappear.
A lot of physical copies of PC games these days will tie themselves to a Steam, Origin, Uplay, or Battle.net account, so you're probably going to have to deal with those services in some way. With those games, you don't have to have the disc in your drive to play them. Most publishers stopped bothering with the disc checks and moved to an online account system simply because the disc checks were so easy to bypass, and even more advanced forms of DRM based on disc checks like SecuROM or Starforce were cracked rather quickly, and also wound up causing problems for the end user.

 
GFWL games are kind of in limbo right now. Some of them had GFWL removed by the developers in a patch and simply run with no DRM at all, or had their DRM replaced with something like Steamworks, it varies from game to game. Some games did not get taken off of GFWL before that service went down, and the developer did not bother migrating the game to another service, in which case you may not be able to activate them anymore, in which case you may need to find a way around that.

Older games will vary, stuff from around 10 years ago will have a disc check most of the time, some stuff from 2006-2007 might have a disc check, it will vary from game to game, 2006-2007 was around the time that disc checks started to disappear.
 
Solution