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So, where can I purchase Nine Sols on GOG?
It’s ridiculous that Nine Sols will get a Nintendo Switch release before going on GOG. I guess “many gamers” aren’t asking for it - oh wait: https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/nine_sols https://www.gog.com/dreamlist/game/nine-sols-2024
A marketplace that is all DRM-free is good, but when they begin to concede on censorship for the political agendas of certain countries because it might affect their Chinese releases because they have far more of a horse in the race than Valve as a developer does in the Chinese market, you have to balance what you consider a bigger issue: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1809540/Nine_Sols/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/555220/Detention/
It only affects a very small minority of games, so it’s up to you whether you consider the censorship a deal breaker. Would a game with an Easter Game criticizing any other country’s politics caused the uproar Devotion did? There’s no shortage of games that do, and as a central plot element as opposed to a simple Easter Egg. Then there’s also the fact that GOG insulted people’s intelligence with the excuse of “many gamers”, specially given their continued silence on other Red Candle Game releases that have no similar issues.
If an art form cannot be used as a means of criticism, then it is not one that is free.
https://artandmedialaw.com/artistic-expression-and-free-speech/
When fundamentals like this are so easily violated under such ridiculous premises, further capitulation isn’t far behind.
Reject consumerism, embrace FOSS.
Or piracy>:)
Call me when GOG Galaxy supports Gnu/Linux.
And when GoG does regional pricing.
So much more expensive if you don’t live in the US/Western Europe.
Unofficial:
Minigalaxy and Heroic are both clients which support GoG
I use Lutris with GOG works great
Bought northgard on GOG, it turns out the game needs GOG galaxy for the multiplayer. It has the icon for “supports Linux” though. Really pissed about GOGs marketing there.
(I use Lutris as well, but it sadly does not solve everything)
i mean you dont really need the launcher
You do you but I don’t reject any platform or publisher and treat each game/sale on a case by case basis as it suits me. If the product is good enough I will put up with additional installations.
I’m not trying to defend anyone here, though it might seem like that, but I’m not sure why valve is lumped in with this, especially since that’s the steam logo.
Steam, as a platform, hasn’t released much of anything, ever. Valve has been sitting mostly on the sidelines since half-life 2 episode 2 and HL:Alyx.
Steam itself is just a marketplace.
I get that a lot of publishers on steam will fall into the categories of games that are the subject of the meme, but I have a hard time piling steam with the games that are published on it.
And yes, corporations are not our friends, and all billionaires are bad billionaires, eat the rich and all that… I’m just saying. There’s a lot of bigger, much worse, fish to fry than gaben, valve, and steam in this discussion. That could have been EA’s logo, or the Xbox logo (or ms game studios or whatever) or any number of massive publishers that are relevant here. Using the steam logo is lazy at best.
People are stupid and think steam is drm. It’s that simple. For what ever reason people don’t realize that 95% of all games on steam are entirely drm free. Just remove the overlay and you don’t even need steam turned on to play games.
Steam also offers DRM, it’s just up to devs to use it. And steams DRM is relatively unintrusive.
I think steam should maybe be in the middle, and the other 2 far on the left.
I think it’s lumped in because Steam sells games with DRMs, but GOG on the other hand will not sell games that come with any type of DRM at all.
I’m sure if Valve had the choice, they’d banish DRMs too, but I’m sure they don’t because they don’t want to piss off their big publishers (even though drm literally does nothing except make paying customers have a worse experience with their shitty games).
(I don’t really agree with “oritented to publishers”, especially when they release features like a more polish family library, but i guess i can see their point in some ways)
Steam: i’m gonna need an internet connection and dictate your OS also you need to run my shit to game
Gog: fuck if i care, here’s the exe
We know you full of bs tho when you say they dictate the OS, even though they’re the ones who have contributed most to gaming on Linux.
If the dev doesn’t opt to implement steams drm, you can also just run the exe. Downloading it requires the client vs. GOG allowing you to dl the game from their website, but that’s about the only difference (GOG outright refusing any games with DRM is incredibly based though and a great reason to buy on GOG over steam)
And that can be quite helpful. Just yesterday I had a game that wouldn’t launch via steam, but for some reason worked fine if I just ran it as an executable via protontricks.
Well, steam isn’t just a marketplace. A marketplace would be just a place to buy keys, or similar. Steam is an ecosystem, with a market, and a launcher, and a community hub, and a modding platform. The multiplayer integration that many games rely on for matchmaking/lobbies.
And every game on steam uses at least steam’s DRM, where you are required to connect to the Internet every now and then to verify ownership of your library.They have been the only platform to really try to support Linux though, and have made huge strides in the last few years. Steam is a big enough influence on the games economy that some of their choices become industry standards. And the 30% cut is the price devs pay to get into their system.
Like 95% of steam games are drm free… The only reason steam has to be running is cause games are bundled with a dll that enables the overlay, cloud sync etc. it’s just removable and your games don’t rely on steam at all.
No check in, no drm, no nothing.
It’s basically only the biggest triple A games that use steamDRM.
Not every game on steam uses its DRM, I have steam games that are outright DRM free
Like the previous poster, I’m not defending steam. No good billionaires, fight for the proletariat, down with the elite, etc
Not all steam games use steam DRM. It’s opt in by the developer. Lots of steam games you can literally just copy out of steam onto a USB key and run it. No DRM at all.
Don’t get me wrong they are skeezy in other ways (charging I indie deva 30% and big publishers less) but if you’re going to criticize them, then at least criticize them for something real.
Huh, I didn’t realize the DRM was optional, that’s good at least. Thanks for the update.
I use steam, but I moved the files out for games that will still work, as well as buy games on gog and download installers. I dont use gog galaxy cause? wont I have to be online to use my games?
All my backups are on a drive
Galaxy is just a launcher. You don’t need it to play any of your games, it’s just a centralized place to track achievements, sync cloud saves and whatnot.
Corporations aren’t your friend.
GOG just localize your prices PLEASE.
It’s ironic that a platform hell bent on providing DMR-free games and preserving them doesn’t seem interested in supporting the one OS in-line with their views.
I lament it, but I understand it. Last year’s reports showed that GoG was barely staying afloat. Their rival shows Linux is only 3% of current market, so GoG probably doesn’t want to spread themselves any thinner until they get some surplus cash to test the waters with.
Thank goodness for Heroic launcher.
Zoom is good about promoting Linux and has DRM free games. https://www.zoom-platform.com/
Damn, they could have chosen another name for their platform…
Nor public movements to do with it either. They’re certainly an interesting company…
Costumer oriented
Opposite problem:
Steam doesn’t enforce the use of its DRM (which is super easy to bypass anyway but that’s a side note).
Steam lets you publish your game on their platform and hand out as many keys as you like to resell on other platforms (at no cost) while still doing all the heavy lifting of hosting and distributing.
Steam doesn’t decide what kinds of titles get published on their platform any more than GoG does, so the bit about remasters, etc. is a bit weird. Besides you the user should get to decide what you want to buy and play.
I love GoG, but I love Steam as well. They’re not mutually exclusive and you can have both.
Yeah, its like a lot of people don’t know you can just… move files out of Steam’s directory, and 95% of the time, game still runs, just, not through Steam.
What even is a Steam rip, anyway?
The problem is that with Steam you only know if that works after you bought the game and only know if that works across machines if you upfront have two machines to test it in.
I mean, if you know upfront that it matters to you (which you might not until, say, your machine breaks and you happen to have no access to the Internet or Steam in your new machine yet, at with point you’ll be thinking “I wish I checked”) you can go through all the hassle of always thoroughly testing it within the refund period of that game, but at that point piracy is less of a hassle.
Meanwhile some of my GOG offline installers are so old that they have been used on 3 different machines (well, one was the same machine under Windows and under Linux) already.
Don’t get me wrong - I use both Steam and GOG, my point is that saying that “Steam has DRM free games” is even worse than a half-truth and about as bollocks as saying that a shop selling TVs is selling “Quake game machines” - sure, people with the right skills can get Quake to run in some Smart TVs, but that’s not how the store is selling them as, that’s definitelly not supported by them and they won’t refund you a Smart TV purchase as “not suitable for purpose” if that device fails to runs Quake.
The PC wiki actually has a dedicated field for if steam games require it or not. It’s rare if not close to never that you don’t know ahead of time if you actually look.
Its annoying it’s not on the store page but eh.
This is something I wasn’t aware of, so thanks for the info.
There are also some other ways to work around Steam DRM, such as the Goldberg Emulator (basically a steam_api DLL which for steam client games emulates the Steam servers).
It’s just all so unreliable and an unecessary hassle when it does work, because of something which only benefits Steam and causes a product to be inferior for the customer.
If Steam made available offline installers with no DRM, clearly stated on the store page even if alongside stuff with DRM and/or no offline installers, I would be buying way more from them than I do.
Even with the whole “so far, so good” soft thouch approach under Gabe’s leadership that does not leverage market power over developers to force use of Steam’s DRM and lets us as customers have all sorts of ways to work around Steam DRM when games do have it, we’re all just having to pray that the guy keeps eating his veggies, avoids saturated fats and walks at least half an hour a day so as to reduce the risk of dying from a heart attack, and always looks both ways when crossing the road so as not to be run over, because when the guy goes the “benevolent regime” might very well be replaced by a malevolent one (as has happened in lots of good companies) and people’s game collections in Steam will be hostages to it because of the way things are set-up (since the first thing a “malevolent regime” would do is push updates closing all the loopholes).
Ok I had to read that twice to understand the angle I think you’re coming from, but uh, basically yeah, agree.
If you want a game, that works if the net goes down… yeah, sometimes just 100% relying on vanilla Steam, that’ll fuck you.
But, Steam does have ways to set up local backup, freeze potentially breaking updates, work in offline mode…
But but, yeah, in many cases, for many people, it makes sense to just either make and keep your own isolated backup of some kind, or yeah, just grab a rip from somewhere and keep it in emergency storage.
My own experience of problems with the “Steam way” is wanting to install and run a new game whilst offline (for example, when I moved houses and was waiting to get landline Internet running, whilst mobile Interned was too slow or expensive to download anything but the tinyiest of games, all the while my external HD with a collection of GOG offline installers gave me plenty of options) and installing games in machines with older versions of Windows because the Steam Application doesn’t support those old OS versions anymore (plus, in all honesty, you definitelly don’t want to to connect such machines to the Internet for security reasons).
Further, as I said in a different post, I can run my GOG games through Lutris by default sandboxed with networking disabled, but I can’t do that in Steam.
More in general, as a Techie since the 90s I’ve long been very aware (and averse) to the dangers of having software or data which is supposedly yours yet is de facto under direct control of an external 3rd party for whom you’re nothing (i.e. not a mate you lent a CD to, but a big company with a massive Legal budget controlling your access to it using phone-home validation), so out of principle I heavilly favor sellers who do not try and retain control of what I bought from them. Same reason I didn’t like “phone home” or “dependent on external servers” hardware or DRM-wrapped books or music, well before the recent wave of enshittification and increase in problems like digital books taken away from people because of some licensing dispute (or even their accounts just being terminated) or hardware bricked because the servers were switched off.
Whilst it might seem like an old-fashioned sense of ownership, that posture has saved me from pretty much all the effects of the enshittification wave.
Got nothing really to add to that or challenge.
Yep, I am personally just a bit more comfortable with the convience of Steam, at the moment… but oh yes, when Gabe announces he’s retiring, I’m backing up everything.
I dunno, I mod (as in, make mods, as well as configure combos of other ones, hell I even mod mods lol) a lot, and I’ve just… got my own method, at this point, would be hard to fully describe lol.
It is a very appealing proposal and that’s why I myself have bought games from Steam when I can’t find them in GOG. Further, I’m not strict about always downloading GOG offline installers for all my games, even though if I don’t I run the risk of losing those games if for example the GOG store closes.
And, as you point out, “so far, so good”.
I’ve just been burned by earlier forms of enshittification and service relationships misportrayed as purchases of forever access.
Also, almost 4 decades of using or in Tech have made me very aware of elements which can affect long term usability of software and hardware.
So nowadays I’ll only ever spend money on things which follow that scheme if I’m willing to lose it, even if for now they seem fine, and favour things that I’ll have a chance to still make work 10 or 20 years down the line (funilly enough, this week I’ve been playing Jagged Alliance 2, which is a 26 years old game with gameplay that’s still as fun as back then).
Hah! JA2 huh?
Fuck its been a while.
Yeah, way way back, I had a choice between either … playing JA2 with a group…
Or joining the mod team for Project Reality, which is now Squad.
I was just a beta tester / ideas guy, but uh, I’m proud of my choice, led me further into making my own mods, learning programming, etc.
That being said, no irrational hate toward JA2, solid game, doesn’t get the recognition it should, I just… had my own ideas and wanted to be a part of making something, even before I was outta high school.
Steam is as much de facto a seller of DRM-free games as a electric appliances store is a seller of quake games machines: some people with the right skills might get quake to work in some of the smart fridges or smart TVs they sell, but they’re definitelly not made for it, definitelly not sold as supporting that feature and definitelly no support whatsoever is provided for that feature.
When you’re making a purchasing decision on their store, Steam doesn’t tell you upfront if the game has or not their DRM hence you cannot make an informed decision on that factor: Steam most definitelly do not want potential customers to select games on the basis or absence of DRM.
Also the install process of a game in a new machine with Steam is always via their store which can arbitrarily refuse you access to the games you supposedly bought (only according to Steam, you only “licensed” them) whilst with GOG once you downloaded the offline installer it’s de facto yours (even in legal environments where such sales are not treated the same as sales of games in physical media - which are treated as owned). The copying over of a Steam game is a hack, which even without the Steam phone-home DRM might not work, for example, if the game won’t run properly when certain registry keys created during install are not present.
Who’s claiming Steam is a “de facto” seller of DRM-Free games?
What was the purpose of you writting as the very first sentence of your post:
Steam doesn’t enforce the use of its DRM (which is super easy to bypass anyway but that’s a side note).
If not to tell us that Steam also sells DRM-free games?
If Steam also sells DRM-free games (even if alongside games with DRM) then de facto Steam is a seller of DRM-free games.
Being a “seller of” doesn’t mean just selling that and nothing else.
The purpose was to tell you exactly what I stated - that Steam does not enforce the use of DRM and nothing more.
You’re the one that wants to extrapolate that statement to mean much more than it does.
The point you missed is that the use of DRM is on the publisher/developer and not Steam itself.
You pointed out that Steam sells games without DRM.
I pointed out that for the customer that’s just a side effect of Steam selling games, since the absence of DRM is not pitched as a feature or even listed by the Steam store.
It seems to me that my point just adds to your point to make a more complete picture that better informs readers.
Are not both our points true?
Your point is confused and all over the place, partly because you’re trying to attribute your own point to something I said.
The issue is you’re completely missing the point that I’m making, which is that Steam isn’t pushing DRM, it merely doesn’t prevent publishers from using it or implementing their own.
This goes back to OP’s post where they’re trying to suggest that Steam is bad because of DRM, when really Steam merely allows it rather than pushes for it.
You then tried to make a point about being beholden to Steam’s platform to download your games because it’s less convenient than backing them up yourself or downloading the DRM-free installer from GoG but all that is moot because the discussion was DRM vs not DRM. Saying that GoG giving you an offline installer that does the heavy lifting is a plus point in GoG’s favour from a consumer ease of use standpoint but if the only thing that’s stopping you from copying and pasting the folder of the game is not necessarily knowing what the dependencies are, well that’s just convenience rather than stripping away your rights.
And speaking of rights, you have the right to choose whatever platform you like based on the features that platform has.
Steam is pushing DRM, to publishers and makers, just the soft sales push rather than forcing them to use it.
It’s not even heavy DRM - it’s designed as a single DLL and there are literally freely available implementations out there of the API as DLLs which allow running most Steam games offline and Steam has done nothing to try and have them pulled down - so at the moment it’s not at all done in a nasty forceful way.
The end result is still that most Steam games do have Steam DRM, most gamers out there don’t know how to work around it, and if tomorrow Steam wants to force update all games to have nasty DRM, they can.
(And, as we’ve seen from how they caved to payment processors on the whole Adult Games front, Steam can be even be pushed to do things they don’t intend to do)
It’s kinda like it’s possible to configure Windows 11 to not run with all the eavesdropping shit, but people have to be aware of it, care about in and go out of their way to make it happen (though, unlike Steam, MS will actually periodically switch back ON that stuff which people switched OFF).
It’s not a nasty “authoritarian” forcing of DRM but it’s still the relentless soft sales push that in practice results in almost everybody by default buying and running games with DRM, whilst with GOG the default is no DRM so most people run DRM free games (one would have to really go out of their way to run a GOG game with DRM).
If there is one thing almost 4 decades as a gamer have taught me is that often DRM is fine until it isn’t, and you don’t really know which ones will be a problem until they are a problem and by then it’s too late and a game you love is now unplayable. If this is bad on a game, it’s many times worse when it applies to a collection of hundreds of games - if Steam turns evil or goes bankrupt it will be many times worse than just one game not running on an OS version later than the max supported when the game was shipped (or something like that).
In risk management terms, with games purchased from Steam de facto there are risks which are not in games with an offline installer and which don’t have DRM (needs not be bough in GOG, and GOG too has some of those risks if you don’t proactivelly download the offline installers), and a couple of decades in gaming (and Tech in general) have taught me that sometimes you get bitten by such risks.
Edit: wrong place
Did you just compare copying and pasting files to running Quake on a smart fridge?
From all that I wrote, somebody having that take is the equivalent for metaphors of being a Grammar Nazi.
Well no, your metaphor is based on the premise that copy and paste is difficult. You can compare it to something ridiculous, but it doesn’t change that copying and pasting something is something actual children master.
My methaphor is explained in the pharagraph immediatelly following that first one:
When you’re making a purchasing decision on their store, Steam doesn’t tell you upfront if the game has or not their DRM hence you cannot make an informed decision on that factor: Steam most definitelly do not want potential customers to select games on the basis or absence of DRM.
I hoped this made it obvious that I was making an analogy about the way both things are sold, by, you know, me talking only about the way things are sold in the following paragraph and not at all about other things.
It’s you who chose to treat the thing as a comparison between the details of characteristics I mentioned in passing and did not at all mention further in my explanation.
Your claim that my premise is about the technical difficulty in making one or the other support making them do something they are not officially supported to do is a Strawman.
Me answering the first paragraph you wrote of rambling screed is a ‘strawman’? Who taught you to write?
Strawman recipe
Step 1 - Put up the strawman by stating that the other person was trying to do something they explicitly said they were not trying to do when they actually explained exactly what they were trying to do:
your metaphor is based on the premise that copy and paste is difficult.
(No. My methaphor is based on how in multiple domains “selling things which can be altered to do something else by those who know how to do such alterations is not the same as selling things for that specific purpose”, as I already explained before and you pointedly ignored. PS: anybody in doubt can just read my other posts here as they’re all consistently about how things are sold, not how things are hacked)
–
Step 2 - Totally trash the very strawman you put up:
You can compare it to something ridiculous, but it doesn’t change that copying and pasting something is something actual children master.
(Absolutely right! I was doing totally wrong that which you claimed I was trying to do. In fact, so totally and completely wrong was the way I was trying to do what you claimed I was trying to do, that intelligent individuals might even suspect I was not in fact trying to do that which you claim, but something else for which what I wrote wasn’t such a mismatched comparison).
–
PS: Loved in this latest post the throwing of vague aspersions about my education level as a counter whilst not in fact addressing my argument. Really shows the strength of your argument and depth of reasoning.
Imagine being sane, neither an steam only, pc master race enthusiast, nor a FOSS Linux 100% privacy and anonymity zealot.
Official client and support for my platform of choice is a big plus only Steam bothers to have.
I have recently realized that I could claim tons of games from amazon with prime subscription that are claimed in GOG. And it seems GOG has some games available for Linux. There usually are couple of download links for different OSes
I purchased Outerworlds on Steam and could not get it to load.
I pirated it and run it through WINE and have no problems.
lutris
And there’s heroic, but both aren’t the same thing as native platform support. Steam has game listings for games that are made for Linux and Mac. You install the official steam client and click “play”. No other platform has that.
There are more or less convenient ways to run the games from gog, epic, Amazon, … on Linux. But none of them have official support or even carry any native games at all.
I don’t even know how it worked, but the official GoG listing for Factorio doesn’t have the linux binary on it, but when I logged into GoG via Heroic Launcher, I had the option to install that rather the Win binary though Wine/Proton.
The official GoG listing definitely mentions the Linux version. Just like every other game on GoG that has a Linux versions available.
hmm. It does.
I don’t think I saw it listed in GoG’s mac launcher when I last looked, but it’s not worth the effort to double check that at this point.
Shit buggy client you can’t customize and with integrated ram-eating webbrowser you are forced to launch to play the game. Vs. native hubs that integrate GoG, itch & co seamlessly, setup and runners and all.
Eh, Heroic isn’t free of fault either; e.g. when it offered to auto-install REDmod along with CP2077 I couldn’t launch the game because the REDmod it installed was completely broken. I’d say that Steam is slightly less buggy than Heroic overall, both of them being pretty damn solid. Haven’t used Lutris much because, well, Steam and Heroic work well enough.
Would a leaner Steam be nice? Yeah, but reliable, lean cross-platform GUI toolkits aren’t easy to come by.
Lutris was pretty janky IME. Bottles has similar issues with Lutris and some very bizarre UI decisions (like IIRC you can’t delete bottle snapshots from the UI, so unless you manually go and delete them in the filesystem, creating snapshots just takes up an ever increasing amount of space). Honestly Heroic is kind of janky too and throws errors about login status half the time, but it generally works at least when it comes to launching the games. The problem is Steam almost always just works, and if it doesn’t work it’s pretty much always the game’s fault and thus I would have problems with any launcher.
Can’t play Stellaris through Heroic because of the launcher being broken.
Bypassing the launcher requires some convoluted setup, and it also removes the ease of modding.
Manually installing Stellaris through Lutris works, but Lutris isn’t well maintained, and even though it’s connected to GOG, doesn’t update Stellaris. Says it can’t find updates despite there clearly being one.
I thought more of Lutris and GameHub, forgot about Heroic. There’s also Legendary (FOSS replacement for Heroic) and Cartridge but i don’t know them.
I use heroic to install and have the setting on to auto add them to my steam library
RAM eating we browser? What, you playing games on 256 MB?
Also, you can 100% customise Steam. There are various user created skins out there you can just plop onto Steam.
With some tool that uses a hack. Just plopping doesn’t work anymore.
RAM eating we browser? What, you playing games on 256 MB?
What, you only play games on a powerful rig? Waay more Casual games in the store than Flagships. And if your notebook has 4 GB and Steam uses 1 GB and you want to lookup a tutorial online it gets close.
Let’s not normalize wasting resources just because some AAA studios are used to it.
I’m not normalising wasted resources, but 8 GB of RAM was a basic minimum standard to do anything on a computer 10 years ago… Perhaps even more.
Unless you’re running a very, and I mean a VERY, cut-down operation system for none-intensive tasks, there is no way 4 GB of RAM is useful for anything.
Are you still on a dual core CPU too?
8 GB of RAM was a basic minimum standard to do anything on a computer 10 years ago
That’s called “privilege”.
By that fucking logic anything more thqn 512kb and dos is privilege.
Get the actual fuck out of here with that bullshit.
Even the cheapest shit boxes from dell have had more then 4 gigs of ram for over a decade.
When a 300 dollar dell ewaste netbook has it, it’s the bare minimum.
No, that’s called basic. We’re not talking about a batmobile shaped RGB “gamer” mouse. We’re talking about the default requirement for a functional system.
You’re talking Windows?
I get both sides of this. I understand wanting GoG to have an official Linux client, but the Steam Client is such garbage.
My own negative experiences with Steam vs GOG were:
- Moving homes and having no landline Internet for a while and not being able to most install most of my Steam games on my desktop gaming PC because mobile Internet is slow and expensive so installing a big game literally costs money. With GOG I just downloaded the offline installer at work into a USB Flash Disk and then installed it on my desktop at home.
- Not being able to install perfectly functional games from Steam into a machine with an old Windows version because the Steam client didn’t support it anymore (even though the games were compatible with that version). Mind you, you that machine shouldn’t even be connected to the Internet for safety reasons, which again would stop me from installing games from Steam even if the client worked.
Beyond that with Steam you have the risk that Steam takes away one or more of your game for some reason (say, licensing problems or just Payment Processors pressuring them to do it), you lose access to your account and can’t recover it (unusual, but possible), your account is forcibly closed for an arbitrary reason with no appeal (not happened yet with Steam but did happen with others such as Google), the store goes bankrupt and closes (not happened yet with steam but has happened with sellers of music with DRM if I remember it correctly), games without DRM or with Steam’s light DRM (the one simply using steam_api.dll, for which there are implementations which just emulate the API without phoning home) get forcibly updated to hard DRM so whilst before you could run it offline, now you can’t.
(Mind you, you get some of these problems - such as risking the loss of your entire game collection if the store goes belly up - with GOG if you just use GOG Galaxy and don’t download the offline installers for all your games, but at least there it’s entirely down to you as the store does nothing to make it harder for you to eliminate those risks)
Steam makes a lot of effort to keep itself inside the loop of gamers playing the games, not forcibly so (as somebody pointed out, they don’t force developers to use DRM) but more with a soft sales push (they offer it for free to developers and publishers and purposefully a bunch of “easy to implement” online features such as Achievements to using the “phone home” Steam DRM to induce developers to use it). They also do not at all indicate before a purchase on the Steam store if a game has Steam DRM or not, so that consumers have to go out of their way to make an informed buying decision, if at all possible. Even for the games on Steam without any DRM one has to actually use an unsupported process to keep a copy of that game after installed from Steam (a simple copy & paste which those who know what a filesystem is can do, though maybe not the less tech literate, though gamers tend to be more tech literate), so people tend not to do it. The result is that most Steam games have DRM and most game playing done on games from Steam involves the phone-home check of the Steam DRM.
Meanwhile in GOG it’s the exact opposite - people have to really go crazily out of their way to run a game from GOG with DRM (apparently there are one or two which slipped the net, and for others I guess you could implement your own DRM around it by encrypting the binary or something 😜)
Ultimately it boils down to weather one is comfortable or not with having for their games collection the risks I listed above.
Personally, with my almost 4 decades experience as a gamer (and almost that much as a Techie), I’m not at all comfortable with that since over the years I’ve seen multiple instances of people getting fucked by their software or even hardware being unnecessarily tied to a vendor for their normal usage loop.
That said, people going into this aware of the risks and still cool with them, then, hey, 👍, you’re an adult, making a well informed decision and will only affect yourself it the risks do materialized into a problem, so you’ll get no criticism from me.
Moving homes and having no landline Internet for a while and not being able to most install most of my Steam games on my desktop gaming PC because mobile Internet is slow and expensive so installing a big game literally costs money. With GOG I just downloaded the offline installer at work into a USB Flash Disk and then installed it on my desktop at home.
You can do that with steam. Just needs steam to check the files and done.
Are you saying that from the Steam Store you can download an offline installer?
Or is it a not officially supported process that some users figured out, involving running Steam on the work PC, installing the game there, copying the installation files over (or maybe the installer itself from the Steam cache) to the home PC and then runninb Steam there, online to verify/execute the installation.
Because if it is the latter, I don’t think it qualifies as “the same thing” as what I described I did with GOG. That’s more of an undocumented hack than an actual store feature.
While I agree you with in principle - the official support is not the same - I don’t think the two processes are as far fetched from each other as you make them out to be.
I have ‘offline installer’ backups for a few of my drm free steam games, for which I basically downloaded the game, zipped up the game directory and that’s that. Now I have an equally portable game as the gog installers.
The big difference is that you need to run the steam client to initiate the original download in the first place, and that’s definitely a difference in quality of life - no argument there.
Steam purposefully pushed and pushes for there to be unecessary hurdles in installing and running the games customers buy from them, which do not benefit their customers but do benefit Steam, and which did not exist in most games before Steam (“offline” installers was the default way to install games until the Steam Store).
They don’t do it in a nasty way that tries hard to stop people from finding workarounds to that, so some customers will then find hacks to work around such obstacles, and hacks by definition are not supported and in this case do not work reliably for all games.
Steam not tightenning it down as much as they can and thus there being ways around it for some games, doesn’t make it any less true that Steam has a policy of trying to get the games that they sell to have an unecessary reduction of customer freedom that does not deliver anything to the customer, and that they don’t disclose which games do and which don’t so that the customer can’t easilly make an informed decision on that factor.
(Compare it to how GOG does make available GOG Galaxy which will does deliver the same core positive features as the Steam App, such as automated updating, but doesn’t actually force customers to use it at all for any game. Personally I installed the thing once, looked around, uninstalled it and went back to downloading installers)
My problem is with that policy of trying to limiting the freedom to use the product, for Steam’s benefit and in a way that doesn’t benefit customers in any way form or shape, even if it’s done via the soft sales push to developers/publishers rather than leveraging their dominant market position as a game store to force it on developers/publishers, together with some purposeful obfuscation in the games listings so that customers when buying don’t just start favoring games not crippled with those freedom limitations.
No matter how Steam makes it happen, ultimatelly what customers get from Steam is “likely crippled, might be able to hack my way around it for some but I don’t know which” games., which compares negativelly with GOG who have a policy for all games of being “guaranteed not crippled in this way or similar”.
It makes total sense that this then reflects on whether as a customer I’m willing to buy or not a game from Steam and even in being willing to pay a bit more for a game which is guaranteed to not come purposefully crippled in the way most Steam games are.
“There’s an easy undocumented workaround that works for some games” doesn’t really alter the reality that Steam is purposefully set up to keep customers tied to Steam for things where there is no need for customers to be tied to Steam. Steam could’ve moved towards a model like GOG were customers use their app simply because it’s convenient, nice and delivers desired features rather than because they have no other option than use it, but Steam haven’t moved to that model.
Mind you, I’m not saying that people shouldn’t buy from Steam, I’m saying that they should be well aware that Steam is trying to sell them products which have had some features purposefully crippled for Steam’s benefit and to force customers to use the Steam App, and if knowing this those people are still fine with it, then it’s their choice.
And I generally agreed with you above.
But from my reading you just spent 9 paragraphs simply to restate
you need to run the steam client to initiate the original download in the first place, and that’s definitely a difference in quality of life
Well that, how that is not reliable and requires specific knowledge to do, how most people don’t know how to do it because it’s not at all advertised and how all that is an anti-feature negative to customers and which doesn’t at all need to be there.
But yeah, I definitelly tend to ramble on and on (and on, and on, and on …).
What sort of costumes do they do?
Robes for frogs, apparently.
