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.

From all that I wrote, somebody having that take is the equivalent for metaphors of being a Grammar Nazi.

If they do it for others, like in film, tv, or theater, they’re also called costume designers.

Always seemed like a neat career!

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.

I’d love to play DRM games but I also love DRM free operating systems and apparently both at once is too much for the transphobes at CDPR to handle

It’s like halloween all year round, and I am here. For. It!

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.

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.

GOG has DRM, they call it Galaxy.

It’s not a DRM, it is just a launcher.

Am I crazy to demand another store for PC gaming ?

But this time it should be a lovechild of steam & GOG but FOSS like Itch.io

Don’t you people think us gamers deserve better stores ?

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.

Nor public movements to do with it either. They’re certainly an interesting company…

Yes, but no. That’s the whole point of the rebranding. You will not find the words “Good Old Games” anywhere in their official materials when referring to themselves. They are now “just” GOG.

They still use “good old game” as a tag for some of the games they sell. But they will never utter those words when referring to themselves in any capacity.

Is it silly? Maybe. But it’s a valid marketing strategy. How effective is it? I don’t know. Maybe ask BP.

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?

Yeah I searched on their website for a bit and did indeed not find any mention of the old name.

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.

Edit: wrong place

Corporations aren’t your friend.

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.