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.

8 GB of RAM was a basic minimum standard to do anything on a computer 10 years ago

That’s called “privilege”.

I use Lutris with GOG works great

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.

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.

Call me when GOG Galaxy supports Gnu/Linux.

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 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

An under-discussed topic is what will happen to Steam after Gaben crosses the rainbow bridge. It’s practically begging to be enshittified.

With games I own, I never have to worry about this.

I mean, GOG is owned by Amazon soooo…

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.

GOG has DRM, they call it Galaxy.

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.

Fuck GOG.

Might be different, but when they launched what I think is their current launcher, it was still using example code from pre-Windows Vista days. This was 2020 I reach out to them, because my user files were mapped to a NAS, and the legacy example code they used didn’t support this. Steam has no issues. Epic had no issues.

All the people wondering why they don’t support Linux… Well that’s because they use outdated Windows code for their launcher.

Call me when GOG Galaxy supports Gnu/Linux.

Fuck GOG.

Might be different, but when they launched what I think is their current launcher, it was still using example code from pre-Windows Vista days. This was 2020 I reach out to them, because my user files were mapped to a NAS, and the legacy example code they used didn’t support this. Steam has no issues. Epic had no issues.

All the people wondering why they don’t support Linux… Well that’s because they use outdated Windows code for their launcher.