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.

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.

Control is on sale atm, btw. It’s like $4.

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).

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.

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.

Apparently, there is a line of succession already planned.

Me answering the first paragraph you wrote of rambling screed is a ‘strawman’? Who taught you to write?

I purchased Outerworlds on Steam and could not get it to load.

I pirated it and run it through WINE and have no problems.

Go be the change you want.

Good luck…