I use Lutris with GOG works great

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.

Damn, they could have chosen another name for their platform…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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)

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).

And when GoG does regional pricing.

So much more expensive if you don’t live in the US/Western Europe.

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.

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 …).

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 egg 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.

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When fundamentals like this are so easily violated under ridiculous premises, further capitulation isn’t far behind.

I mean, GOG is owned by Amazon soooo…

No it isn’t