Why not. As long as i get free key with my prime subscription. Not that i’m going to renew that, anyway.

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?

Imagine what happens if Steam Valve just stops developing Proton.

Oh, haha, well, then uh, in not too much time, linux gaming for all future games beyond that point goes back to being roughly where WINE was a decade ago, future games that work on linux goes back to being a really weird, esoteric, niche thing.

People really don’t understand that Proton basically is the most important project in the history of linux, of free software, in terms of getting an actually sizeable chunk of people to use linux regularly, to abandon corporate OSs.

Maybe someone should create a loot generator game…

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.

They also work to preserve old games, instead of just serving remasters.

I do hope you’re as purposeful in misunderstanding me as I am in taking the costume/customer typo as an intended choice of wording.

If so, kudos for beating me at my own game, because I’m not sure!

No I speed read your message just as tonight I speed slept (as in, I didn’t sleep much)

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.

Did you just compare copying and pasting files to running Quake on a smart fridge?

It’s not official, but I’m liking Heroic Launcher. Really, GoG should just support them(or Lutris) and link to them directly for linux support.

Who’s claiming Steam is a “de facto” seller of DRM-Free games?

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.

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 use both Steam with Proton (for Steam store games) and Lutris with Wine (for the rest, mainly GOG) and the rate of one-click-setup success in both is about the same (maybe slightly better for Steam), with Lutris with Wine being more easy to tweak for solving the problems for those games that won’t just directly run, plus Lutris lets me do way much more configuration customizing, so for example all my games under Lutris run sandboxed with networking disabled by default.

Granted, I am a Techie so I can more easilly figure out how to tweak all those configuration options and how to track launch problems in the logs.

Maybe Steam with Proton has a slight advantage for non-Techies (or Techies who just don’t have the patience to even try to tweak things when a game won’t run and just give up on it and move on), but it’s not really that amazing - I get the impression it’s more of a problem of misinformation (people hear about Steam and Proton and how it’s all great, so try it and stick with it, but they don’t hear enough about Lutris and the Heroic Launcher so end up not even trying either of them): it looks a lot to me like an instance of the usual “open source vs commercial software” marketing problem.

Mind you, without Lutris (or, as others mentioned, the Heroic Launcher which is similar) with all the nice install scripts properly configuring Wine for the specific game being installed, trying to game on Linux by directly configuring Wine (+DXVK) would be as an experience bad as gaming on Linux was a decade ago.

PS: That said, using the GOG client on Linux is a hassle and best avoided. both Lutris and Heroic integrate with GOG, listing the games in your account and seamlessly downloading the installers when you chose to install a game.

Robes for frogs, apparently.

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?

Well GOG is just the acronym for Good Old Games no ?

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.