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

That’s called “privilege”.

Call me when GOG Galaxy supports Gnu/Linux.

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.

Call me when GOG Galaxy supports Gnu/Linux.

Well, steam isn’t just a marketplace. A marketplace would be just a place to buy keys, or similar. Steam is an ecosystem, with a market, and a launcher, and a community hub, and a modding platform. The multiplayer integration that many games rely on for matchmaking/lobbies. And every game on steam uses at least steam’s DRM, where you are required to connect to the Internet every now and then to verify ownership of your library.

They have been the only platform to really try to support Linux though, and have made huge strides in the last few years. Steam is a big enough influence on the games economy that some of their choices become industry standards. And the 30% cut is the price devs pay to get into their system.

I think these days, “costumers” are called “cosplayers”

I use steam, but I moved the files out for games that will still work, as well as buy games on gog and download installers. I dont use gog galaxy cause? wont I have to be online to use my games?

All my backups are on a drive

Like the previous poster, I’m not defending steam. No good billionaires, fight for the proletariat, down with the elite, etc

Not all steam games use steam DRM. It’s opt in by the developer. Lots of steam games you can literally just copy out of steam onto a USB key and run it. No DRM at all.

Don’t get me wrong they are skeezy in other ways (charging I indie deva 30% and big publishers less) but if you’re going to criticize them, then at least criticize them for something real.

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.

Well, steam isn’t just a marketplace. A marketplace would be just a place to buy keys, or similar. Steam is an ecosystem, with a market, and a launcher, and a community hub, and a modding platform. The multiplayer integration that many games rely on for matchmaking/lobbies. And every game on steam uses at least steam’s DRM, where you are required to connect to the Internet every now and then to verify ownership of your library.

They have been the only platform to really try to support Linux though, and have made huge strides in the last few years. Steam is a big enough influence on the games economy that some of their choices become industry standards. And the 30% cut is the price devs pay to get into their system.

Call me when GOG Galaxy supports Gnu/Linux.

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

Moving homes and having no landline Internet for a while and not being able to most install most of my Steam games on my desktop gaming PC because mobile Internet is slow and expensive so installing a big game literally costs money. With GOG I just downloaded the offline installer at work into a USB Flash Disk and then installed it on my desktop at home.

You can do that with steam. Just needs steam to check the files and done.

Zoom is good about promoting Linux and has DRM free games. https://www.zoom-platform.com/

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.