Aceticon

My own negative experiences with Steam vs GOG were:

• 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.
• Not being able to install perfectly functional games from Steam into a machine with an old Windows version because the Steam client didn't support it anymore (even though the games were compatible with that version). Mind you, you that machine shouldn't even be connected to the Internet for safety reasons, which again would stop me from installing games from Steam even if the client worked.

Beyond that with Steam you have the risk that Steam takes away one or more of your game for some reason (say, licensing problems or just Payment Processors pressuring them to do it), you lose access to your account and can't recover it (unusual, but possible), your account is forcibly closed for an arbitrary reason with no appeal (not happened yet with Steam but did happen with others such as Google), the store goes bankrupt and closes (not happened yet with steam but has happened with sellers of music with DRM if I remember it correctly), games without DRM or with Steam's light DRM (the one simply using steam_api.dll, for which there are implementations which just emulate the API without phoning home) get forcibly updated to hard DRM so whilst before you could run it offline, now you can't.

(Mind you, you get some of these problems - such as risking the loss of your entire game collection if the store goes belly up - with GOG if you just use GOG Galaxy and don't download the offline installers for all your games, but at least there it's entirely down to you as the store does nothing to make it harder for you to eliminate those risks)

Steam makes a lot of effort to keep itself inside the loop of gamers playing the games, not forcibly so (as somebody pointed out, they don't force developers to use DRM) but more with a soft sales push (they offer it for free to developers and publishers and purposefully a bunch of "easy to implement" online features such as Achievements to using the "phone home" Steam DRM to induce developers to use it). They also do not at all indicate before a purchase on the Steam store if a game has Steam DRM or not, so that consumers have to go out of their way to make an informed buying decision, if at all possible. Even for the games on Steam without any DRM one has to actually use an unsupported process to keep a copy of that game after installed from Steam (a simple copy & paste which those who know what a filesystem is can do, though maybe not the less tech literate, though gamers tend to be more tech literate), so people tend not to do it. The result is that most Steam games have DRM and most game playing done on games from Steam involves the phone-home check of the Steam DRM.

Meanwhile in GOG it's the exact opposite - people have to really go crazily out of their way to run a game from GOG with DRM (apparently there are one or two which slipped the net, and for others I guess you could implement your own DRM around it by encrypting the binary or something 😜)

Ultimately it boils down to weather one is comfortable or not with having for their games collection the risks I listed above.

Personally, with my almost 4 decades experience as a gamer (and almost that much as a Techie), I'm not at all comfortable with that since over the years I've seen multiple instances of people getting fucked by their software or even hardware being unnecessarily tied to a vendor for their normal usage loop.

That said, people going into this aware of the risks and still cool with them, then, hey, 👍, you're an adult, making a well informed decision and will only affect yourself it the risks do materialized into a problem, so you'll get no criticism from me.

Strawman recipe

Step 1 - Put up the strawman by stating that the other person was trying to do something they explicitly said they were not trying to do when they actually explained exactly what they were trying to do:

your metaphor is based on the premise that copy and paste is difficult.

(No. My methaphor is based on how in multiple domains "selling things which can be altered to do something else by those who know how to do such alterations is not the same as selling things for that specific purpose", as I already explained before and you pointedly ignored. PS: anybody in doubt can just read my other posts here as they're all consistently about how things are sold, not how things are hacked)

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Step 2 - Totally trash the very strawman you put up:

You can compare it to something ridiculous, but it doesn’t change that copying and pasting something is something actual children master.

(Absolutely right! I was doing totally wrong that which you claimed I was trying to do. In fact, so totally and completely wrong was the way I was trying to do what you claimed I was trying to do, that intelligent individuals might even suspect I was not in fact trying to do that which you claim, but something else for which what I wrote wasn't such a mismatched comparison).

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PS: Loved in this latest post the throwing of vague aspersions about my education level as a counter whilst not in fact addressing my argument. Really shows the strength of your argument and depth of reasoning.

2030, the year of Linux in the Desktop!

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.

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).

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.

Edit: wrong place

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?

What was the purpose of you writting as the very first sentence of your post:

Steam doesn’t enforce the use of its DRM (which is super easy to bypass anyway but that’s a side note).

If not to tell us that Steam also sells DRM-free games?

If Steam also sells DRM-free games (even if alongside games with DRM) then de facto Steam is a seller of DRM-free games.

Being a "seller of" doesn't mean just selling that and nothing else.

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.

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.