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.
Steam doesn’t enforce the use of its DRM (which is super easy to bypass anyway but that’s a side note).
Steam lets you publish your game on their platform and hand out as many keys as you like to resell on other platforms (at no cost) while still doing all the heavy lifting of hosting and distributing.
Steam doesn’t decide what kinds of titles get published on their platform any more than GoG does, so the bit about remasters, etc. is a bit weird. Besides you the user should get to decide what you want to buy and play.
I love GoG, but I love Steam as well. They’re not mutually exclusive and you can have both.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well no, your metaphor is based on the premise that copy and paste is difficult. You can compare it to something ridiculous, but it doesn’t change that copying and pasting something is something actual children master.
I feel like GOG would be more popular if their client were better. Maybe more usable with a controller too?
And something that would help competition in the game launcher space in particular would be if OSes had great built-in controller support (and controller OS navigation) so we wouldn’t have to rely on Steam for it.
Meh, Proton alone makes me like Steam a bit more than GOG. Itch.io is also nice, but for some shitty reasons, they have some problems with my debit card. While it is nice to support small devs, I hate to support Peter Thiel the absolute piece of human garbage with my payment.
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.
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.
And there’s heroic, but both aren’t the same thing as native platform support. Steam has game listings for games that are made for Linux and Mac. You install the official steam client and click “play”. No other platform has that.
There are more or less convenient ways to run the games from gog, epic, Amazon, … on Linux. But none of them have official support or even carry any native games at all.
I don’t even know how it worked, but the official GoG listing for Factorio doesn’t have the linux binary on it, but when I logged into GoG via Heroic Launcher, I had the option to install that rather the Win binary though Wine/Proton.
I have recently realized that I could claim tons of games from amazon with prime subscription that are claimed in GOG. And it seems GOG has some games available for Linux. There usually are couple of download links for different OSes
Shit buggy client you can’t customize and with integrated ram-eating webbrowser you are forced to launch to play the game. Vs. native hubs that integrate GoG, itch & co seamlessly, setup and runners and all.
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’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.
Eh, Heroic isn’t free of fault either; e.g. when it offered to auto-install REDmod along with CP2077 I couldn’t launch the game because the REDmod it installed was completely broken. I’d say that Steam is slightly less buggy than Heroic overall, both of them being pretty damn solid. Haven’t used Lutris much because, well, Steam and Heroic work well enough.
Would a leaner Steam be nice? Yeah, but reliable, lean cross-platform GUI toolkits aren’t easy to come by.
Can’t play Stellaris through Heroic because of the launcher being broken.
Bypassing the launcher requires some convoluted setup, and it also removes the ease of modding.
Manually installing Stellaris through Lutris works, but Lutris isn’t well maintained, and even though it’s connected to GOG, doesn’t update Stellaris. Says it can’t find updates despite there clearly being one.
Lutris was pretty janky IME. Bottles has similar issues with Lutris and some very bizarre UI decisions (like IIRC you can’t delete bottle snapshots from the UI, so unless you manually go and delete them in the filesystem, creating snapshots just takes up an ever increasing amount of space). Honestly Heroic is kind of janky too and throws errors about login status half the time, but it generally works at least when it comes to launching the games. The problem is Steam almost always just works, and if it doesn’t work it’s pretty much always the game’s fault and thus I would have problems with any launcher.
Akcthually you can publish drm free games on steam, it’s just that you cannot download an installer. But for some games you can just copy the folder and it’s going to work even without steam. Also GOG enforces drm free games
I love the idea of GoG, but it’s also the only client that forces me to pay in local currency with local taxes when I travel too. Have to use a VPN and change my time zone in settings to get it to let me pay in USD. Steam does it based on billing address and card.
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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.
More public movements to do with it either. They’re certainly an interesting company…
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
I’d love to play DRM games but I also love DRM free operating systems and apparently both at once is too much for the transphobes at CDPR to handle
What sort of costumes do they do?
Robes for frogs, apparently.
Steam doesn’t enforce the use of its DRM (which is super easy to bypass anyway but that’s a side note).
Steam lets you publish your game on their platform and hand out as many keys as you like to resell on other platforms (at no cost) while still doing all the heavy lifting of hosting and distributing.
Steam doesn’t decide what kinds of titles get published on their platform any more than GoG does, so the bit about remasters, etc. is a bit weird. Besides you the user should get to decide what you want to buy and play.
I love GoG, but I love Steam as well. They’re not mutually exclusive and you can have both.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Who’s claiming Steam is a “de facto” seller of DRM-Free games?
What was the purpose of you writting as the very first sentence of your post:
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.
The purpose was to tell you exactly what I stated - that Steam does not enforce the use of DRM and nothing more.
You’re the one that wants to extrapolate that statement to mean much more than it does.
The point you missed is that the use of DRM is on the publisher/developer and not Steam itself.
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?
Did you just compare copying and pasting files to running Quake on a smart fridge?
From all that I wrote, somebody having that take is the equivalent for metaphors of being a Grammar Nazi.
Well no, your metaphor is based on the premise that copy and paste is difficult. You can compare it to something ridiculous, but it doesn’t change that copying and pasting something is something actual children master.
Imagine being sane, neither an steam only, pc master race enthusiast, nor a FOSS Linux 100% privacy and anonymity zealot.
I feel like GOG would be more popular if their client were better. Maybe more usable with a controller too?
And something that would help competition in the game launcher space in particular would be if OSes had great built-in controller support (and controller OS navigation) so we wouldn’t have to rely on Steam for it.
I think these days, “costumers” are called “cosplayers”
If they do it for others, like in film, tv, or theater, they’re also called costume designers.
Always seemed like a neat career!
It’s like halloween all year round, and I am here. For. It!
An under-discussed topic is what will happen to Steam after Gaben crosses the rainbow bridge. It’s practically begging to be enshittified.
With games I own, I never have to worry about this.
Why not. As long as i get free key with my prime subscription. Not that i’m going to renew that, anyway.
Meh, Proton alone makes me like Steam a bit more than GOG. Itch.io is also nice, but for some shitty reasons, they have some problems with my debit card. While it is nice to support small devs, I hate to support Peter Thiel the absolute piece of human garbage with my payment.
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.
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.
Imagine what happens if
SteamValve 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.
I’m on Linux as well and I just use heroic for my gog library
I like both Heroic and Lutris
Official client and support for my platform of choice is a big plus only Steam bothers to have.
lutris
And there’s heroic, but both aren’t the same thing as native platform support. Steam has game listings for games that are made for Linux and Mac. You install the official steam client and click “play”. No other platform has that.
There are more or less convenient ways to run the games from gog, epic, Amazon, … on Linux. But none of them have official support or even carry any native games at all.
I don’t even know how it worked, but the official GoG listing for Factorio doesn’t have the linux binary on it, but when I logged into GoG via Heroic Launcher, I had the option to install that rather the Win binary though Wine/Proton.
I have recently realized that I could claim tons of games from amazon with prime subscription that are claimed in GOG. And it seems GOG has some games available for Linux. There usually are couple of download links for different OSes
Shit buggy client you can’t customize and with integrated ram-eating webbrowser you are forced to launch to play the game. Vs. native hubs that integrate GoG, itch & co seamlessly, setup and runners and all.
RAM eating we browser? What, you playing games on 256 MB?
Also, you can 100% customise Steam. There are various user created skins out there you can just plop onto Steam.
With some tool that uses a hack. Just plopping doesn’t work anymore.
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’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?
I get both sides of this. I understand wanting GoG to have an official Linux client, but the Steam Client is such garbage.
Eh, Heroic isn’t free of fault either; e.g. when it offered to auto-install REDmod along with CP2077 I couldn’t launch the game because the REDmod it installed was completely broken. I’d say that Steam is slightly less buggy than Heroic overall, both of them being pretty damn solid. Haven’t used Lutris much because, well, Steam and Heroic work well enough.
Would a leaner Steam be nice? Yeah, but reliable, lean cross-platform GUI toolkits aren’t easy to come by.
Can’t play Stellaris through Heroic because of the launcher being broken.
Bypassing the launcher requires some convoluted setup, and it also removes the ease of modding.
Manually installing Stellaris through Lutris works, but Lutris isn’t well maintained, and even though it’s connected to GOG, doesn’t update Stellaris. Says it can’t find updates despite there clearly being one.
Lutris was pretty janky IME. Bottles has similar issues with Lutris and some very bizarre UI decisions (like IIRC you can’t delete bottle snapshots from the UI, so unless you manually go and delete them in the filesystem, creating snapshots just takes up an ever increasing amount of space). Honestly Heroic is kind of janky too and throws errors about login status half the time, but it generally works at least when it comes to launching the games. The problem is Steam almost always just works, and if it doesn’t work it’s pretty much always the game’s fault and thus I would have problems with any launcher.
I thought more of Lutris and GameHub, forgot about Heroic. There’s also Legendary (FOSS replacement for Heroic) and Cartridge but i don’t know them.
I use heroic to install and have the setting on to auto add them to my steam library
Nope! I’ll horde steam and gog both, now i shame you into flossing your feet and brushing your butt.
What did Steam do to offend you?
Wouldn’t Steam, with TF2, be the most costumer oriented?
On being customer oriented on the other hand, Steam could use some improvement.
Akcthually you can publish drm free games on steam, it’s just that you cannot download an installer. But for some games you can just copy the folder and it’s going to work even without steam. Also GOG enforces drm free games
But this does nothing to address my need for towering pillars of hats, masks, and outfits!
Maybe someone should create a loot generator game…
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)
All those Counter Strike skins, too…
Gog doesn’t have lower prices for poorer regions. Paying 20-50% more for noDRM is no-no for me.
I love the idea of GoG, but it’s also the only client that forces me to pay in local currency with local taxes when I travel too. Have to use a VPN and change my time zone in settings to get it to let me pay in USD. Steam does it based on billing address and card.