Overview page: https://www.gog.com/en/anniversary
Direct sign up for Galaxy Linux beta: https://www.smartsurvey.co.uk/t/YEF5EV/
Overview page: https://www.gog.com/en/anniversary
Direct sign up for Galaxy Linux beta: https://www.smartsurvey.co.uk/t/YEF5EV/
I feel like this and DRM are the two things people point out as GoG’s benefits, but first of all GoG also sells you a license, so it’s EXACTLY the same as Steam. The “difference” is in the other point, because without DRM games bought on GoG can be backed up and installed again without needing GoGs approval, but this ignores two HUGE caveats:
All in all this means that in regards to ownership morally GoG is essentially the same as Valve, they just have better PR about it.
PS: To give credit where it’s due, GoG is a lot more restrictive with what DRM it allows, and you can expect most of the game you bought to be playable without DRM there. However I feel that allowing me to play on my libre OS is a lot more morally significant than the difference between those two DRM stances.
Genuine question, can you start these DRM free games that you own via steam without the steam launcher?
Absolutely, otherwise the game wouldn’t truly be DRM free. There are some games that have a different version on Steam that on GoG where the game crashes if it can’t find steam running, IMO those are badly programmed games and while it is technically DRM I would put those into a category of unintentional DRM, and there is an easy crack which is to replace the steam library they ship with with a fake one that replies as if it were steam. And while easy to do I would not call those DRM free.
TIL, I thought all steam games had to be run via the steam launcher.
95% of them do.
Further, even if they are integrated with Steam via the Steam API (they literally are shipped with a steamapi.dll), you can usually get around the soft DRM of it using something like the Goldberg Emulators (basically a version of that DLL that doesn’t connect to Steam’s systems).
The problem is that if you care about games having or not DRM, you can’t make an informed purchase decision in Steam because they don’t give you information about that when you’re considering buying a game, so you only find that out after you bought it.
This is even more of a problem that merelly single player games that won’t run offline because some forms of DRM which aren’t phone-home DRM can still make it impossible to run that game with Wine or Proton - I have a game from Steam which won’t at all run in Linux no matter what I do, yet a pirated version of it runs just fine with Wine.
Does Steam tell you upfront before you buy the game if it’s DRM free, or is it always a happy surprise when you brand new single player game doesn’t fail to startup because it phoned-home and your Internet connection was down?
It does, kinda, there are warnings for games that require certain things like kernel level anti-cheat or 3d party accounts, although I think they should have an extra one for always on DRM which is particularly nasty and troublesome for people on a steam deck so there’s reason for them to warn on that.
But also, you have 14 days to return a game as long as you have less than 2h of play, if this is a major concern for you you can run the game offline and ensure it works otherwise refund it. There are also unofficial curators run by community that allow you to quickly see if a game is in those lists which is a nice community way to ensure weird cases are captured. Still would be nice to have more official stance from Valve on hard DRMs, hopefully with GoG coming to Linux they might have to care more about it, but we’ll see.
Often you don’t know or care your game won’t run offline until your Internet is down and you just want to play a game and it won’t run. Also some kinds of DRM are totally invisible until certain conditions happen (say, you upgrade components in your PC and now the DRM thinks it’s a different machine).
Even if without fail you install and test every single game you buy from Steam games for DRM before you actually play them (so as not to exceed the 2h), making sure you do so within 14 days of purchasing, and refund them if they do have such DRM, or for every single game you’re considering buying, spend time trawling through support communities upfront to see if they have such DRM, you still won’t know for sure if that game has some DRM that will stop you from playing it a later date - maybe the offline stuff only triggers after X days offline, maybe the DRM is doing the whole machine ID stuff and breaks only if you change enough or specific components in your PC, maybe it’s just something that cause needless problems running it under Wine, and for all those things maybe nobody that had problems with it wrote about them in whatever support forum forum you checked.
Unreliable workarounds aren’t actual solutions.
Meanwhile you can buy from GOG without such hassles or risks that you have when buying games from Steam to make sure they’re free of nasty DRM, a totally unecessary massive hassle as Steam could easily list for each game if they gave DRM or not and which kind of DRM they have if they do, but they choose not to.
My point is that with its current stance Valve is at best purposefully supporting anti-consumer stances from some game publishers which would suffer in terms of sales if their bullshit DRM was prominently signalled in the store listing for their games.
I don’t disagree with most what you said about Steam, I really wish they were more strict about DRM and disclosure of it, I think they have a lot to improve in that area, and you are absolutely right that just because there’s a workaround doesn’t mean it’s not a problem.
In fact the only thing I disagree with is this:
You do know GoG allows DRM on their store, right? And that you don’t have curators or similar to have a workaround, your only hope is to go through this thread https://www.gog.com/forum/general/drm_on_gog_list_of_singleplayer_games_with_drm/page1 to find if it’s listed there.
I’m not anti-GoG or pro-steam, I wish both of them to succeed because I want to play DRM free games on my Linux machine, but I feel that GoG gets a lot of good propaganda for things they’re only doing marginally better than steam.
Yeah, they sometimes fail in enforcing their own stated policy.
While quite a number those things are so so, many are clear breaches of that policy (for example the Absolver one at the very start and the Cyberpunk 2077 one).
Personally in my 200+ collection of games from GOG I never had such problems, whilst my Steam collection of around 20 games has several titles with DRM to the point that one of them won’t even run from Steam in Linux but the pirate version (which is cracked) runs just fine.
None the less, you make a fair point.
Personally I currently favor GOG because with their “No DRM” (except when they fail at it, as you pointed out) and downloadable offline installers, I de facto have the same ownership rights of the games I purchase as I used to have in the pre-Internet days when I bought a game CD (later, with the Internet, even physical games started having online validation), and if a different store was giving me that I would support them equally for that.
It’s really about how far in practice do my ownership rights of a game go rather than store X or store Y, so stuff like blocking from playing a single player game in a machine which is offline or at any point the “game license” being revoked, the game removed from my collection and now I can’t ever play it anymore (which, by the way, is also a risk in GOG if you don’t download the offline installer) are big problems to me.
Yup, I can totally see that logic, but as someone who’s using Linux as their main OS for a long while being able to easily play the game on my system is more important than most instances of DRM (although always on DRM is not acceptable to me). My reasoning is that if I have to jump through hoops to get the game to run on my machine by for example having to setup a wine prefix and figure out things for it I’m not paying for that game, if they don’t care for me as a customer, then why should I pay them?.
For a long time that meant only native games got my money, and back then I used to buy stuff from GoG as all being the same their no DRM policy is better than Valve’s. But Valve invested heavily on Wine and Proton, which not only improved my experience inside their store but also outside of it, so I see a lot of return in giving them money, whereas GoG I’m getting the same experience from them than from the pirate bay or whatever kids are using nowadays, so I don’t see a reason to give them money.
All of that being said, when GoG Galaxy comes to Linux, and if they integrate wine with it in a useful way, I plan on having a look at the old games catalog and possibly throw some money their way to encourage both Linux and DRM free support, but nowadays rebuilding my game library elsewhere would be prohibitly expensive, not to mention the pains of having to deal with multiple launchers, systems, etc.
Yes. Needing the Steam client to run would be considered DRM.