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/
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.
I use Lutris as my launcher in Linux and the level of convenience to run Windows games in Linux with it is slightly superior to Steam (superior mainly because I like to run my games inside a sandbox with networking disabled, which I can easily do in Lutris but not Steam, plus I don’t have the launchers always running in the background and it’s very rare that I have to wait for Lutris to update when I want to run a game and start it, whilst with Steam it’s pretty common that I try to start a game and then spend a few minutes waiting for Steam to update itself and/or the game, when all I want is to run the bloody game and don’t care about it being the latest version), though for most people it should be around the same or maybe even a bit more for Steam if you care about automatic updating of the games before they’re run (which Lutris won’t do for GOG games - it will fetch and install game updates but you have to tell it to do it) and certain Steam API facilities such as cloud-saves and showing achievements to your friends.
My total failure rate of running Windows games from GOG using Lutris as the launcher is about the same as that of running Windows games from Steam because Lutris too does the whole Wine + DXVK thing and has launch scripts for most games, though Steam does seem to have problems with AAA games from a certain generation (around the 00s) that won’t run in Linux whilst the pirate version of the same game runs just fine from Lutris, which is probably due to the DRM for those games back then which I remember was a real pain in the arse and which is still present in the Steam version.
So my no-DRM thing is also a bit about running my games in Linux - because sometimes DRM gets in the way of that - though it is mainly about ownership and controlling myself when and how I run the games I bought and not actually losing access to a game because it was taken down from the store.
In fact I have no intention of using a Linux GOG Galaxy as my launcher in Linux, same as back when my gaming PC was Windows I didn’t use the Windows one, I just hope GOG finally making one for Linux signals that they’re taking Linux gamers more seriously and maybe they’ll do like Steam and contribute some open source code to the gaming ecosystem in Linux, as that will benefit us all.
Yeah, I understand all that, but first of all I have 4 gaming systems, 3 of them boot straight to Steam big picture (Desktop plugged to my living room TV, Steam Deck and Steam Frame), while I could have my gaming laptop for something different it just makes it easier to use the same on all systems, plus I would miss on cloud saves which make it seamless to switch from one system to another.
But here’s the thing, to run things in Lutris I have to set it up myself, and setting it up with GoG downloaded installers or pirated versions is essentially the same, so what exactly is GoG providing me that I can’t get by pirating? Am I only paying them for the legality of it?