this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2024
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[–] [email protected] 223 points 1 month ago (83 children)

I love how this article takes shots at steam despite valve being THE company holding the bar up in the gaming space.

I could list examples but I honestly don't even think I need to

[–] [email protected] 188 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Absolutely. I mean, I love the fact that GOG has DRM-free games. It's really incredible how many games are available without DRM because of them.

But I'm not going to make Valve out to be the bad guy here. Valve is like 99% of the reason why gaming on Linux is viable right now.

Valve seems like a great example of how, if you don't sell your company to venture capitalists, you can just be cool nerds that make good products. As much as I want DRM-free to be the norm, I'm also not going to vilify a company that is one of the best examples of not enshittifying right now.

[–] [email protected] 101 points 1 month ago (2 children)

A lot of Steam games are also DRM free. It's up to the individual developers whether they enforce DRM checks or not.

I've copied files from Steam folders directly to a flash drive, plugged them into an offline, Steam-less computer that I don't have rights to install anything on, and ran them perfectly. But it is a game-by-game thing.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 month ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 month ago

Not in the sense we're discussing it here, they don't.

There's a list of about 20 games said to have DRM in Gog and when you actually read the list rather than just it's title it turns out none of them has what we would call DRM - any sort of phone-home validation or anti-piracy measure.

It's mainly things games with add-on content that requires you use Gog Galaxy or register online, some that send analytics to a server and stuff like that.

You can see the info here,

Whilst it's still nasty and still shouldn't be happening, none of that makes the game unusable in the future after the servers are down if you still have the offline installer.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Which ones? Do they disclose that they contain DRM?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago

The info is here and none of that "DRM" means you can't in the future, after the servers are down, install the game from your copy of the offline installer and play it.

None of that is DRM in the sense we're talking about here: the kind of mechanism that allows the game to be taken away from you or won't let you install it or play it in single-player anymore when the publisher decides they don't want to pay for servers anymore.

It is, none the less, a deviation from the No-DRM promise, IMHO.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago

If we're talking about DRM as in a measure to prevent copying, or require online security check, or anything like that, then no GOG game has DRM. One of GOG's core policies is that all of their games are DRM free. However, some people have stretched the definition a little to include other stuff. For example, if an online multiplayer game requires GOG Galaxy to connect to its online servers, some people consider that to be DRM.

There are some posts on GOG's official forums where people try to list all the games that have "DRM" of any kind. So if you're interested, that's where you could look. But if you just want to have confidence that you'll be able to install and run the game in the future, then don't worry about it. No GOG game has anything that would prevent that.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I was wondering how all those Sony games worked on GOG.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Yeah, the only caveat is that you don't get an installer with steam, so if you copy the installed game onto a pc that doesn't have all the correct dependencies installed (like the correct DirectX version for example), then the game won't launch. But it's not too complicated to install the dependencies manually

[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yeah.. it’s also a new law in California is it not? Kill shot? Hahahaha. Right. Who wrote this headline xD

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It's like every clickbait gaming website whenever a new MMO game drops and they call it the WoW-killer for the umpteenth time in the past 15 years.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Flashbacks from the advertising for The Outer Worlds, and IGN calling it the "Bethesda-killer"

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

The true Bethesda killer was Bethesda themselves

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 month ago

Valve is holding up the bar not because valve is great but because everyone else is so shit. I've had a ton of issues with steam throughout the years and it's just.. nothing else is better. I was actually excited for the epic store launch and it's... Well, not the worst, because being the worst is a challenge some places take seriously, but certainly not a good steam replacement especially for low data people.

Steam may not let me control the updates to steam, but it won't force refresh my library causing ping spikes all the time as an intended feature.

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