This has literally always been the case with Steam, the only difference is that people are told up front now. Things will likely continue to operate exactly the same as it has until now, I doubt Valve wants to disrupt the giant money train they have.
As far as I know there is no mandatory DRM on Steam either, so if a publisher wants to they can just make their game be portable and not require Steam to even be installed. Pretty sure all the re-releases that use DOSBox or ScummVM are like this, for example.
Yeah there are loads of DRM free games on steam (mostly indies of course). Steam just offers a very basic (and easily bypassable if you know how) DRM to devs/publishers but they absolutely don’t need to use it.
As long as you understand the terms of your agreement with Steam as a platform, everything is fine. Physical media for games are outdated anyway, especially with frequent updates, patches, and DLC releases. Regarding older titles that are no longer supported, well, as the saying goes: “If buying isn’t owing…”
I like steam as a user but it’s still proprietary software and I’m slightly concerned about what is going to happen when Gabe Newell steps down as president and ceo of Valve.
Yeah. And also choice not as wide as Steam exactly because of DRM free. Can’t buy monhunt or any of Capcom’s game on GOG. But if you want to play old game then GOG is the place to go, they make sure everything run.
Steam should have taken the opportunity to recommend a gamer to GOG, mentioning that it’s only a license unfortunately. Or offer installers that can’t be taken away.
These articles are basically just advertising for GoG.
They have the same issues as steam does regarding only selling licenses, or not having inheritable or transferable accounts.
DRM free is great, but as a service they aren’t fundamentally different from steam. They just like to market themselves like they are.
This has been posted a million times already, but I am still going to repeat it. Yes you are right, in their own legal docs they also only talk about licenses.
Difference for the consumer however is that you get the installation files which are supposed to work offline. Meaning if you take care to store that, it will not be gone ever, no matter if GOG goes down. With Steam this gets more complicated and may only work for some games.
I get that. DRM free is great and better. I just don’t like the advertisement that casts it as “you own the game”, or entire articles built around posts by their marketing department.
It feels very ambulance-chaser-y.
If GOG are such a freedom heroes why do they rely on megacorp Windows OS? That’s what I like about steam - it makes gaming on linux dumb easy. And not just on linux, their “package” is ridiculously good - mods, cummunity, reviews, friends, non stop sales, mobile app (although I hate they removed chat to standalone app), and much, much more.
I’m not shitting on GOG. I love those guys, they brought back so much memories with reviving long forgotten games, I have hundreds of purchases there. But… it just needs a lite more polish (pun intended).
Not sire how it’s now, but couple years ago that “new galaxy” thing felt like it was precisely crafted to NOT run on linux. I tried multiple ways to run it, but all of them were unstable, crashing and very laggy. The best one was through Bottles but still… Heroic came and was instantly way ahead.
Yeah. I intentionally buy my games on Steam for ethical reasons because Valve contributes to a positive gaming ecosystem by making things run seamlessly on Linux.
GOG contributes to a negative gaming ecosystem by making Windows the “easy” option and not making use of Proton (or similar tech). Hopefully they fix that one day, but they don’t seem to care.
I’d take a guess that from their perspective, putting all that time + money into developing and supporting a Linux version isn’t worth it when probably ~3% of the user base is using it.
And similarly, all 4 of these are not the real deal. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for more games like this and I hope they’re good, but I will wait until Kurvitz and Rostov to be at the helm again before getting too excited.
If nothing else though, Argo Tuulik’s blog post for Summer Eternal is worth a read. I love his writing style, and that post is unreasonably funny to me, but you can still tell there is a lot of meaning behind what he says. I suppose things hit hardest when presented in ridiculous over the top metaphor.
Oh yeah, for sure. Don’t get me wrong, I hope these are good. I liked John Henry Irons, Superboy, and Eradicator as well, lol. Just not the original, and need to be able to stand on their own. I desperately want more games like DE but what I don’t want is a bunch of bad actors churning out bad clones sold on someone else’s good reputation. Not that I’m accusing any of these games of that, just that given ZA/UM’s current situation, it’s hard not to worry.
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