Reject DRM embrace GOG
Reject DRM embrace GOG
Comments
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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.
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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?
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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.
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A voice of reason... about videogame platforms!?
It's nice to see you here, people are ridiculous about this stuff. -
Imagine being sane, neither an steam only, pc master race enthusiast, nor a FOSS Linux 100% privacy and anonymity zealot.
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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.
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Wouldn't Steam, with TF2, be the most costumer oriented?
On being customer oriented on the other hand, Steam could use some improvement.
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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
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All those Counter Strike skins, too...
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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.
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I lament it, but I understand it. Last year's reports showed that GoG was barely staying afloat. Their rival shows Linux is only 3% of current market, so GoG probably doesn't want to spread themselves any thinner until they get some surplus cash to test the waters with.
Thank goodness for Heroic launcher.
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Nor public movements to do with it either. They're certainly an interesting company...
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Zoom is good about promoting Linux and has DRM free games. https://www.zoom-platform.com/
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Damn, they could have chosen another name for their platform...
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Call me when GOG Galaxy supports Gnu/Linux.
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Unofficial:
Minigalaxy and Heroic are both clients which support GoG
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i mean you dont really need the launcher
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And when GoG does regional pricing.
So much more expensive if you don't live in the US/Western Europe.
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I use Lutris with GOG works great
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Bought northgard on GOG, it turns out the game needs GOG galaxy for the multiplayer. It has the icon for "supports Linux" though. Really pissed about GOGs marketing there.
(I use Lutris as well, but it sadly does not solve everything)
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Heroic with GOG works great on Linux. Why wait?
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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.
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I'm on Linux as well and I just use heroic for my gog library
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I like both Heroic and Lutris
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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.
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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.
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Imagine what happens if Steam 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.
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Corporations aren't your friend.
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What sort of costumes do they do?
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Robes for frogs, apparently.
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Gog doesn't have lower prices for poorer regions. Paying 20-50% more for noDRM is no-no for me.
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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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I'm not trying to defend anyone here, though it might seem like that, but I'm not sure why valve is lumped in with this, especially since that's the steam logo.
Steam, as a platform, hasn't released much of anything, ever. Valve has been sitting mostly on the sidelines since half-life 2 episode 2 and HL:Alyx.
Steam itself is just a marketplace.
I get that a lot of publishers on steam will fall into the categories of games that are the subject of the meme, but I have a hard time piling steam with the games that are published on it.
And yes, corporations are not our friends, and all billionaires are bad billionaires, eat the rich and all that.... I'm just saying. There's a lot of bigger, much worse, fish to fry than gaben, valve, and steam in this discussion. That could have been EA's logo, or the Xbox logo (or ms game studios or whatever) or any number of massive publishers that are relevant here. Using the steam logo is lazy at best.
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People are stupid and think steam is drm. It's that simple. For what ever reason people don't realize that 95% of all games on steam are entirely drm free. Just remove the overlay and you don't even need steam turned on to play games.
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I think it's lumped in because Steam sells games with DRMs, but GOG on the other hand will not sell games that come with any type of DRM at all.
I'm sure if Valve had the choice, they'd banish DRMs too, but I'm sure they don't because they don't want to piss off their big publishers (even though drm literally does nothing except make paying customers have a worse experience with their shitty games).
(I don't really agree with "oritented to publishers", especially when they release features like a more polish family library, but i guess i can see their point in some ways)
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Steam also offers DRM, it's just up to devs to use it. And steams DRM is relatively unintrusive.
I think steam should maybe be in the middle, and the other 2 far on the left.
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Well, steam isn't just a marketplace. A marketplace would be just a place to buy keys, or similar. Steam is an ecosystem, with a market, and a launcher, and a community hub, and a modding platform. The multiplayer integration that many games rely on for matchmaking/lobbies.
And every game on steam uses at least steam's DRM, where you are required to connect to the Internet every now and then to verify ownership of your library.They have been the only platform to really try to support Linux though, and have made huge strides in the last few years. Steam is a big enough influence on the games economy that some of their choices become industry standards. And the 30% cut is the price devs pay to get into their system.
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Like 95% of steam games are drm free... The only reason steam has to be running is cause games are bundled with a dll that enables the overlay, cloud sync etc. it's just removable and your games don't rely on steam at all.
No check in, no drm, no nothing.
It's basically only the biggest triple A games that use steamDRM.
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Not every game on steam uses its DRM, I have steam games that are outright DRM free
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Like the previous poster, I'm not defending steam. No good billionaires, fight for the proletariat, down with the elite, etc
Not all steam games use steam DRM. It's opt in by the developer. Lots of steam games you can literally just copy out of steam onto a USB key and run it. No DRM at all.
Don't get me wrong they are skeezy in other ways (charging I indie deva 30% and big publishers less) but if you're going to criticize them, then at least criticize them for something real.
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Steam.
Owned by Valve.
Published CS:GO.
Home to the most deprived gambling economy, that set the blueprint for others to follow.
Fuck Valve.
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Steam: i'm gonna need an internet connection and dictate your OS also you need to run my shit to game
Gog: fuck if i care, here's the exe
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If the dev doesn't opt to implement steams drm, you can also just run the exe. Downloading it requires the client vs. GOG allowing you to dl the game from their website, but that's about the only difference (GOG outright refusing any games with DRM is incredibly based though and a great reason to buy on GOG over steam)
And that can be quite helpful. Just yesterday I had a game that wouldn't launch via steam, but for some reason worked fine if I just ran it as an executable via protontricks.
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We know you full of bs tho when you say they dictate the OS, even though they're the ones who have contributed most to gaming on Linux.
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Costumer oriented
Opposite problem:
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Reject consumerism, embrace FOSS.
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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.
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I think these days, "costumers" are called "cosplayers"
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If they do it for others, like in film, tv, or theater, they’re also called costume designers.
Always seemed like a neat career!
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It's like halloween all year round, and I am here. For. It!
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A costumer is someone who puts others in a costume. They might do cosplay themselves, but it's not part of the job.
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Sadly I don't wear costumes, so I don't think GOG is for me.
/j
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Or piracy>:)
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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
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Old? I got Silksong from them on release day.
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Their acronym is "Good Old Games", so I suspect it's a play on that.
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They were Good Old Games for about 4 years until 2012, when they started selling modern games and rebranded to just GOG, dropping the whole "old games" moniker.
(Yeah, I'm also old. I was there when they rebranded, but I thought it was recently, around 2020!)
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They also work to preserve old games, instead of just serving remasters.
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What's the blue middle one? Don't recognize the icon.
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Blizz's battle.net or whatever it's called nowadays.
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battle net, it’s blizzard’s launcher
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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.
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Apparently, there is a line of succession already planned.
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I mean, GOG is owned by Amazon soooo...
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No it isn't
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You do you but I don't reject any platform or publisher and treat each game/sale on a case by case basis as it suits me. If the product is good enough I will put up with additional installations.
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Who exactly are their core costumers?
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Gaming cosplayers, of course.
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My own negative experiences with Steam vs GOG were:
- Moving homes and having no landline Internet for a while and not being able to most install most of my Steam games on my desktop gaming PC because mobile Internet is slow and expensive so installing a big game literally costs money. With GOG I just downloaded the offline installer at work into a USB Flash Disk and then installed it on my desktop at home.
- Not being able to install perfectly functional games from Steam into a machine with an old Windows version because the Steam client didn't support it anymore (even though the games were compatible with that version). Mind you, you that machine shouldn't even be connected to the Internet for safety reasons, which again would stop me from installing games from Steam even if the client worked.
Beyond that with Steam you have the risk that Steam takes away one or more of your game for some reason (say, licensing problems or just Payment Processors pressuring them to do it), you lose access to your account and can't recover it (unusual, but possible), your account is forcibly closed for an arbitrary reason with no appeal (not happened yet with Steam but did happen with others such as Google), the store goes bankrupt and closes (not happened yet with steam but has happened with sellers of music with DRM if I remember it correctly), games without DRM or with Steam's light DRM (the one simply using steam_api.dll, for which there are implementations which just emulate the API without phoning home) get forcibly updated to hard DRM so whilst before you could run it offline, now you can't.
(Mind you, you get some of these problems - such as risking the loss of your entire game collection if the store goes belly up - with GOG if you just use GOG Galaxy and don't download the offline installers for all your games, but at least there it's entirely down to you as the store does nothing to make it harder for you to eliminate those risks)
Steam makes a lot of effort to keep itself inside the loop of gamers playing the games, not forcibly so (as somebody pointed out, they don't force developers to use DRM) but more with a soft sales push (they offer it for free to developers and publishers and purposefully a bunch of "easy to implement" online features such as Achievements to using the "phone home" Steam DRM to induce developers to use it). They also do not at all indicate before a purchase on the Steam store if a game has Steam DRM or not, so that consumers have to go out of their way to make an informed buying decision, if at all possible. Even for the games on Steam without any DRM one has to actually use an unsupported process to keep a copy of that game after installed from Steam (a simple copy & paste which those who know what a filesystem is can do, though maybe not the less tech literate, though gamers tend to be more tech literate), so people tend not to do it. The result is that most Steam games have DRM and most game playing done on games from Steam involves the phone-home check of the Steam DRM.
Meanwhile in GOG it's the exact opposite - people have to really go crazily out of their way to run a game from GOG with DRM (apparently there are one or two which slipped the net, and for others I guess you could implement your own DRM around it by encrypting the binary or something 😜)
Ultimately it boils down to weather one is comfortable or not with having for their games collection the risks I listed above.
Personally, with my almost 4 decades experience as a gamer (and almost that much as a Techie), I'm not at all comfortable with that since over the years I've seen multiple instances of people getting fucked by their software or even hardware being unnecessarily tied to a vendor for their normal usage loop.
That said, people going into this aware of the risks and still cool with them, then, hey, 👍, you're an adult, making a well informed decision and will only affect yourself it the risks do materialized into a problem, so you'll get no criticism from me.
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Moving homes and having no landline Internet for a while and not being able to most install most of my Steam games on my desktop gaming PC because mobile Internet is slow and expensive so installing a big game literally costs money. With GOG I just downloaded the offline installer at work into a USB Flash Disk and then installed it on my desktop at home.
You can do that with steam. Just needs steam to check the files and done.
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Are you saying that from the Steam Store you can download an offline installer?
Or is it a not officially supported process that some users figured out, involving running Steam on the work PC, installing the game there, copying the installation files over (or maybe the installer itself from the Steam cache) to the home PC and then runninb Steam there, online to verify/execute the installation.
Because if it is the latter, I don't think it qualifies as "the same thing" as what I described I did with GOG. That's more of an undocumented hack than an actual store feature.
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I use steam, but I moved the files out for games that will still work, as well as buy games on gog and download installers. I dont use gog galaxy cause? wont I have to be online to use my games?
All my backups are on a drive
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Galaxy is just a launcher. You don't need it to play any of your games, it's just a centralized place to track achievements, sync cloud saves and whatnot.
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customer*
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Having worked in an international environment for over a decade makes me 99% sure that OP speaks Portuguese.
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I'm confused as to how people with English as a second language even learn the word "costumer". It's reasonably obscure!
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Who made that spelling and the pronunciation though? Seems like two separate people. Gets me every time.
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GOG just localize your prices PLEASE.
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Nope! I'll horde steam and gog both, now i shame you into flossing your feet and brushing your butt.
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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
Don't you people think us gamers deserve better stores ?
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Go be the change you want.
Good luck...
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So, where can I purchase Nine Sols on GOG?
It's ridiculous that Nine Sols will get a Nintendo Switch release before going on GOG. I guess "many gamers" aren't asking for it - oh wait: https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/nine_sols https://www.gog.com/dreamlist/game/nine-sols-2024
A marketplace that is all DRM-free is good, but when they begin to concede on censorship for the political agendas of certain countries because it might affect their Chinese releases because they have far more of a horse in the race than Valve as a developer does in the Chinese market, you have to balance what you consider a bigger issue: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1809540/Nine_Sols/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/555220/Detention/
It only affects a very small minority of games, so it's up to you whether you consider the censorship a deal breaker. Would a game with an Easter egg criticizing any other country's politics caused the uproar Devotion did? There's no shortage of games that do, and as a central plot element as opposed to a simple Easter egg. Then there's also the fact that GOG insulted people's intelligence with the excuse of "many gamers", specially given their continued silence on other Red Candle Game releases that have no similar issues.
If an art form cannot be used as a means of criticism, then it is not one that is free.
https://artandmedialaw.com/artistic-expression-and-free-speech/
When fundamentals like this are so easily violated under such ridiculous premises, further capitulation isn't far behind.
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What did Steam do to offend you?
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Control is on sale atm, btw. It's like $4.
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Weird place to mention that. But thanks?
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Why not. As long as i get free key with my prime subscription. Not that i'm going to renew that, anyway.
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Yeah.....not really... :/
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Fuck GOG.
Might be different, but when they launched what I think is their current launcher, it was still using example code from pre-Windows Vista days. This was 2020 I reach out to them, because my user files were mapped to a NAS, and the legacy example code they used didn't support this. Steam has no issues. Epic had no issues.
All the people wondering why they don't support Linux... Well that's because they use outdated Windows code for their launcher.
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All the people wondering why they don’t support Linux
The Heroic launcher works great on Linux, and manages GOG, Epic, and Amazon games.
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GOG has DRM, they call it Galaxy.
Official client and support for my platform of choice is a big plus only Steam bothers to have.
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
I purchased Outerworlds on Steam and could not get it to load.
I pirated it and run it through WINE and have no problems.
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.
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.
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.
I get both sides of this. I understand wanting GoG to have an official Linux client, but the Steam Client is such garbage.