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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.
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.
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?
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.
The PC wiki actually has a dedicated field for if steam games require it or not. It’s rare if not close to never that you don’t know ahead of time if you actually look.
Its annoying it’s not on the store page but eh.
Call me when GOG Galaxy supports Gnu/Linux.
And when GoG does regional pricing.
So much more expensive if you don’t live in the US/Western Europe.
Unofficial:
Minigalaxy and Heroic are both clients which support GoG
i mean you dont really need the launcher
I use Lutris with GOG works great
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)
Heroic with GOG works great on Linux. Why wait?
Reject consumerism, embrace FOSS.
Official client and support for my platform of choice is a big plus only Steam bothers to have.
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 thought more of Lutris and GameHub, forgot about Heroic. There’s also Legendary and Cartridge but i don’t know them.
Heroic is FOSS, though, isn’t it? I thought Legendary was just Heroic, but without the GUI?
Looks like.
I purchased Outerworlds on Steam and could not get it to load.
I pirated it and run it through WINE and have no problems.
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 ridiculous premises, further capitulation isn’t far behind.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Steam.
Owned by Valve.
Published CS:GO.
Home to the most deprived gambling economy, that set the blueprint for others to follow.
Fuck Valve.
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.
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.
Corporations aren’t your friend.
Or piracy>:)
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.
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.
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.
User files mailed to a NAS? What?
God damn prediction text keyboard. Mapped! (which this time was almost married… fucken Gboard)
Oh I see, you had that directory on a share mounted on the system. That should have been abstracted away by the OS, especially if it was SMB. NFS or iSCSI would have been a bit more tricky, but as long as it was addressable through a drive letter I would have expected it to work.
I thought the same. Everything else worked, but for whatever reason, only GOG didn’t. I actually still have the photo saved from it. I find errors about it dating back at least 2009. At the time I was looking into it, I found it was a common thing from some example code. And it wasn’t even new to GOG; the old installer had the same problem. Example, https://www.gog.com/forum/the_witcher_2/cannot_install_internal_error_failed_to_expand_shell_folder_constant_userdocs
All the people wondering why they don’t support Linux
The Heroic launcher works great on Linux, and manages GOG, Epic, and Amazon games.
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.
I mean, GOG is owned by Amazon soooo…
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.
I’m on Linux as well and I just use heroic for my gog library
GOG has DRM, they call it Galaxy.
It’s not a DRM, it is just a launcher.
Games that are multiplayer will usually use drm, yea.
The thousands of other games do not.The very first game on the list;
Absolver - Boss re-matches are locked behind an online requirement. Boss loot too. As well as some techniques that can be used in offline play but can only be learned online. Absolver also installs the invasive EAC anti-cheat software even for single player and won’t start without it.
Ok
I don’t think it’s required for any titles.
Would still be nice if they’d allow you to run games without the launcher open (assuming you use it to install them) though.
