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Reject DRM embrace GOG (media.piefed.world)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca
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[–] -4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

You pointed out that Steam sells games without DRM.

I pointed out that for the customer that's just a side effect of Steam selling games, since the absence of DRM is not pitched as a feature or even listed by the Steam store.

It seems to me that my point just adds to your point to make a more complete picture that better informs readers.

Are not both our points true?

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Your point is confused and all over the place, partly because you're trying to attribute your own point to something I said.

    The issue is you're completely missing the point that I'm making, which is that Steam isn't pushing DRM, it merely doesn't prevent publishers from using it or implementing their own.

    This goes back to OP's post where they're trying to suggest that Steam is bad because of DRM, when really Steam merely allows it rather than pushes for it.

    You then tried to make a point about being beholden to Steam's platform to download your games because it's less convenient than backing them up yourself or downloading the DRM-free installer from GoG but all that is moot because the discussion was DRM vs not DRM. Saying that GoG giving you an offline installer that does the heavy lifting is a plus point in GoG's favour from a consumer ease of use standpoint but if the only thing that's stopping you from copying and pasting the folder of the game is not necessarily knowing what the dependencies are, well that's just convenience rather than stripping away your rights.

    And speaking of rights, you have the right to choose whatever platform you like based on the features that platform has.

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  • [–] -2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    Steam is pushing DRM, to publishers and makers, just the soft sales push rather than forcing them to use it.

    It's not even heavy DRM - it's designed as a single DLL and there are literally freely available implementations out there of the API as DLLs which allow running most Steam games offline and Steam has done nothing to try and have them pulled down - so at the moment it's not at all done in a nasty forceful way.

    The end result is still that most Steam games do have Steam DRM, most gamers out there don't know how to work around it, and if tomorrow Steam wants to force update all games to have nasty DRM, they can.

    (And, as we've seen from how they caved to payment processors on the whole Adult Games front, Steam can be even be pushed to do things they don't intend to do)

    It's kinda like it's possible to configure Windows 11 to not run with all the eavesdropping shit, but people have to be aware of it, care about in and go out of their way to make it happen (though, unlike Steam, MS will actually periodically switch back ON that stuff which people switched OFF).

    It's not a nasty "authoritarian" forcing of DRM but it's still the relentless soft sales push that in practice results in almost everybody by default buying and running games with DRM, whilst with GOG the default is no DRM so most people run DRM free games (one would have to really go out of their way to run a GOG game with DRM).

    If there is one thing almost 4 decades as a gamer have taught me is that often DRM is fine until it isn't, and you don't really know which ones will be a problem until they are a problem and by then it's too late and a game you love is now unplayable. If this is bad on a game, it's many times worse when it applies to a collection of hundreds of games - if Steam turns evil or goes bankrupt it will be many times worse than just one game not running on an OS version later than the max supported when the game was shipped (or something like that).

    In risk management terms, with games purchased from Steam de facto there are risks which are not in games with an offline installer and which don't have DRM (needs not be bough in GOG, and GOG too has some of those risks if you don't proactivelly download the offline installers), and a couple of decades in gaming (and Tech in general) have taught me that sometimes you get bitten by such risks.

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