That's what I figured out, but there is online activation GFWL and non-online GFWL like Universe at War for example.

Even, If it uses legacy GfWL Mode for Offline activation, you need to be online to save your games.
At least had always trouble with offline mode and it deleted my savegames.

Are you sure about that? Can't you just create an offline profile for saving? That's what I did for Fallout 3 and Universe at War and it worked. Oh well, for €2.5 I think I'll bite.

I am not entirely sure, yes, but I even _think_ RF:G was the game that made me change to online mode.
Sorry, it's a bit ago since I played it.

Well, I'll give it a shot when the download is complete and I will mention my findings tomorrow.

Nope, no need to be online. I played the whole game with an offline profile and got no problem.

Indie Gala issue. According to the Indie Gala website from their FAQ:

"To gift a Steam key from your purchase page, follow these steps:
1) On "Your games" section, click on the gift icon located to the right of the Steam key you want to gift. 2) You will get a special gift link to provide to the recipient. 3) Don't redeem the gift if you open the link, just give the url to the recipient. 4) When the recipient will redeem the gift, upon e-mail confirmation, he will get a download page with the single key you decided to gift to him."

This is not what is happening for me. Indie Gala is not giving a KEY, instead they still require the friend to link their Steam account through India Gala. So Indie Gala not only knows your Steam account, they now know the Steam account of every "friend" of yours too. So despite what is in the FAQ it is impossible to get an actual Steam key out of Indie Gala anymore. All one gets is a link to a connection, that's it.

Greenman's servers have been clogged all day like they're selling Steam keys for a dollar or less... or something.

Does this require an Indie Gala account? If yes, it looks like an attempt (of poor taste) to increase their user base count.

Have you contacted Indie Gala about the contradiction with their own FAQ?

Yes, also the receiver needs an Gala Account. This is an attempt to avoid letting people get screwed over by key-resellers of poor character.

Sloppy wording in Indie Gala's FAQ, it seems.

But in general, I wouldn't expect games to be sold as keys much longer. Keys have been abused so massively that the publishers are pushing for the newer, keyless systems.

Wouldn't they achieve the same result going the Humble Bundle route or something along that line?

sorry, I don't get you, this is exactly what Humble Bundle does.
To redeem a gift-link the receiver needs a HB account that connects to their steam account.
You never see a key anymore.

Oops, I was under the impression that the gift-link for HB didn't require a HB account, sorry. >//<
Question - if you gift a HB-Steam-link, is the Steam account that redeems it revealed your in HB inventory?

I guess this will eventually lead to everyone that gets a Steam-link gifted to also get an account on every single one of these bundle sites.


EDIT: typo

no need to apologize, this stuff gets more complicated by the day and it's hard to keep up with all the changes :-/

And no, as soon as the HB-Gift is redeemed, the gifting person does not have any further insight into the process.
Yes, if you want to trade HB or Gala Gift-links those sites get your Steam account names.
At least the good part is that 'gifting' is now officially legal*.
And I see other sites like groupees might follow the model, also.

*(PS: just a side a note of a problem Gilt-linking solved ;): though I really doubt that it was legal from those sites to condemn 'sharing' keys in the first place, nevertheless it is understandable that they _wish_ they had a legal basis to restrict key-usage to discourage the massive abuse that was happening. So this seems a good solution for everybody.)