Posted June 05, 2017
HereForTheBeer: DRM-free game, acquired outside of the Steam ecosystem, Steam still prevented me from playing. Is the client DRM on a DRM-free game?
timppu: After you had the complete content delivered to you, then you had the DRM-free game. The content in the box was still incomplete. you needed the Tellworlds workaround (file?) on top of that. So my question to you is, if it had required you to create an online account through your web browser and accept an EULA through it before you can play your retail game, would that have been fine with you and you would have considered your retail game fully DRM-free (even though it requires an online registration with a web browser before you can play it)?
That is something I don't understand: why the client used for that extra step (registration) is the biggest issue to some people? I would be damn angry if all my downloaded GOG games required me to log into my online GOG account before I can install or play their single-player content. It doesn't matter if it required that with a web browser or Galaxy, the tool required for the registration is not the real issue here. The requirement for online registration is.
The content was complete. The game itself would have played were it not for needing to see the little "okay" from the Steam client installation. To the best of my recollection, it was either a different serial key (which is then mine to lose track of or not) or a registry entry that allowed me to play. The content was all there, though - which, frankly, is the way it should be when you buy something on disk, fix-it patches and free expansions not withstanding.
For your question, it would not have been okay to make me create an online account to play the retail game. To which you may be saying, "A-HA!" But no, it wouldn't be okay in this case because I bought that particular title from a brick and mortar shop and had all of the bits and bytes I needed, contained on the disk in the box. Taleworlds' solution was not a patch to download, so the purchased content did not change. If you're wondering whether I'm okay creating an account to buy games, well of course I am okay with that. Wouldn't be a gOg customer - or Amazon, or eBay, or any of a bunch of other online shops - were that not the case.
To that end, if someone can describe a decent non-account way of buying digital content that will allow me to download it multiple times over several years at my whim, then I'd like to hear it. The only one I can think of is to email someone a specific link that takes them to their download, and that link never expires. Beyond that, I do not know what would work in place of an account. A non-account transaction works fine for physical goods, because you order it once, you pay for it once, they ship it once, you receive it once. Digital content, such as the game products we're talking about at Store XYZ, can usually be downloaded multiple times, and thus an account makes sense to me. This is especially true for content that gets patched / updated / upgraded over time.
Now, as gOg shows, the customer library can be handled completely (in the old days, anyway) via the website. The customer can get the exact same DRM-free content (talking about any given game they both sell, not saying that their DRM-free catalogs are identical) as on Steam without needing a client with its own rules and restrictions placed on top of the store rules and restrictions. As my example shows, that layer - which was wholly unnecessary for the game I purchased - can prevent one from obtaining the stuff that was purchased, even from a completely different retailer.
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One other thing, you asked why one would need to download a DRM-free game again. One would not HAVE to, but some customers choose not to download the installers as soon as they buy the games, and instead let the store do the storage duties. For those customers, repeat downloads might be the norm as they play, uninstall, and then reinstall to play again later- especially if they have a nice internet connection and large downloads take only minutes. For me and my craptastic internet, I get the stuff as soon as I can and sock it away on a backup drive so I only need to do it once (except for Titan Quest and its full installers for every patch, but that's a whole other matter).