Lifthrasil: No. Steam started out with all their games DRM-ed. So you always just rented your games there. They just some things in their TOS some time later, but they never pretended to be anti-DRM.
Actually, as far as I know, they started selling DRM-free games only later, after having been DRM- exclusive for a while. So Steam changed a bit in the other direction.
Steam started out as 100% DRM-ed store. Now they are slightly less on the DRM-side. But you still have to use their client, even to get their otherwise DRM-free games.
GOG started as 100% DRM-free. Now they are DRM-agnostic but really want to make everyone use their client. It's only a matter of time until GOG and Steam ate indistinguishable, except by size

B1tF1ghter: You know... There is this thing called "shortening quotes to absolute neccesary minimum for the sake of readability and tidiness".
You should try it...

Likewise
I actually did this but youre too busy to pointing fingers at people in the trhead than actually taking the argument

B1tF1ghter: Really?
What kind of dictionary of yours warrants ownership == DRM-free ?
These are completely unrelated terms.

Those are not unrelated terms
Its not true just because you say so

B1tF1ghter: Perhaps you didn't get the memo.
I have dug inside and out of Steam software and I know FOR A FACT there is plenty of cvars doing interesting things.
Including ones that seriously bypass online requirement (at least for singleplayer games) after installing - and before you ask - no I will not share it because the moment it would go viral it would get patched (just like when depot downloading got mainstream enough Valve introduced access tokens for it). Many people other than me know about it, since Valve has nasty habit of leaving these cvars in plain sight (along with their very... cough incomplete cough developer documentation) until they get too much publicity in which case they patch it and I personally don't want that to happen.

Considering how Steam API is built, how things like Goldberg use that fact, I am highly certain "the official solution" could literally be a drop-in replacement steamapi .dll file that plugs into the existing calls (just like Goldberg which uses the whole fact of how conveniently Steam API is build to allow that) to entirely bypass any STEAM-RELATED online / client needs.
I'm not going to go into details but Goldberg even allows emulating Steam networking in such a way that you can play over LAN in certain games that normally don't have that functionality.
And OFFICIAL drop-in file would get even more functionality.

Yes somebody are gullible enogh to eat up the pr speak in the steam ecosystyem , got ya

B1tF1ghter: I think you are confusing some things.
Valve meant that they have a hidden way of allowing bypassing STEAM ITSELF, NOT "all DRMs put in all games BY DEVELOPERS".
Responsibility for the latter is ENTIRELY on developers and Valve has nothing to do with it.
I would like to note that Valve doesn't force any developers into putting ANY DRM in games published on Steam.
Valve provides the platform, and some toolkits, such as Steamworks, Steam stub DRM, Steam CEG DRM (seems dead and unused for years), and some others.
It's entirely up to the developers IF and WHAT they put into their games.
There is plenty of games on Steam that have literally NONE, NOT EVEN STEAM STUB, and after installing they are 100% DRM-free.
It's not Valve that puts for example Denuvo in some game. It's entirely a CHOICE of related developers and it's THE DEVELOPERS' responsibility to eventually remove it. They totally could provide DRM removal patch some years after theoretical "Steam death".
There are plenty documented cases of such patches being eventually distributed for example for SecuROM games outside of Steam.

B1tF1ghter: The fact that you said this makes you look like you think you are some sort of saviour of forums talking about some unspeakable news.
It's no news at all that there have had been and still are plenty of games which contain internal call-home online checks (and subsequently refuse to start if not present) that are completely independent from Steamworks (the checks).

B1tF1ghter: Oooooh, so you belong to "this TOS is imo unlawful, I HATE IT, but I'm not going to fight it" crowd?
As in: "law is a thing 'but in practise it doesn't work that way'" crowd?
The one that decides to never complain to authorities and instead to wave their hands saying "in practise law doesn't work"?
If you don't like the TOS and think it's unlawful go ahead and report it to authorities. Do something about it.
Unless, of course, it's more convenient for you to point fingers and wave hands doing nothing.
Seriously...

B1tF1ghter: They may, and it really depends on a lot of factors. Such as regional laws.
Those regional laws works in favor for big corparations and give a shit about basic human rigfths in most cases
Thanks for proving my point

B1tF1ghter: The... WHAT?
Just... WHAT human right warrants ownership of games... let alone "basic" one?
Please... quote...
Prove your point about how allegedly "it's a BASIC human right to own games".
I'm waiting.

Article 17
1. Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
2. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

B1tF1ghter: I'm pretty sure all services (for example websites, stores, etc) that have a TOS do exactly that.

Oh they do?
yes tell me all about the new coontact i have to sign for a car that i bougth 20 YEARS AGO at the same car dealer TO BE ABLE TO CONTUNUE TO DRIVE IT today.

B1tF1ghter: I don't recall ever being presented with new Steam TOS to accept on every multiplayer game update.
Maybe you are confusing it with EULA. Which is a contract with developer/publisher and is outside of control of Valve (as evident by the fact that some games don't have it at all and all others basically have all kinds of stuff in there and every single such EULA can be different).

Thats classic
A diddrent name on the contract and diffrent wording in the contract suddenly makes it diffrent
Then all drm is not the same as well either then
we can then rule out alot of the claims people are saying are drm on gog as well if we are going to use simmilar debate talk points.

B1tF1ghter: I never said it. Don't EVER try to put words in my mouth!

Oh, but you kinda are but its subtle i agree with that

B1tF1ghter: Oh, so you are not ok with "Steam unlawful TOS" but you ARE ok with proven unlawful HumbleBundle TOS?
Ok. Gotcha.

Maybe you missed the point where i said i was going to buy on any store regardless of consumer practices
i didnt say it was ok.
Im just sayiing i dont belive in a boycott
i coud offcorse ellobrate more on why
but i didnt bother with that

B1tF1ghter: I don't know from when (I would have to make a lot of backtracking to find out, but it's been like that for at least years) but you can ACTUALLY bypass Steam DRM in almost all (I am not certain if 100% all) Valve games with a simple cvar.

You can bypass all drm with hacks and simmalar things with the help of pirates and the consumers help in diffrent ways thats not the point

B1tF1ghter: I would use word "account" instead of "online" but otherwise what you said is generally correct.

B1tF1ghter: It's not a myth. Valve made their API in such a way that they could very easily make this come true.
Read what I wrote in this very post.

Lodium: Steam did not start out as DRM store
If fact you were once able to copy or back up your games once upon a time but this is so far back in the day that most people doesnt remember it
They even had something called support for disc based games and were even selling valves own games on a disc once upon a time.
I had no trouble to back up these discs back in the day and thats withouth any hack
But its true that they did not speak publicy about beiing a drm fre store like gog did but they did speak publicity about your ownership of games

OldOldGamer: Be honest: CP2077 is a clear indication of where the company is going.

Lifthrasil: Yes, it is. CDPR wants to abandon DRM-free and wants GOG to become a small copy of Steam.

Lifthrasil: I'm quite sure whent they add multiplayer to CP2077 it will be Galaxy-exclusive and it will contain micro-transactions.

Lifthrasil: OK. In that case I'm wrong and have to correct my statement to: when I became aware of Steam, they were already an exclusively DRM-ed store. I bought physical copies as long as they were still available DRM-free. Then suddenly you had to register physical games to Steam (using Half-Life 2 to push DRM on everyone). That's why I associated Steam with DRM from the beginning and why I never bought a single game there. And returned the physical copies that were dependend on Steam.

Lifthrasil: Yes, it is. CDPR wants to abandon DRM-free and wants GOG to become a small copy of Steam. I'm quite sure whent they add multiplayer to CP2077 it will be Galaxy-exclusive and it will contain micro-transactions.

Vendor-Lazarus: No, you're right. steam started out as an Always Online DRM-store to sell their Half-life 2.
When the many problems with that occurred, they walked back to Online Verification.
When it turned out that you had to have the latest patch/update installed, or you couldn't play, they offered offline mode. Which only checked in once every two weeks. It has never released control of anything though.
Online verification on install and updating still makes everyone beholden to the steam servers forever.
They can say they'll disable it or whatever, but you should treat those as the word of a politician.
That's not counting the many other DRM's steam allows to be used, and other servers that must be checked against.

Vendor-Lazarus: Online verification on install and updating still makes everyone beholden to the steam servers forever.

GamezRanker: I wonder if the any/all drm filled games would even work if the steam requirement were removed....

GamezRanker: what with the folder structure and all.

GamezRanker: (at the very least i'm guessing that it'd probably be a bit of work to get some games "sorted"/running again if steam ever closed up shop)

WeirdoGeek: After seeing what B1tF1ghter had to say about my statement, I feel I should restate and clarify some things.

1. The only time GOG will be ever be seeing my business from here on in is if the game in question is exclusive to their store

WeirdoGeek: I find the option to get it directly off the Red Candle store to be an even better outcome due to Red Candle getting all the profit

WeirdoGeek: I wish you all the best and I HIGHLY recommend you pick up Devotion from Red Candle's store if you haven't already. It's FANTASTIC, so damn good I ain't even mad they had me make an account before I could buy it.

OldOldGamer: As an aside, I have 600 physical original videogames in my (huge) library that I can't play as I don't have floppy disks

OldOldGamer: CDROM

OldOldGamer: or an OS that is able to run them.

OldOldGamer: Some of them could not be even readable anymore as floppy disks doesn't have such a long life.

Lodium: No they have not

GamezRanker: Too bad it isn't possible to crack out that protection after buying games there, then. ;)
(btw:, cracking out such drm is legal in a number of countries)

Lodium: so the claim that steam started out as an always online store is hard to belive considering internet speeds wasnt that great around the year 2003 in all parts of the world but my memory here migth fail me.

Gersen: There is 3000+ games on Gog and out of those, based on you own list, there are only 6 that have optional cosmetics that needs Galaxy or an online registration to enable, being angry about that is one thing, pretending like it's a clear sign that Gog decided to drop DRM-free is a stretch.

Gersen: You mean the thing they already confirmed two years ago ?

Lodium: No they didnt
Steam was created in 2003 by the same company that created video game juggernauts such as the Half-Life series, Left4Dead, and Counter Strike.

B1tF1ghter: All?
Almost definitely not.
Any? That's a laughable suggestion that NO games would work.
Most DRM solutions are made to work independently from Steam and it's API.
Most don't check Steam files itself.
Most Denuvo cracks use combo of Steam emulators (things like Goldberg) and Denuvo calls mimicry.
When you use Denuvo crack the Denuvo IS STILL ACTUALLY THERE. It's just fooled into thinking your install is legit.
I am not sure about VMprotect and Arxan tho, this could possibly break (testing required).

B1tF1ghter: Yeah what about it?
I think you may be misunderstanding how such hypothetical override would work and / or not know what is / haven't used Goldberg.
If the solution I hypothesized (which sounds rather likely given how Steam API is and how Goldberg leverages this very fact) it would be a replacement for literally one file.
I don't understand why would you even expect FOLDER STRUCTURE to change.
The only thing that would really change would be save paths.
Perhaps you are not familiar with Goldberg on technical level.
Steamapi dll file is a proxy between all Steamworks internal game calls / IPC and Steam services / network.
With enough work one can produce a mimicry file that would bypass Steam networking entirely.
Goldberg specificly utilises the fact that pretty evidently Steam API was designed in a way to allow that.
Which highly suggests that Valve thought about it already long time ago.
If you didn't get it already: the solution I hypothesised as being official would be very much like Goldberg (just better since Valve has entire documentation for their own software whereas Goldberg developers have to highly guess).

B1tF1ghter: Tabun... (<<JP) Tho it highly depends on the definition of "some" in this case.

B1tF1ghter: So then you want GOG to become monopoly for old games?
I surely don't.
It's kind of a problem that they do have some old games as the only seller.
Especially when one wants to not buy on GOG (it means then that one cannot obtain said games anywhere) due to for example boycott.
Diversity of choice is a preferable thing.
Saying a "game should be exclusive to GOG" is like accepting EGS "anti monopoly" practises (which are well marketed lie and doing the very thing they pretend to be exterminating).

B1tF1ghter: It is a better outcome.
For the developer to self publish is frankly the most favorable solution (one I hypothesised for this game long time ago btw).
But we are boycotting decisions of GOG, NOT Red Candle Games.
It's GOG that did wrong here.
So, Devotion got self published? Awesome. Wholesome news.
But GOG had nothing to do with this and so the boycott of GOG must continue until they change their course.

B1tF1ghter: Now, one of my only concerns with this, since already few people reported account need, is that theoretically their database could become a target for "certain individuals" and should it ever be stolen it could be used for targetting individuals supporting the cause.
And before somebody accuses me of "giving ideas to 'the people'" - no - I am fairly certain that their cyber division came up with that eventuality long time ago already (any person with half a brain that deals with IT sec would casually come up with this, let alone cyber attack divisions).

B1tF1ghter: You claim to own 600 implied-non-account-type-DRM games, some of which you are implying to be on floppy disks, yet you cannot be bothered to buy even the cheapest of cheap floppy DRIVES?
That's highly mind boggling. With the amount of money you had to spend on those 600 games you probably have money for both a decent floppy drive and proper floppy drive dumper (something that operates in lower level than average mobo floppy controller and allows dumping those in more "debug" mode).

B1tF1ghter: That's a cringe excuse. These are cheap even if you buy some high end Teac. Cheap compared to cost of 600 games anyway.

B1tF1ghter: *one of the most painful and highest Sigh's in my month*
This excuse is so cringe I cringe even when typing this.
Let's put CDROM aside for a second as situation there is not that clear in some cases (not everything works 100% perfectly under Wine).
Floppy disks, almost all run PERFECTLY in things like DOSbox.
And for OS you can use a metaphorical billion of Linux flavours that currently offer better compatibility for old games than things like Windows 10 (oh the irony).

B1tF1ghter: I'm not going to comment your lenience much as I don't have time to scold people for their negligence.
But what you are describing is even worse than many GOG customers casually buying games here specificly for the sake of DRM-free without accounting for and reserving drive capacity and PROPER backups first.

It's entirely your decision, and maybe you have those 600 just for the sake of collecting, I'm not going to judge, but don't give stupid excuses publicly.
Unless you received those 600 games for free, one can assume you DO HAVE neccesary money to dump all those and use them.

B1tF1ghter: I see you are continuing your trend of pointlessly consuming thread page space with your pointlessly untrimmed quotes.
"no they have not"?
And which part of your grotesquely raw quote style are you referring to anyway?
The "hidden solution" one by any chance?
Because if so then I frankly don't have any more time to try to explain this to you. I said what I wanted and what I said is indeed correct and I stand correct on the cvar part, as I, and many others have tested and even documented it.
There are even hints ALL OVER VALVE'S DEVELOPER DOCUMENTATION on how the API was DESIGNED to be modular and replaceable.
So, frankly, no amount of your ignorant nopes is going to change that fact ;)
Have a happy negligence + ignorance ;)

You can call it whatever you want
as long as its not official, bradloy annonced and tested for a extended period of time as Valve or any of its advocates say it works and say it does its just claims and nothing more
Or the parts of the Pr machine i like to call it

B1tF1ghter: From my point of view sarcasm is dripping from your response (cough Goldberg cough). But to confirm: you ARE being sarcastic right? :P

B1tF1ghter: Call-home network connectivity doesn't exactly consume much bandwidth.
You may be confusing it with patches, which CD-based games still would require you to download over the very same slow-ass internet connection.
I also somewhat cringe at your argumentation. At the time CD-based games were dripping with DRM such as SecuROM or StarForce.
I specificly remember sitting at my friends place installing Crysis with SecuROM (requiring internet connectivity for activation).
Steam just switched industry from one internet reliance to another.

Lifthrasil: No. Counter Strike wasn't created by any company. It was a fan-made mod of Half-Life, that Valve just bought, after it became successful (hiring two of the mod-developers iirc)

rjbuffchix: Do you apply this logic to other contexts where service is unacceptable? If I order soup and there's a hair in it, I don't go, "oh, at least it wasn't more than one hair, and at least it wasn't like something more gross". Also, as I write this I realize it isn't a perfect analogy considering that in that case, the mistake could at least have presumably been accidental, whereas GOG is actively choosing to foster a DRMed environment.

rjbuffchix: So, on one hand, you claim it is a stretch GOG is willing to drop DRM-free, but now you are acting nonchalant that their flagship game has DRM, "oh everyone knew that already"...uh, for one, not everyone knew, and furthermore, that's absolutely cause for concern about GOG's direction.

Lodium: funny that you mention crysis as an argument a game that was realesed 13. nov. 2007
a whole diffrent time period

Lodium: A lot of water had flowed in the river since the early days since then

Lodium: Yes alot of custommers at the start of the internet surly had the money to stay online for an extended perod of time on dial up modems
It doesnt make any sense whatsover to limit your custommer base to make the store aviable to only a select few induvuduals that coud browse the steam store at their lesuire (sarcasm)

Lodium: at the start of the internet

Lodium: And btw
patches that you had to download also came later
before that there was something called expansions and patches over the internet with single player games was a rarity

Lodium: patches that you had to download also came later

Lodium: patches over the internet with single player games was a rarity

Lodium: before that there was something called expansions

Gersen: some dumb "bonus" being exclusive to some retailer / shop / preorder is nothing new, so having a bunch of optional cosmetic content requiring a connection / subscription is not the end of the world as long as the games themselves are DRM-free and said content is insignificant enough (i.e. cosmetic)
(...)
don't care about Dying Light weapon skins or X4 paint jobs.