This is my personal gripe with DRM-free games on Steam. The backups Steam creates cannot be restored without Steam. I prefer a backup that will continue to work even when Steam no longer exists, which GOG provides.

Additionally, since my offline backup installers on GOG are available to be downloaded over the web, I can set up a small server with a script like gogrepoc to automatically download new versions of games. This way I can have an up-to-date backup of all my games that will survive any storefront.

Steam doesn't allow me this convenience, and I understand that it has no incentive to. The average gamer doesn't care about these kinds of things.

Some devs might feel a moral imperative to deliver.

However from what I read, the dev didn't even want to release on GOG in the first place; it was the publisher who released the game here.

I meant to say Douse, not fan the Flames.

It's not really an excuse though. The Devs signed a binding contract with the publisher and happily took the money. They could always have self-published.

Incidentally, I'm amused by the amateurish minimum and recommended specs that were provided for this game.

This is patently false. There are many games, once installed, you can pack up the install folder, move to a computer in an underground bunker and never see the sun or the internet again, and they will work.

Well, yes. The attempt of damage control is spam. I think we all are used to spam, but it is still bad.

I don't know hardly anything about these contracts but I feel this dev should have had the option to simply not release here. It resulted in just another 2nd class citizen case.

If it was either have a publisher and release even places the dev didn't want to or self-publish, yeah he should have self-published .

(As an aside I think the dev or publisher ought to be the one doing the refunding.)

I lived through Valve dramatically changing usage rights once, there is nothing, absolutely nothing stopping them updating Steam again to put a wrapper around pushed .exe filesthat puts their DRM onto currently "DRM Free" Steam games. Will they? Highly unlikely. Am I willing to trust £1000s of games that Valve won't absolutely not.

And that's putting aside the legal mechanisms Valve uses too. Steam is a subscription contract and your software is leased. Your right to use those games ends with your Steam account.

While true you can migrate the install folders, there are inherent dangers in using Steam for "DRM Free" gaming.

Indeed.
Most Steam games are DRM-free, not counting the mandatory client to download them with.
Move them to another computer, click exe and they will be playable.

Even those games that have client dependencies can be detached from the client in 10 seconds or less in most cases. Sometimes all you need is a text file with numbers in it to do that.

Only third party DRM and AAA games from big companies are real problems.

But obviously offline installers that are guaranteed to be DRM-free are a preferable method over any Steam things, if for no other reason than the ease of use.

The biggest problem in this case seems to be that in order to have continued access to game updates the buyer must have an account in another store than the one he bought the game from. DRM-free or not, that's a real problem.

Agreed with the Workshop rhetoric. It is a plague that doesn't seem to be stopping and the modding scene on anything non-Steam is suffering for it greatly. It took Serious Sam 4 years to finally get the executable for playing with mods on GOG but trying to RIP the mods from Steam workshop without owning the game there through SteamCMD has been quite annoying. It was still possible, but some games can be set to check ownership on Steam before allowing you to download any Workshop content, and if that is the only place where the mod is, you're out of luck.

As for the game, at least you can get a free Steam key. Free is the only case where I'm willing to use it.

There is another point that is often ignored for not wanting to buy anything on Steam, and that is not wanting to fund Gabe Newell's monopolistic empire founded on microtransactions and scams, see the actual black markets that flourish with the buying and selling of CS:GO skins or Steam cards.

This is simply not true. There are 40000 games on Steam and certain websites/torrents offer cracked versions of Steam games. One website has an incomplete collection of 10000 cracked Steam games where the Steam DRM wrapper is circumvented. Only a small minority of games on Steam are "DRM-free" as in using the game executable after installation and without any further manipulation. These are about 2-5% of all games on Steam. If you add those games where you have "small" manipulations like editing files or adding starting parameters than probably about 5-10% are "DRM-free" on Steam. I don't count such games as DRM-free. For DRM-free there should be no manipulations at all.

On Steam store pages you get informed whether DRM methods like Denuvo are used, but they don't say anything about the Steam DRM wrapper. If people really start thinking that most games on Steam are DRM-free then I'll have to congratulate the psychologists working for Valve/Steam. Their job was successful.

I'm sorry, but it literally is. If Valve made non-owners of the game able to download mods then it wouldn't be, but instead they shut down third party tools that allowed people to do that.
Clearly this thread is being discussed on the game's discord and a few Steam users with GOG accounts have come to "talk some sense into us"... or just troll.
I do not think that phrase means what you think it means.
Just a Freudian slip then? :P

This is getting off-topic, but most games I have downloaded from Steam are DRM-free as is.
As for the rest, I have managed to make them client independent in every case, using one method or another.

Again, if you are buying AAA releases from big companies, you will get heavy DRM.
If you choose indies or freeware, which form about 95% of Steam catalogue, there is little to no DRM involved, and client dependencies can be cut literally within seconds if you know how.

It should also be mentioned that all games that can be run in DOSBox or ScummVM are DRM-free, which means thousands of games.

So, the only real problem with Steam is whether you want to support their way of doing all this.
I really don't, but I'm also pragmatic. If there are DRM-free games on Steam that GOG and other places don't have, I have no problems getting them from Steam.

In my case it's about 10%. But then again I only buy on Steam what I can't get anywhere else and that usually is DRM protected.
DRMed indies I would consider to be a a slap in the face on both cheeks. I absolutely expect indies to be DRM free - without exceptions.
Luckily I have hundrefs of indies on itch.io and gamejolt, there's no need to push my luck and buy them on Steam.

So what is left to buy from Steam are B and A+ games. It has been a while since I bought AAA on Steam, these days I get those from Epic or their own platform, if they have one. The vaste majority of these is DRMed, even 20 year old B-point&click-adventures can only be played with DRM.