I don't understand, how does that change what I said in any way? I'm not trying to be aggressive here, I genuinely do not know what are you trying to tell me. What I got from your post is that Subscriber Agreement is not legally binding, which is exactly what I was saying.

And family sharing is not in any way tied to family filtering - Family Sharing allows any number of Steam accounts you have authorized on computers you have authorized to access your Steam library, download games from it and play them, as long as you're not playing any game yourself - a rule which is extremely easy to overcome for a person playing primarily SP games such as myself by simply entering offline mode.

Technically, if you authorize 9 devices (and you can authorize up to 10) and then log out of your account, switch to offline mode or not play games at the time, those 9 devices can then proceed to download and play any of your games without limitations. This is not even against the SSA and I'm pretty sure it's not illegal in any way either, at best it's a bit irritating and prevents one account out of those 9 from playing multiplayer titles.

As for being dependent on third party, that's certainly not a problem which goes away with consoles, not anymore at any rate. We now live in a time in which DLC (provided by said third party) and patches (also provided by that third party) can be integral to gameplay experience. So while you do own a physical disc, it's essentially worthless without content a third party provides.

Which is where GOG comes in to do things right, more or less.

In practical terms, very little.
In every practical term VALVe owns your games and can dictate what ever terms it wishes and you can loose your account and every game associated with it if you don't do as they say.

But to say its lawful is incorrect.

Many contracts have clauses that have absolutely no legal basis.
I worked for a company that supplied software for the legal industry, and we had a lawyer on call for any and all questions.

One of our coders got a job for a major credit company. A clause in the contract said they couldn't work for any competitor for 5 years after leaving work. This was "total bollocks", and just in there for effect.

Yet the fact remains.

VALVe can terminate your subscription for any reason, with out any need to justify themselves or be accountable to any law.

The only way you could get your games back is to take the multi billion dollar super lawyer up'ed VALVe to court.

Of course so could gog, the difference is they can't take the installers you already have, nor take away the licenses you've paid for.

GoG can take away your access from downloading the game. Yes I know, backups and all that but then again backups do fail.

And I'm the first to agree here, thanks.

Callling it a clear cut monopoly, as I've done countless times over the years, usually gets you in the wrong kinds of arguments though. I'm not interested in assessing Steam's market influence in .01 percentage points. They have 75+ percent upwards market share, and 25+ would already be considered an illegal monopoly e.g. in the UK.

It's huge, it's all encompassing, it's wayyyy too much – and the thread title is great evidence of that – and that's all there is to know to start heavily supporting any other service, really.

Yes, they can (by controlling your account and access); but, in practical terms - have they?


Multiple times they're removed a game from being for sale (for various reason) - but in each case - if I had previously purchased the game - it has remained available for download in my library.


Steam, OTOH has removed games from "owners" libraries.


One (Steam) has an actual history that includes removing access. The other (GOG), well; I don't know of any cases. Do you?

To be fair, to my knowledge, Steam has only removed access to titles which were literally unplayable for anyone (like MMOs which ceased to exist and thus were rendered unplayable.)

Backups will last as long as your storage media and you can easily prolong this by quite simply copying them over. It's entirely in your hands.

There was also the case of Afro Samurai 2. Originally supposed to be released in 3 volumes, the first volume ended up being so bad, that the publisher themselves publicly called it a failure, cancelled plans for the other two volumes and removed it from stores. Alongside that, they also proceeded to remove it from all accounts, after refunding all the buyers of the game.

I know of one case where an account was shut down after a father passed it to his son.

Oddly enough, even after this the person still defends VALVe and their draconian policies.

I believe there is a dire need to have proper legislation over digital ownership. The EU will probably be the first to sort it, so I'll never see the benefit ;(

Well, since I don't "do" Steam, my knowledge is basically limited to what I read about it - which may or may not be accurate. (Disclaimer: I do own 2 Steam titles, Fallout New Vegas, and I can't recall #2 [and can't be arsed to log into Steam to find out]).

Maybe some would consider this fair: <i>Steam Removes Game 'Order Of War: Challenge' From User Libraries</i>. This is a game that reportedly had 18 single-player missions (in addition to online play).

There was also: <i>GTA: San Andreas Steam update removes songs, resolution options</i>. Taking away 17 songs isn't something many would shrug off.

I'm not sure how much more there is (or isn't). But, my point was that there is a history there. And my inquiry was - does GOG have any similar history? (I can't recall any cases).

This one proved to be a false alarm. While the multiplayer was indeed removed because the servers shut down, the single-player part remained intact. There is even an updated notice at the end of the page:
"Update: It appears that contrary to what I first believed, the single-player portion of the game—Order of War without the “Challenge”—is still available on Steam, and only the multi-player content has been removed."
Aside the Jmich-repeated example of the Mac version of Imperial Glory, I'll name you another example;
Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis

The game was removed from GOG, because of some dispute between Bohemia and Codemasters. Years later, it would return to GOG as ArmA: Cold War Assault, now published by Bohemia themselves. The problem with this release, was that the expansion included in the original version belonged to Codemasters and could no longer be included in the package. Unfortunately for the original owners, the new version replaced the old one, so if you didn't back it up, poof it went.

I don't, but I used to. Never liked it, I find Steam downright annoying and almost all the new games on the catalog show no interest to me. I only used it for TF2 until I got bored. Also CivIV, but with the relevant developers now putting games on GOG I'm hoping to see it here eventually.

I've heard of all these situations. Moving on to Origin there was the whole fiasco that took place right after EA's first Humble Bundle, where they removed a whole ton of libraries for whatever reason. Suspicion of piracy from sharing unused codes I think. I remember the anger storm, it wasn't pretty but it was hushed because EA.

As far as GOG? Never ever happened from any memory or old post I've ever read, nor have I found any article pertaining to such. In fact every single game taken off from the sales is still in a person's library (Descent and Re-Volt for example, there's been a good amount of games taken down before unfortunately). Community pages even stay up.

It's easy:

1) I dislike Steam's business model: it's not even DRM, I'm a happy Netflix user, it's really that they want to sell me games one by one and then their access model is like a rental. You want to sell me a service? Fine, then charge me for continuous payments for said service and give me lots of bang for my buck.

2) I don't get too engrossed on particular titles that I *need* to play (ie, if a particular game ends up DRM-only, I won't cry over it)

3) There are enough good quality games that even with a subset of release titles, there are enough high quality titles to last me several lifetimes.

Ahh - thanks for pointing that out. I missed it. Maybe because I had read the article when it originally published; but prior to the update - and then this time II didn't re-read it closely (as I apparently should have).

Hmm, I do sort-of remember that. Looks like I purchased that ArmA game back in December 2012. Maybe it was after that happened.


So, okay, GOG isn't immune to that happening; and Steam is less "guilty" than I thought (on that topic). Good to know..

Meanwhile, I'll continue avoiding Steam for other reasons. But it's fine with me that others like Steam - good for them. Whatever works..

Well piracy is piracy. Cracked new games don't have any DRM either.

I won't lie, I do play SNES games on an emulator and I won't pirate new PC games. I feel differently about the two, but from a logical point of view they are the same thing.

Ah, this sort of thing counts then?

In that case, Fallout 1/2/Tactics is way in there. Even the classic ones got replaced with the new Bethesda editions with the HD patch and an older Sfall, though you could still access a "classic" version without HD (but not unmodded).

The classic versions are basically the same thing as the new FO purchases with more goodies.