Bingo. My thought's exactly.

At the end of the day, especially if you subscribe to the drm-free installers model and not the whole captive ecosystem shenanigans that Steam (and now to a lesser degree gog) is creating, a store is just a sale point that picks games for you, sell them to you via financial transactions, makes them available for immediate download and ideally keeps them for your for downloads.

GOG does a little more with some older games in terms of curation and for gatekeeping with drm thanks to the norm that Steam set (although we'll all agree that they haven't done a crazy good job with that lately).

Overall, yeah, its work and it deserves to be paid (via a commission on sales right now, though if that turned out not to be sustainable long term, I'd be ok with paying a monthly fee for the GOG service to operate, but that's me).

However, lets not kid ourselves, the vast lion-share of the work for all the games you're playing is borne by developers. who create all those games (they are also the ones taking the lion share of the risks).

That the distribution points have come to occupy such a large part of the dialog speaks volume, to me, about dysfunctions in the way games are distributed.

Those you mentioned yes I can agree with those listed by name even if TheQuartering has over reactionary cases he often gets called out by others he knows anymore at the very least

Yeah, on a website that has not been updated since June 2020. I'm pretty sure it's dead.

Also the more people that talk about this the better....and those two have nice sized audiences.

Oops.

Like always with steam you need the client to launch just about any game. Only games you don't need steam to launch are focus Home interactive games. You can launch the game on steam while being offline but it still needs to be done through the client and even then you only have access to 15-20% of the game. Stay far away from this type of game, rots my brain to think why IO is like this. Especially when Hitman 2 was cracked 2 weeks into it's release with Denuvo and all. The funny thing is, like always this hurts the paying customer because pirates don't have o deal with these problems and when they do they just move on. To add another insult to injury, Hitman One shouldn't be here without Hitman 2 because the 2 games come together in one giant install. therefor I don't know what IO is trying to pull. The entire file size is 149 GB, there is no reaosn for anything to be stored online with such a giant a$$ file size, they are doing this out of pure control/misery. The only reason I got hitman 2 after the BS of Hitman 1 was because i got it for 9 dollars on the "grey market", BEFORE it was released IO is a TERRIBLE COMPANY! They split from their devil masters to become the devil himself..

That's incorrect. I have tens of games on steam that I've played in the last few months, and I have never installed the steam client.

Here is an incomplete list of 2000+ games that do not need the steam client:
https://steam.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games

Would be nice if they could make a "Server emulation" file so players can do some of the user-made missions, Escalation stuff, and Elusive Targets stuff offline.

But, as companies keep learning further into say proprietary stuff (Steamworks for MP; GOG Galaxy for MP); central servers (like MMO's do); and/or their own stuff - this is the non-sense we will have to deal with...especially when games might need to be re-worked for different stores and their services. Preservation of a game goes out the window, when this stuff happens - as these games are built from the ground-up w/ certain aspects to be only able to work when online and connected.

While it was great when there was middle-ware for MP (Multiplayer) portions of games like say GameSpy so that games w/ that support on Steam and GOG could use the same middleware on every PC version, so they didn't have to re-work the game to work w/ each version. Problem is: when GameSpy away, everything for the MP portion basically goes away...on every store.

Now, you have some games on Steam use Steamworks for MP; and then that same game on GOG might use GOG on that version. Great way to split the fan-base. And also, who knows who'll stick around longer? Will Steam stick around? Will Galaxy? Yeah, I want them all to stick around forever - but, who knows, right? [shrug]

That's why Multiplayer should always support LAN/TCP/IP - like the old days. It's up to the players to figure this out w/ their friends, when all the crap might hit the fan way down the road, when proprietary stuff like Galaxy and Steam might unfortunately go away...just like how GameSpy went away.

This is why MP w/ Skirmish modes should have a section, where it also works offline w/ bots - like say Q3A does; or say Battlefield 1942. Will Battlefield 2042 be preserved, if it's still tied to EA's servers and requires EA Origin or EA Desktop? COD's MP portions and all of those maps probably won't really ever be preserved, as...well, you need to play those online via Activision's servers as there's no offline mode for all these Skirmish modes and maps; they hold all the cards.

This should also go for games w/ inverted multiplayer (like say Dark Souls games) or single-player games with online stats/leaderboards/achievements/etc (like Hitman GOTY 2016). These games and portions should work offline, if I can basically play this...without any other players online. If I want to play offline and not deal w/ online stuff - I should be able to...period.

It all feels like slowly but surely, everything will unfortunately go online-only; especially if streaming services try to be like NetFlix & GeForceNow; and/or online-only for games just become the unfortunate norm.

What we need at this point is for someone in the game development world to make an open-source library that supports all those drmed platforms as well as a self-hosted "drm-free" alternative and that becomes a standard of sorts for devs who would not mind supporting everything (GOG, Steam and drm-free multiplayer), but lack the time to do so.

This library would require an open-source self-hosted server counterpart to exist as well (for the drm-free option).

The jQuery (back when browsers were wildly incompatible) of client-server networking for gaming if you will.

GOG could potentially have done it, but they've jumped into the imperialistic bandwagon of wanting their own captive ecosystem.

If I had a game that needed to run both on GOG and Steam, I'd work on that, but I'm just not in that world.

yongyea won't offer any interesting information other than to read what's out there. that's what he does.

and while thequartering WOULD wade into this, he's...ah...problematic. shall we say.

i'd pass on both of those. angryjoe would be the right person to go to. [and jim sterling, also.]

i can feel the downvotes incoming for mentioning jim, though. so pretend you didn't see that :P

you see this is the road I don't like going down, because you damn well know steam is a DRM platform and the publishers/developers make teh decision whether or not to use steam as a downloader or a DRM platform. MOST GAMES and most AAA games on Steam are DRM locked. No one cares about a damn indie foo foo game. Cut the garbage man, I can't stand you steam Whore$. I never lied about anything or mislead anyone, these are known facts about steam and is why we are here on GOG. You knew what the Op meant but you wanna be wanna of those people, typical STEAM Wh*re.

This list is not 100% accurate and misleading. Some games still require steam to play. Arma 2 will not run with out steam. Like I said before a lot games are shovelware.

Edit: I have a lot of games from steam and maybe 1% play with out the launcher. Don't give me that, steam is not drm bull. If you like steam cool. But boycotting GOG, then using steam which is the main reason PC DRM got so big. It's just laughable.

Jim sterling at this point is basically a clown and is rather ''problematic'' himself worse then the Quartering in varies ways and Jim sterling loves to when he has any valid criticism about him stated in a reasonable none hateful manner ...as saying its a troll or hate for him being last I checked claiming to be trans when before he claimed to be gay then bi then nonbinary .. its rather telling when a guy like him hides behind such labels to try saying all valid and levelheaded none hateful phrased criticism towards his content is just bigots and him cycling through each sexual identity at different times

(rest of your post is good too, just highlighting this one).

I get so pissed off when people ask for GOG to make a "Steam Workshop" equivalent. It's like, no... Steam Workshop was a giant step backwards for game modding! It's a huge "lock in" tool that *has* prevented titles from being released outside of Steam.
I'm suspicious of this. Does the person game on an a computer that is kept offline entirely? Is it possible he's online and doesn't realize it? If the reports are fully accurate, he really is content with a game with but one weapon and a just couple stages?