Functionally at this point I don't think there are many old games that are easily licenseable that hasn't already been done. GOG isn't the only company doign teh 'old games' stuff anymore. Companies like Night Dive Studios are also in that space now. So even if GOG wanted to go there, they even have competition within that space too.

I'm sure if someone dug really really hard there's probably some stuff still out there, but then its a matter of does that work translate into actual profit.

Okay.

To all onlookers on this thread: don't pay satoru any mind. No matter what proof, links, or documents you throw at him, he will insist that Steam is not DRM. You can scroll up and decide for yourself whether you want to discourse with him (and you should), but my experience tells me you're also better off saving the effort. There's also the linked evidence that he is a Steam moderator, therefore he has a "conflict of interest."

If you want to continue interacting with him, please keep asking him this: if Steam is not DRM, then why does he tell us to ask devs to make their games on Steam DRM-free? Steam is not DRM, right?

no because, You still need Steam to download a game, even drm-free.

The very fact that Steam can be played offline - i do it all the time twice a year when i'm on annual leave with gaming with my laptop- rebukes that. Same goes for Origin and Ubi -some games do not allow it but that's life today
Yes you don't get updates etc, but you don't get updates with GoG either if your offline.
GoG is about Good old Gaming, people come here for memories and to replay them, but they wont pay a fortune for them unless they are remade and work with controllers etc. That's the nature of the beast.

The eternal debates as to what constitutes DRM still continue. Winners: None.

I gave up buying games on Steam for a year now, because of the DRM and because of their libtards social justice warriors posing as moderators.

its that thing where you have to find the right word in a specific paragraph in the novel that came with the game, right?

Giant Panther disagrees.

oh, wait, no, is DRM the thing where it asks you about 1960's American TV trivia to make sure you're over 21? I'm so confused

For the billionth time - no, it's not. Not anymore, not for a long time now.

My mother's name was Haggis. What a sweet woman! :D

It is for me. I have very little interest in buying Early Access titles. My library of 342 games is predominantly OLD games - so sorry to disappoint. The original lure of GoG is OLD games

Forcing a client / third party program to get access to a game you bought, which may have not even been bought on their store, is totally DRM. If one program is gated by the use of another program, that is totally DRM. I'm not gonna argue about it dude, like I said different people have different ideas of what it means to them. If you want to try and twist what it means to me to try and prove me wrong then go ahead but it just reeks of desperation more than anything.

On GOG, there's no strings attached. I just go to the website and download the game I paid for. That's it, I have access to it forever, without it being gated by another company's data mining or borderline spyware software. Once it's on my PC I can install it wherever, whenever I want. It means a lot to people like me that a place like GOG still actually exists.

Plus, if Steam were really DRM-free, as you have convinced yourself, why would you even be here? That's literally the whole point of this place. I just never understood why Steam fanboys are so desperate they have to crawl into every corner of the internet like cockroaches to prove how great they think Valve is. Valve's games are literal trash, Half-Life felt like a chore to get through. Plus if they have to include gimmicks like gambling with lootboxes to hook people in, it shows two other things. That their games are shallow and that the people attracted by that kind of marketing are suckers.

As for broken features, literally every other platform I've ever played on has working achievements. They just work. I've never had one not work for me on any other platform, although I've heard stories but it's not as frequent. Not Steam. I could see if it were 1-2 games that have broken 'chieves, but there's so many. Plus, there's third party programs out there that have been designed to give user's the features they've been asking for forever, to reset 'chieves, even though Steam fanboys will tell you how impossible it is for Valve to do.

But yet, they will remove support for OSes that some games they still sell were explicitly designed to run on. Or they will add any number of gimmicks to make a penny, which doesn't add anything to actual gaming.

I'm sure the Steam fanboys will try to find any argument to try and absolve Valve of any wrongdoing but two other things I absolutely hate and consider broken relates to the game's ownership / attachment to one account forever.

First is games that get removed from Steam. If I played that game / got an achievement in that game, that data is forever attached to my account, and I can't remove it. If some game company turns out to be a bunch of complete douche bags, which happens quite often, I'd like to remove all traces of it from my account. I once contacted support to remove data pertaining to games that were literally removed from their store and they refused to do it. Of course they were some crappy free to play games that came and went, which I tried when new to the platform or played with my brother. Also people have been begging for ways to manage cloud data attached to an account because it actually breaks their game. There is a third party program to do this but it doesn't work on every game.

Second is that my account is attached to one ID forever and so is my library. So if I friend someone who turns out to be a stalker, psychopath or the all too common obsessive compulsive Steam fanboy, that person can easily stalk my account and entire library of games into eternity. That's the shittiest system ever invented and has happened to me numerous times. I've purged my entire friends list of over 200 friends on multiple occasions because a few users don't understand the meaning of privacy or are just super annoying only to have them try to add the 2 people left on my friends list or create brand new account to harass my account attached to my entire library. To me that's a broken system. To let shady accounts have free reign over the ones who abide by the rules.

This is already a novel, I could go on and on but it makes no difference because there's always gonna be some fanboy in every reach of every corner of the internet to argue about it. At least that's one thing they have on their side.

I think some people are missing the point of this DRM debate. DRM free is important because it is the only correct way to operate commercially.

The problem is not specifically the DRM management system. People are defending Steam on the basis that they can use their games in offline mode. While that may be true, you have to first purchase the games in steam, and the game has to be installed into steams client before it can be put into offline mode. In that process you have to abdicate your legal rights to steam and in perpetuity agree to continually having your content held hostage to get you to agree to how ever steam chooses to alter the terms in condition into their favor, or else you are locked into a frozen snapshot in time of not just that one game you bought, but the entire steam library.

That is where the actual battle against DRM resides. Defending normal and legitimate consumer practices and defending against the anti consumer precedents that companies like steam will continually try to work in until all your consumer power and options for recourse are gone so that you are left with a choice of bow to what ever insane rules they want, or not be able to play anything basically anywhere. Because when one company consistently gets consumers to willingly agree to something that actively hurts the consumer, it quickly becomes standard operating procedure as other companies add similar rules.

This behavior must stop, and GoG is basically the only company even attempting to do anything about it any more as the indie bundler market has crashed and contracted and with IGN purchasing humble they are quickly becoming little more than a reseller for steam on PC platform.

So it does not really matter if steam client is technically not DRM, its practices are consumer toxic and it is our responsibility as consumers to not support practices that not only effect steam customers, but literally effect all gamers, including those on consoles and even mobile platforms. Caveat Emptor.