I agree. Which is why boycotting this is an appropriate reaction, because it too is not the end of the world and does not cause me --- and hopefully you --- any loss of sleep.

Im not ok with this either
but the problem is like all other things in the world today
its hard to do anything with it
the problem is evry person has a diffrent value of what this boycott shoud be
and some doesnt care at all and have little principles

The Call of Duty fan community was fuming when Infinity Ward announced its abandonment of dedicated servers in Modern Warfare 2. It was as insulting as calling your granny a slut, they reckoned. Over 85,000 signed a petition, but the developers didn’t dismantle IWNet or add dedicated server support to the PC game. Then, a few months later, most of the leading protestors could be found on Infinity Ward’s own matchmaking service, playing the game.

Changes only works if enogh people mobilze and care enough to keep their principles even in the event of resistence
Sadly i have learned the hard way
that in most cases its just better to not care when its talk about boycots or other types of reactions
because otherwise i just use up energy for nothing.

Are you sure you don't mean the regular Steam backup/restore feature which still would need the client to be able to run the games after you've restored them? I might be wrong but I am not aware that Steam ever offered the official possibility for "their" games to be played without Steam.

I migth remember this wrong
Its so damn long since
but i seam to remember that if you linked a disc based game that you had bougth outside of steam
you coud then back it up via download withouth the disc if the game was indeed drm fre and withouth copy protection
and withouth beeing further connected or use of the client after the download on steam.
But this is a vague memory

At least im pretty sure i was able to back up half life one
that i had on disc
and pretty sure i didnt have any hack to do it since i dont have any particullar hacking skills and my connection to internet in those days was abysmall

I meant if people wanted to run their games if steam ever shut down, if they could just run them from the steam folders like that, or if they would want to(and not say move them, if possible, to folders of their own naming/choosing).

I believe that user meant they'd only buy a gog game if they couldn't buy it anywhere else, bot that they want games to be sold only on gog.

I was totally (not) saying that cracking steam games one bought and paid for is a thing people can do if they ever had to. *wink wink, nudge nudge*

Well, the backup/restore mechanism on Steam wasn't much more but a simple packing feature used. IN fact there still is one tool available (Phoenix Tools) that still is able to pach/unpack those files. The installation of the disc basically just started the restore routine (umnpacking) and afterwards started Steam but you were also able top simply use the feature from the client itself. However those games still needed the client to run. It might be that some did not need the client after installation but that's still the case. The earliest game I actually bought on Steam was HL2 and I still have the disc - I still do remember the uproar (at least here in Germany) that it should be forbidden to have the client mandatory ... in the end they had to print a warning on the cover that the game does need Steam. Back then nobody would have expected that years after many, many, people won't care about the client and login anymore ... and of course not that many would WANT that cleint in the first place. Times changed a lot.

No. Changes also work even if a single person mobilises. For example, I have reduced the number of games I buy on GOG from more than a hundred a year to zero. It was a very noticeable and dramatic change. I am sure there are billions of people in the world, including in Warsaw, who have not noticed this change, but I have very much noticed it and it has affected me greatly, in a positive manner.

I didnt buy half life 2 on disc so i cant really say in that case
only bougth half life one and that was relased way before Steam

Well said.

I get being cautious on some things, but it seems some(in general I mean) are making mountains out of molehills on that and a few other issues.

Ok maybe i expessed me a little too bombastic there :)
More power to you and saved money as well.
what i meant was in a broader sense

If you guys don't consider locked cosmetics DRM, where do you draw the line then? How much game content would have to be locked, for you to consider it DRM? Why should we tolerate any amount of content being locked at all, on a store that supposedly prides itself on being DRM-free?

As I have said before, if this 'cosmetic content' is substantial enough to affect people's purchasing decisions about a game, then it is substantial enough to be considered DRM. If the content were truly insignificant, there would be no reason at all for developers to go to the trouble of coding dedicated authentication servers to lock it.

Yeah. So?

Just because the average Cowadoodytard doesn't have principles doesn't mean I don't need to have any.

That's true. I bought HL1 as well and because it was released outside of Steam (iirc it was published by sierra) it did not need any client.

Clarification: I was trying to say that I don't see it as that big a deal(it is akin to the preorder stuff most stores have done with games for years now, and is "only" cosmetic skins), and wasn't saying if it was or wasn't DRM.....sorry for not being more clear.

As for what level I am not willing to tolerate: things like if SP campaign content(such as the story expansion or character stuff for ME games) was preorder only or tied to a specific system(console/etc).

People are of course free to respond to such as they will.

I'm just saying that, imo, some are "over responding" to that one issue(showing the same level of "concern" as if it were, say, story content hidden behind a preorder/galaxy wall)....of course others are free to disagree.

I think they did it more so because it is cheap/easy to make such preorder content, and making it exclusive in such a manner likely makes the "normies" preorder more.