On the contrary. It's a form of basic democracy using the means of capitalism to regulate it.

I think a full discourse about how unregulated capitalism leads to tyranny would derail this thread badly.

Instead, I'll leave you with a couple of interrogations:

Steam (with GOG fast following its footsteps) has very much dictated the baseline about what gamers are used to and expect. For sure, they did a lot of things right which led to their success, but people didn't get much of a say in some of the minutiae.

I think we can establish at this point that the vast majority of gamers are willing to tolerate losing their games should a store go down (its probably a low to mid priority concern at best)

Do you think that if they were asked if they'd like an offline alternative in addition to the client managed installer, the majority would say no? How about an offline multiplayer alternative?

How about back before Steam set the norm for what people expect? You think that if we had put it to a vote back then, the same number of people would have been ok with losing their purchased game if the store goes down?

How about in the future, if Steam goes down and everyone lose their games (without recourse), will people have a say in the matter? How about if they know right now that this will happen (not being given a pretty lie by Gabe about "yeah, no worry, we'll unlock everything if we shut down"), do you think that will influence their current opinion on what they are willing to tolerate?

You seem to be saying the same thing as many of us in this thread.

Steam is providing a poor service, so it makes sense not to buy there at all. GOG is fast following in its footsteps, so --- unless it gets its act back together, as most boycotters here hope, but know not to expect --- it makes sense to do the same for it too.

If there is no store willing to sell me the products I want to buy, then I will not buy anywhere. Simple.

Exactly. If those people had 'voted with their wallet' instead of just complaining in the Steam forum, these practices would never have become so successful. The fact that renting games is the norm now is directly related to people not using this form of democracy. You may dislike the term for some reason. But it's the only form of democracy we have in a mostly unregulated market. There is no regulation authority where one could vote to forbid certain practices. But we do have the power to choose which kind of business to support with our money. Unfortunately the vast majority voted for DRM and against their own ownership rights. Because it was convenient.

That's why I like the term, because it describes the reality. If you buy somewhere, you automatically support that store. Calling this a 'vote' underlines your responsibility. No matter what you say in a forum, your money says: "Your business model is working. Continue." On the other hand, withholding your money is the only voice that corporations will hear. If the majority would only buy games that are DRM-free, all major stores and publishers would have to offer DRM-free options. Or lose out on a major market share.

Sad, isn't it?
Convenience is above everything.

I honestly don't even understand what other form of "democracy" could exist in the context of stores and customers and is supposedly being "capitulated"? Popular election every 4 years with market share distributed like parliament seats?

Its nice theory. Except we're not ants. Mobilising like that is extremely difficult which is why it fails the mast majority of the time.

In practice, its more like: "Well, I can abstain from using X and hope that everyone else does like me or I can just eat it". People will just eat it, almost always. It takes a special kind of abuse for people to take to the streets in outrage.

There are countless examples of companies just ripping off people, until regulators grow a pair and do their job as elected officials: Regulate on behalf of their constituents.

For example, we have affordable internet at all here because the government is forcing the main providers that own the infrastructure to sell to third party providers at reasonable cost, forcing competition on what would otherwise be monopolies.

Ownership worked before the advent of the internet, because it was codified into laws. There was a standard. copyright holders didn't do whatever the heck they wanted, like they do now on the internet.

This applies to GOG as well. They get to suffer the consequences of their poor actions.
The sword cuts both ways.

Yeah, there should be repercussion from corporate entities behaving in an undesirable way.

All I'm saying is that hoping to achieve the desired outcome using market forces will at times work (usually when there is a fair amount of competition and that only a single corporate actor is misbehaving), but fail often enough that it can't be considered a dependable solution.

And hoping that corporate entities will behave well out of the goodness of their heart (no matter what image they project) without a regulatory framework, well, hopefully you know what I think about that at this point.

I believe this is a difference between an idealist and a pragmatist.

An idealist would say "until the regulators manage to correct the situation, I will at least refrain from supporting these harmful practices".

A pragmatist would say "until the regulators manage to correct the situation, I might as well join the masses".

Well, for me, there are several ideological sides to this:
- There is GOG the store and to what extent you want to support it
- There is supporting game developers (especially indie game developers)
- If at some point, most of these games will be DRM-only, there is getting as many as possible while they are mostly DRM-free to help with longer term preservation (the more legit copies there are out there, the better the odds)

Its not just the ideological way and the pragmatic way. Ideologies can at times clash.

Exactly. Well said!

Fair enough. However, if one's ideology is to support and preserve as many indie DRM-free games as possible, I believe one may well be better served by buying primarily on Steam, as many of the indie games on GOG are also DRM-free on Steam, whereas Steam has many such games missing from GOG. But then, of course, there's your argument of supporting GOG for being GOG.

To me, GOG has always been a convenience more than anything else (I know all the games here are DRM-free or still mostly are anyways, its one store to manage, convenient).

Then, I'll admit never having invested the time to research to what extent games on Steam are DRM-free.

My understanding is that you need a client to download games at all on Steam, which is a show stopper for me.

I mean, there are nice lightweight well behaved "devops minded" binaries that I'm used to that run in a well defined constrained way and then there is your usual spammy "your machine belongs to me fool" hogs you often find for the more casual users. I assume both GOG's and Steam's client fall into the later category.

Its not as bad now that I have a separate machine that I use mostly for gaming, but still.