skeletonbow: Purely ideologically I agree with you to a degree. The problem I see though is that sometimes our ideological views can make us take on a stance on something that is so strong that our actions end up giving us more of the exact opposite of what we stand for and I see this particular issue as one of those occasions and here's why.

There are people out there who have a hardline stance about this and they wont buy the game(s) in question whether or not they are available for sale on GOG, they're voting with their wallet and I support their choice to do so whether or not I would agree with their underlying reason personally or do the same myself. I vote with my wallet also.

There are also people out there who want a particular game no matter what, and they may prefer to buy it on GOG.com DRM-free, but if it isn't available here they're willing to buy it on Steam instead or elsewhere possibly DRM-free or possibly with DRM and while they may dislike DRM they will give in to some degree if they want the game bad enough. This is the category which I more or less fit into myself. If we can buy the game on GOG.com DRM-free, then that sends a message to that developer that DRM-free makes money, but if we can't buy it here DRM-free and it isn't available on GOG.com and we buy it on Steam instead, the message sent to the developer is twofold. Firstly, that Steam is more profitable for them, and secondly that DRM may or may not matter (depending on whether or not their game has DRM on Steam). In either case they get their money and they're not really affected in any major way by the very small minority of people who don't buy the game because it is not available on GOG.com DRM-free.

The industry more or less just sees money or no money, and goes where the money is. As an ideological force the DRM-free gaming movement is a great thing, but its members are divided into two camps for the sake of discussion, hardline we'll say - which wont buy anything that isn't DRM-free and under a specific list of various other conditions they expect, and we'll call the other group DRM-free-preferred for lack of a better term, who either are just comfortable making certain compromises, or who believe as I do that taking a very strict hardline stance on multiple issues all at once (DRM-free, regional pricing, etc.) all-or-nothing as an extreme minority just makes the big developer who may have even been contemplating going DRM-free to try it see "Oh, and you have to do THIS, and THIS, and THIS TOO or WE DON'T WANT YOUR DAMN GAME" and think "hrm, well... all that complexity and extra effort for a small minority blip of extra revenue on our radar seems like a lot of extra hassles from a verbally vocal group of activists that will probably find some other reason to boycott or reject our product anyway... let's just stick to Steam and we'll still sell to 99.9% of the market anyway, and um... lets not bother with DRM-free".

Don't get me wrong though, I think all of the issues people want to fight for here are good ones. I just strongly feel that they are all best battles fought individually so that small incremental gains can be made on individual issues in the gaming industry and momentum towards a better situation happens in baby-steps, and I think that when people take a stance on several issues all at once and as a small minority vigorously demand to a behemoth industry a list of demands an arm's length long that must all be met simultaneously or money wont be spent that the net effect is to scare away the industry who might have been ok to adopt some of the individual goals into their practice but not all of them at once, and the end result is that progress forward on any one issue moves at a snail's pace instead of seeing incremental improvements on the individual issues. I think the only way that the all-or-nothing mindset remotely stands a chance to work on such an industry is if the mindset was shared by the majority of gamers out there.

If 40/50/75% of gamers decided to not buy games unless they were DRM-free, one world pricing, no censorship, <insert list of desires/demands here> and did so highly vocally on the Internet all at once, then they might have a chance to change industry common practice, but as a very small minority of hardliners, I fear that the numbers are just line noise on the industry spreadsheets, and that they wont bother releasing DRM-free if they think it is too complicated and not worth their effort to come here. They'll just go to Steam and make Steam even more entrenched as the one stop gaming portal, and now that more and more games are starting to not only use but require core Steam services to work and some developers are not willing to reimplement those parts of their game for other services (such as multiplayer, achievements, cloud storage, etc. etc. etc.), over time less and less offerings will be available to a place like GOG.com as a result except for the odd old classic games, and games from indie developers that are the small-fries that will do whatever to get their game out for sale wherever and haven't already married it to Steam themselves.

So I totally understand and highly respect the hardline stance, but I just see it as a self-defeating movement that is throwing the baby out with the bath-water in a sort of movement of martyrdom. I hope I'm wrong, but I also hope we don't all end up having to light a candle to the hardliners from within Candle Simulator 2017 on Steam too. ;o)