vv221: To the people who honestly think that GOG is not trying to trick anyone, they are actually using a well-known and well-documented design approach:
dark patterns. You can more specifically look at the pattern named "misdirection".
Let's see you have a button called "
Download and Install" and when you click on it it... download and install the game...
Damn, that's actually the worse kind of misdirection possible a misdirection that actually does exactly what it tells you it will do! how can they keep getting away with it!
Seriously while you can complain about Gog not so "optimal" web design or often dumb ideas (e.g. the whole CP2077 rewards) but the whole "
trick" you described has less to do with some Illuminati style evil conspiracy and more to do with them wanting to avoid the extra support of needing to explain to the average Steam user how to download, install and update their games manually, which is something, for those with short (or selective) memories, that used to generate a couple of forum posts every day not too long ago.
And if peoples are interested into having DRM-free offline installer then I am pretty sure they can manage to click once on the "
Download offline backup game installers" label to expand it (or download said offline installer with Galaxy like I do) and if they cannot then it's probably better for them to continue using a client anyway.
Syphon72: Some users on these forms will disagree with you because of programs called Goldberg and Steamless. The funny thing is that more games are using 3rd Party DRM with Steam DRM. Even none AAA games.
No it's different, the two program you mention bypass Steam similar to a crack. Steam games that peoples tend to call DRM-free are those who are DRM-free out of the box, as in you can copy the install folder to any offline computer and it will run without issue. Most of them are indies (often having exactly the same binaries than the Gog version) but there are some AAA ones too even if they are pretty rare. (e.g. Jedi Fallen Order)