But right now we have them, GOG has not made their Galaxy client mandatory (yet). So I am still OK shopping there. Like I can shop at Humble, itch, or other stores that deliberately provide offline installers.

The day one of these shops stops providing DRM-free offline installers without the requirement to go through some third-party client, I would stop buying there. For Steam, it was the day they opened their store ;)

I know I could get games from Steam, EGS or most other client-based stores through workarounds to avoid using their clients, but I don’t want to support these stores with my money. (to be fair, GOG heavy push towards Galaxy is making me hesitant, they do not seem to be far from joining the "Valve & friends" team)

So where I draw the line is not at the ability to get games without a third-party client, but at the store actively supporting this. It Valve wants my money, they need to start providing DRM-free offline installers that can be downloaded by any Web client (Web browser, cURL, whatever I chose) and can then be installed and run without requiring any kind of third-party software.

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I fully agree with that. And this is the main reason why, despite what I wrote in my answer to mrkgnao, I would not buy games from Steam even if they actually started to propose DRM-free installers.

Valve has done huge damage to the whole video games industry by making DRM something that "looks cool" to a lot of players. This is not something I could forget.

Fair enough. I don't understand the distinction, but I respect your approach.

At the moment I'm effectively boycotting every store, but as things currently appear, if I ever lift the boycott, it seems more likely that I'll be buying games on Steam than on GOG, because if I'm to receive poor service, I might as well pay a lot less for it and have the games be up to date, rather than the other way round.

Not boycotting but Steam is in my lowest priority as it stack DRM from other clients (Uplay, Origin...) ... I look for drm-free version, then exclusive to each storefront if there isn't and i really want that game asap...

I don't boycott Steam but despite having around 100 games on it, I never paid a cent through it. Don't even have a payment method registered. All the games are either registered retail copies (most of them) or freebies.

This would definitely be nice. Not only for preservation but many times, patches can make some balancing or gameplay changes that may not be to everyone's liking. I still vastly prefer the old method, where you bought the retail game version 1.0 (or close to it) and then patched it yourself with a separate downloaded patch. You can read the patch notes for each patch and decide what you want. This choice is not available anymore as every digital storefront will just give you the latest version and that's it.

For example, if Battle for Middle Earth 1 is ever re-released, it will 100% be the 1.03 version. But after playing through the game on 1.02 and 1.03, I can confidently say that the 1.03 patch ruined the balance and made many questionable changes. They absolutely ignored campaign balance and made changes strictly for multiplayer. Luckily, I can patch my retail copy to whatever version I like but people would be stuck with 1.03 if it released digitally.

Well, I have started to boycott GOG because they now allow DRM in their single-player games. So of course I keep boycotting Steam as well. DRM-free (and therefore not buying on Steam and their like) was what brought me here.

Have you tried any of the unofficial patches that came after 1.03?

Considering I had steam from day one (back in 2003 or so), I don't see it as something doing damage. If anything, it has changed the gaming industry away from optical media dependency with various stupid DRM systems that existed long before steam. Steam simply changed the whole system of game distribution, it is not the devil you make it out to be, it's the driver of innovation - even if steam itself don't make something new, someone else will just to compete with them. DRM will exist whether or not steam is present, steam only offered one of the many forms of it.

boycotting doesnt work , spreading information does

I did try 1.06 but quickly dropped it. The main reason was that one of the previous patches (1.04) increased the frame rate to fix some multiplayer issues. The original game ran on 30 FPS and the engine is tied to it. In multiplayer, it could sometimes lead to movement commands being eaten when there were a lot of units. So they increased the frame rate, which however lead to speeding the game up noticeably. Some animations obviously looked too fast. Lurtz looked stupid for example. I never had a problem in the single player or campaigns, which is all I play. I am used to the normal game speed and I'm not about to re-learn that just because of a massive change for the sake of multiplayer. The 1.06 patch also requires 1.03 of course so I quickly went back to 1.02

I think I posted here, ages ago.
Well, I still haven't bought anything from Steam since late 2013.

Can't remember whether I posted in this thread before. But I can say that all games that I bought and that use steam are retail versions. I never bought any game from steam directly.

just around 1 million inhabitants

just checked the preliminary numbers for 2020 and it says

50875 crimes in total which makes for about

4239 crimes per month on average

so about 141 crimes a day

of which 16 are sexual assault , 0.4 are actual rape and

7 violence ...

the actual numbers are a tad higher since i'm looking at the numbers per specific charge

you have public violence, destruction of public property, violence in home a combination of violence and sexual harrasment etc etc etc

I don't really like the term boycott nor do i consider myself boycotting them, I just don't buy DRM'ed games and with 99% of the 30K titles or so being tied to the client i simply do not buy games from steam and tbh they haven't done anything to get drm free games either since a lot of games are drm free on GOG/Epic but not Steam.

If steam would try to get more games that run without the client then i wouldn't have anything against buying there. Boycott comes across to me as doing something out of spite far too often but not always ofc like when someone boycott to try and force a change that they consider better. Buying on steam simply runs counter to my interest in drm free games, it is as simple as that so nothing personal against them.

I like the comparison one person is doing with DRM made to protect corporates from...people who wouldn't have bought the game, and crimes everyday people suffer from. The false equivalency is astonishing in this one. Major difference between trying to protect from piracy (and failing so utterly bad that you just have stores with "no DRM" as a selling point), and efforts by law enforcement (when it doesn't turn on the people) to protect innocents from criminals.