All your criticism of GOG is out of their hand. GOG cannot sell games they are not given by the publishers and AAA publishers love their DRM. The same goes for discounts, every discount has to be agreed on both by GOG and the publisher.

As for DRM-free Steam games, can you please point out to me where I can backup the installer or download the installer without the client? Hint: you can't. What these supposedly DRM-free games have is online-activation and I remember when PC gamers were upset at publishers introducing it for retail games. But in the end they swallowed their pride and took it up their ass. If they just had said no we wouldn't have any of this discussion in the first place.

Lots of text on how Steam rocks and GOG sucks, but you still failed to answer the original question.

Damn you and your Greek philosophy!

*goes to peek in the box to see if the cat is there!

It' the first sentence: "I was initially drawn here by Fallout 2, Baldur's Gate, Jagged Alliance and Heroes of Might and Magic III (which were hard to find) when GOG was the only place that had them" That's why and how I got here.

About a year or two ago, GOG also had two sales in succession that had discounts that were better than Steam (for the same games.) I actually bought a bunch of games from GOG from those two sales. I was hoping it would become a trend. Unfortunately, it did not last. It only happened twice, and has not been repeated since then.

Anyway, my points:

(1) For the same games that are available on GOG and Steam, GOG should have the same levels of discounts as Steam/Green Man Gaming/GamersGate does. (Which has not been the case except in two sales; as a general rule, the discounted prices of GOG are higher than those on Steam.)

(2) If GOG gets an on-going series long after Steam has it, GOG should offer "incentives" for people (who can prove that they already own the series on Steam) to migrate.

Chronicles of Riddick as i recall was pretty good, but honestly i'm not big on first person shooters either so it's a curious thing i managed to beat the games back-to-back on the 360.

Maybe what i enjoyed most was just listening to Vin Disel's voice as he comments in the dark monotone tone. Although i haven't played Dark Athena recently so i totally forgot most of it's plot...

I'm just not a big fan of FPS. I played Halo games when friends lent the discs to me or buy a FPS as part of a bundle with other games I want, but I would never pay a full price for a FPS or buy a FPS on its own. The only exceptions are the BioShock series and FPS with RPG components. I have never played any game from Half-Life, or Call of Duty, Doom/Quake/Unreal or any of the popular FPS series.

You can still download the installers, even without Galaxy. It's about having the option to ignore the client. Obviously you need an account to purchase a game and you need to be online to download it, but once you have downloaded it you have a working standalone installer that is not dependent on GOG.

And how is that supposed to work? As I said, GOG cannot do anything the publishers don't agree on, so you have to complain to the publishers about that.

Let me rephrase it then.
Are the games Galaxy installs not DRM-Free, because it doesn't download an installer when you use "install game"? Or is the option of getting an installer for the game required for a game to be DRM-Free?

I don't understand people complaining about all those DRM-free stuff. Is an installer truly DRM-free ?

Maybe we should ask for a FTP server with all the files already extracted and instructions on how to create shortcuts and registry entries :)

OK, they are not DRM-free, if that is what makes you happy. I'm still fine with that as long as I can download the standalone installer. You know, having choice and stuff.

Yes, it is. Is it OS-independent? No, but not software is, so that's a moot point anyway. Ideally we would also have access to the source code of the installer so we can extract the files manually, but that's another issue, not DRM.

It doesn't, but it helps know on what basis we are talking on. You say that if a game doesn't have a standalone installer, it cannot be DRM-Free, and while I do object to that, I can accept that. I would point out though that said definition prevents most flash based games from being called DRM-Free, since they are a simple .swf file which is distributed "as-is", but if that is your definition, I respect it.

Most flash games are free of charge, so there is not much of a loss. It also depends on how the game is distributed; if you can get the SWF in a standalone Flash player (like you can do with Intrusion 2) it's DRM-free again. (Flash has its own issues though)

I was talking about a game that distributes just the .swf file, which is all that is required to play. It does distribute all the needed game files, just not wrapped in an installer. You can move the .swf file to any other computer, you can play the .swf file without any kind of internet connection, but it lacks an installer. So according to your definition, the game is not DRM-Free, because it lacks an installer.

In case of an SWF file there is only one dependency: the Flash player. In case of a game written in an actual language you need compiled dependencies (DLL files and such), none of which are documented anywhere. That is what the installer is for, it installs these dependencies on your system.