TBh GOG installers are pretty bad now. First, the compression is poor, look at serious Sam 4 v fitgirl, it’s a 50% difference in size for the same thing. When you have thousands of titles, and many are huge, this is a big issue.
Second, they are galaxyfied installers, not simply compressed like before which makes extraction more tricky.
Also, rather than centralising the libraries (dx, cpp, physx, dosbox, all of these types of things), that means they all get downloaded each time, and tend to have different versions etc. Would be better to have one pack for all games, and just games in the installer (although this is gog who can’t provide changelogs or older versions so I don’t have any hope).
There was a time when gog installers were the prize, not really anymore, size is a real issue if you back up offline.

I'm not convinced it scales the same way in the big picture of hundreds of millions of gamers. Netflix style video streaming = the content is static, pre-compressed, is latency insensitive, never changes per user or per session and can be multi-cast or cached via regional mirrored Content Delivery Network servers. For game streaming, that content is always completely unique per user, per session, has to be compressed in real-time (can't reuse content), can't be multi-cast, mirrored, or pre-cached, is highly latency sensitive and last but not least requires an expensive unique GPU per user. The hardware distribution costs for game streaming are much more expensive per user than video streaming and the entire "back-end" is very different indeed.

Another three obvious effects would be 1. Lack of choice, ie only the most popular 100-500 titles will be available to stream at any one time, with everything else being rapidly dropped as player count drops. 2. Same service fragmentation / subscription fatigue we're starting to see with video streaming ("stream all you want for $30pm! (2 years later = "That's $30pm for EA. And another $30pm for Ubisoft. And another $30pm for Square Enix. And another...", etc, which definitely won't end up cheaper for gamers if they have to pay just to retain their existing catalogue...) 3. Video quality. Unlike video streaming, local game rendering is naturally lossless and the difference in quality as bitrates start to be reduced (as we're already seeing with 1080p Youtube looking worse than upscaled 720 BluRay) will be even more pronounced. Not much of an upgrade at all.

What I suspect we're seeing now is the infant game streaming services are currently being run as "loss leaders" to test the "full media de-ownership" waters, but looking at Stadia even the mega-bucks of Google behind it is struggling to make any meaningful headway anywhere near what Youtube / Spotify did at the same stage, and simply throwing more bandwidth at it will not solve all the issues the same way it did for audio / video streaming services.

Isn't that a bit much?

Personally i'd prefer to see what steam does more as a glimpse into the future regarding age old concepts such as ' ownership ' , freedom and accessibility

Sorry, what are you referring to? I'm tired so I'm not at my sharpest right now haha.

The problem with Steam and with Valve is that they enjoy the power and money far too much to actually give two squats about the players. Thanks to concepts like Game Pass (and the general shift toward subscription-based rental of media instead of private ownership), many gamers don't care about owning the things they purchase but as for me, the DRM-free nature of GOG and other similar services are imperative to defend, share and talk about. The reason I say I'd buy exclusively from GOG whenever possible if they had the wallet cards is because I care about owning the things I pay for. I mean, sure, the likelihood that Steam will go under is very slim and the cases of them removing games/forcing you to prove ownership are extremely uncommon as well but neither of those should even be a concern. If I pay for a game, I should be able to own it, to hold on to the game files, to play it on any system that I want, whenever I want to play it. That's the beauty of DRM-free: you don't have to worry about that stuff anymore.

Well it might be playing into the hands of producers/manufacturers or market controllers but, the idea that something you can't actually do something with it except with using it for yourself still can be 'yours' or as long as the provider is able to provide might also be considered as a evolution of the race and as an impact of technology advances. With the advances of internet there is already since its first introduction began a 2d world next to the real one with its own rules and masters. Game products and later on maybe only game prescriptions seems to fit nicely in with this technology advance.

Who needs to be able to trade or sell ownership when actually everyone can have access to that similar product? if only for a penny a month ;)
Its yours because of the time investment you made towards progressing a certain goal be it fun of competitive, and of course with the bronze silver and platinum medals to show your worth

Futurists also made predictions where ownership of anything will eventually fade out of existence when everyone is able to carry their whole definition of themselves with them in bits and bytes projecting this definition where and when they like

of course any new change will meet with sufficient resistance :D

And that's exactly why Steam DRM is so predatory in a way.
While many have full time access to the internet, therefore, ways to connect and re-download their games if wanted, many doesnt.
A counter argument in favour of Steam DRMs models is that it's not likely that Steam will go bankrupt in 5~10 years+. (Only if something really heavy happens to them judicially.)

Still... Debating this in Steam forums is like punching a bee hive. Unfortunately.
What they don't see is that by accepting this, they prejudice every gamer.

who says a bottle of rose can't make you perform better?

ALL games from Steam are DRM ... at least until you install some of them.

You cannot download a game installer from Steam.

Once Steam games are installed, some can be made DRM-Free ... if you are lucky.

It can be quite a convoluted process in some cases, to make a Steam game DRM-Free, of those that can be. And if the game requires dependencies installed outside the Steam games folder, or a Registry entry, then what you backup may not be truly DRM-Free.

In many cases though, you just need to backup the game's install folder and make a little change to a file or shortcut.

If you want to save space and or make a proper installer, you would need to zip up that game folder. Though doing so may not be for the faint-hearted as it may take quite some time (size dependent) to do it properly. You likely also lose access to any updates, or you need to go through the whole backup and zip process again. You also have to hope an update doesn't remove the DRM-Free aspect. Same issues for later DLCs etc that may also have DRM.

You also need to realize that what you installed on Win 7 for instance with Steam, may not work on Win 10. Steam may have only installed what was needed to work on Win 7.

And of course, if you are going to go to all that trouble, you should check it works on another Steam free PC, which also takes even more time. No point backing up a lemon, especially as DRM-Free status can change anytime ... listings are no guarantee.

You don't get the same guarantee or simplicity with Steam DRM-Free as you do with GOG DRM-Free.

Ahh the wonderful DRM world of steam, which is why i dropped using it after trying to backup/play my games not only offline but on another computer without steam and without any credentials. Let's just say, i haven't given Valve any money since i originally joined here.

I haven't tried it myself because I don't want to contribute to their numbers, so all I can go off of is reviews on sites like Cnet or PC Gamer. In my experience they more or less praised Stadia's performance, they just hated the business model. Though I guess a lot of this is relative, i.e. I read a lot of "amazing for what it is" types of comments. Also multiplayer is a whole other bag.

I just mean in the sense of mainstream "play an hour of Assassin's Creed after the kids go to bed" gaming I think streaming subs will take off pretty quickly. That alone will likely support exclusives soon enough, at least timed ones. Heck Stadia already had exclusives.

transport police if they catch you behind the wheel! ;)

Yeah yeah, and all GOG games are technically speaking DRM'ed too, because you need an account to purchase them.
I'm with the majority here; DRM only starts after you've taken 'possession' of your purchased 'product'. DRM-free means: you buy it you keep it (it's a bit simplified, but that's the gest of it).

They gotta catch you first
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gCM3xrGBwM

Exactly!