VWood: Thank you for that article.
It does go to show how dangerous the idea of licensing could become. I think our world hasn't come to grips yet with the idea of digital media and the corporations that sell these products are abusing this fact. They are essentially knowingly claiming more rights than they have.

I understand the difficulty surrounding re-sale, but the problem is that those companies are infringing the rights of everyone to attempt to stop the few who may infringe their rights (and their profits).

I think GOG and others are currently doing a good job of showing that the first-sale doctrine and the idea that you own what you buy will apply to any medium. It seems more and more people are taking note, hopefully the trend will continue.

MightyPinecone: Have they? Have you ever sold one of the games in your gog library to someone else? I'm not aware that the first-sale doctrine applies to the games in our libraries.

VWood: Good fundamentals bear repeating.

I read the list of DRM-free games for Steam and what I noticed is that their definition of DRM-free is that you can install the game from steam and then run it without needing to ever log in. This, however, is still DRM since you can only use those files on that specific PC, unless you download it again on another PC (i don't know what their policy is on install limits).

nightcraw1er.488: I am not really disagreeing here, having to have the steam client installed would be an annoyance, but is it drm, as long as if you have the game installed and it runs without requirements? The reason I say that it is a nuisance rather than actual drm is, all software has some other components installed, games from gog contain galaxy dlls, steam dlls, probably other stuff. So long as you can pick up the game package, back up, use on any system, and not need to be connected, then the software is totally under your control - and this is really where it is at. Anything at all which takes any control of the product away from the user is - and I wont use the term drm - removing the users rights to manage their product as they want.

SirPrimalform: In that instance it's not just a question of having Steam running, but of Steam granting you permission. That's what makes it DRM, the gatekeeping aspect.

hummer010: I don't have the steam client installed on my computer. I'm a Linux user, so my workflows might be a little different than most, but here's how things work for me steam vs. gog:

Steam:
- Check and make sure the game is on the "works without the steam client" list.
- Fire up SteamCMD and download the game. Exit SteamCMD.
- Play.

GOG:
- Fire up lgogdownloader and download the game. Exit lgogdownloader'
- Install the game.
- Play.

Neither one requires a client or anything running at play-time.
Both wind up with a file or set of files that can be moved to other computers, and can be played without a client or anything running.
Both download clients require a user name and password to download the files.

Seems to me that if GOG is DRM free, then so are the Steam games that are on the list.