More notes about Humble Bundles:

- not all Humble Bundles are DRM-free, but Humble INDIE Bundles are

- The bundles are ultra-cheap, but unlike in GOG, you end up buying same games several times from the same service due to overlapping bundles. But the very low price compensates for this, I guess. Still, quite often a HiB bundle nowadays has only one or two games I don't have already from the same service, and they are also the ones which require paying "beat the average".

- The DRM-free installers on the site are a bit of a mess compared to e.g. GOG or even DotEmu installers. Incoherent formats, incoherent naming, incoherent everything. But this is merely an extra (unnecessary) inconvenience. If you want to keep a local repository of your DRM-free game installers, the nice and tidy directory structure and files that GOG downloader client creates for you is much preferred.

- I don't really care about the extra Steam keys or Linux versions from HiB, but the extra Android versions (when applicable), I do. They are very nice, if you have an Android device (preferably a tablet). And you can get DRM-free installers for those too.

No it isnt.
Most of their games are either Steamworks/Origin or have some form of other drm like starforce or more likely securom. Only a small % of their games are tru DRM free.... many of which can be had elsewhere ie Desura

Nope, I have nearly 80 games there, and all of them are either DRM-free or with one-time activations, like serial keys or more mild versions of Securom.

Except they arent strictly DRM free.
They have a good number of Desura games, BUT also handful of Steam games for sale.

Out of a catalogue of how many games?

And as has been pointed out, they are "DRM-free" only if you do the workaround trick during the download process. So it seems the DRM-free titles there are DRM-free by mistake.


Hardly DRM-free then. And even the so-called DRM-free titles need a special workaround trick before you really get the DRM-free installer.

Note that some games on Steam have third-party DRM in addition to Steam's own DRM. Refer to The Big List of 3rd Party DRM on Steam for details of all known cases.

Excellent information all, I really appreciate it. I makes a lot of things clearer. In my book DRM-free means pretty much how GOG does it - you buy it, you get it, you own it, and it's yours forever regardless of the status of GOG. Anything that requires the vendor's server to be up, or for me to be online, or installs some kind of keystore monitor on the computer, is not DRM-free.

I stopped buying ebooks with DRM a while back, even though I've seen sites where you can get a script that rips the DRM out with almost no effort. Doesn't matter whether removing the DRM is easy or hard, I shouldn't have to do it at all, and buying something with DRM in it just encourages vendors to keep using it. And I don't need anything they're selling that badly.

This^

So when GamersGate calls some of its games "DRM-Free", it's lying. Aren't there laws against that sort of thing?

Harbinger is a great little game. I got it when it was brand new, and had a good time playing through it. It's got 3 different stories depending on who you choose to play as, and imho was a better "SpaceSiege" than SpaceSiege was :))

You could try this link. It is a community created list of all humble store games, their prices, platform availability and links to buy them.

The problem is, DRM-free is not clear cut term. While most of us use it to mean GOG way of providing DRM-free installers, others take it to mean that installed game itself does not contain any DRM. There is also depate on what constitutes as DRM. Does archaid copy protection (manual key words, ship sheets etc.) count as DRM? What about disk check? CD/licence-key? Or is it only always active rootkit type protection mechanism? Considering rootkits scale to requirements of developers (from simple CD-key or one time chekc to full blown always online limited activation systems), are they always DRM even when they actually do not actually install anything?

Cheers, I'l have a look later and see how up to date it is. At a glance it looks a bit better than the pc gaming wiki.

I do wish HS had its own front end, but I guess this is part of why they manage to give developers such a big cut, there is very little cost involved except the actual hosting.

The same goes for BMTMicro, I guess, which some indies like to make use of.

But apparantly they do offer publishers the option to put SecuRom on their games for them, which is neither a DRM of their own nor something that comes with the game as offered by the publisher. At least that's what I gathered from my exchanges with developers (Skygoblin, Telltale. Jeff Vogel). And from my experience GamersGate putting SecuRom on 3rd party games can have a really bad effect on performance or cause other issues.