Thanks for proving my point.

+1

Just a little example. I bought the GOG Version of Legend of Grimrock. Im fine with it, but short after my purchase they announced support for Steam Workshop and i would love to use this but i am out due to strictly DRM-free... Every digital retailer, except GOG, offers Steam Keys for Grimrock.

Old games from GOG? Ok. Games like Deponia? Ok. But i will not buy new games again wthc might get Mod and Steamworks Support. To be honest, i like the whole DRM-free thing, but if DRM-free offers less than Steam....

You seem confused. Let's take it again, you claimed: and The DOS games I had already two decades ago mostly work just great even today, _without buying them again_, or even tweaking them (unless you feel running them through an emulator called DOSBox is "tweaking". The original game files are still exactly the same as back then).

If your point was supposed to be that e.g. DOS games cannot be run on Windows 8 without using DOSBox, gee, I guess you are right there. Completely irrelevant point, but still true I guess. :D

Usually the only games that will not be future-proof are those with DRM, heavy copy protections etc. That's why your whole Steam game library will become obsolete over time, except the ones which can be run without a Steam client, or the ones that Valve/game publishers keep updating to work on all future OSes where you'd run them.

Same goes for console games, Amiga games etc. (usually only the DRM-free pirated images of them run on emulators today, not the original copy protected games).

This is actually a trend I find deeply disturbing. I'm not against DRM per se, and titles using Steamworks are fine, but demanding everything to have Steam keys included by people is putting Steam into a way too powerful position on the market.

Of course this is tweaking. What happens if nobody is able and interested in Dosbox Development anymore?

And old simple DOS Games are one thing. There is a huge gap and problems with the first Windows Games without a Windows 95/98 emulator out there...

Your DOS games don't work without using Dosbox, exactly. Something extra needs to be done or they don't work anymore.

20 years from now, your GOG library will probably be vastly outdated, with a dosbox that doesn't work properly anymore. In other words, it will have to either be updated, or you will need an outdated system, or you will need someone to have done the work for you (either emulator (possibly requiring purchase or install/configuration at least) or GOG style enhancements)

Either way, your GOG library is still just as OS dependant and hardware dependant as those DOS games are.

Edit: Perhaps the word 'Tweaking' threw you off? I don't mean amending the original files. Just getting it to work properly on a new OS.

The fact that every game nowadays uses Steam, is because it is free for them. Once that would change, the trend would die as fast as it came up.

That's against Steam and most other DD EULA, officially you cannot transfer you account to anybody else. (even thought it might be legally possible in the EU)

Inheritance is not covered by this, even in the US.

(I think in the US it is even stronger than here).

Yes, of course you will either have an old Windows machine around, or a virtualized/emulated environment. Just like today we have such emulators and virtualizations for almost any old system, even very obscure ones.

That still doesn't make your claim any more true that the GOG collection will be obsolete, or that you'd have to rebuy them again anyway.

At the same time though, the older Steam-dependant games will refuse to work, even if you have an emulator or a virtualized environment for the games.

By that time they will be cracked and repackaged a dozen times, the same way today you can't find some old games with their protection intact.

Most of them are already :D

Well, it's a hard thing to prove either way since I simply think it will have an effect (we'd need to be able to see into a parallel dimension where they didn't do this bundle to actually check anything).
Thus I don't think I can ever say I was wrong or right.

All it takes is one or two SOPA like law to pass for this possibility to become either impossible or very hard. Not to mention that it's only possible for games that are actually "crackable" if more and more games starts being online only or having more and more online only "features", no amount of cracking and repackaging will help you.