It's relevant because a lot of people do like Steam, and making Steam more DRM-free is a good goal.


Why single out Steam when GOG has the same policy?

I actually have a problem with ALL policies like that.

However, smaller digital businesses don't hold the same power as massive monopoly businesses such as Steam.

The difference is that STEAM could shoulder the cost of refunds, and still be the most profitable business by far. In fact, it would be chump change to issue refunds.

Furthermore, STEAM has the power to laugh in the face of the developers they control. Steam could say to the developer, "I will not be paying you for all the copies that resulted in refunds, because we refunded your product due to the fact it was faulty. That is your fault."

What will the developer do? Pull from Steam and lose out millions of dollars, bankrupting themselves? Take Steam to court and kill their company by instantly being blacklisted on Steam? Even if they won the case of a few hundred dollars, they'd lose out millions upon millions (huge amounts for every game they ever make, that isn't allowed on Steam).

Steam has power over developers. In fact, some indie developers live or die based on if they are Greenlit, because that is their market strategy. There are actual games which "fail" due to Steam saying "No thanks, we won't sell it." That is the developer's fault for making a strategy that relies on Steam, but still. The point is that Steam has the power AND the money, to treat customers with excellence...which would net them EVEN MORE MONEY!

GMG and GoG more than likely have these policies to keep themselves competitive, because they are much smaller than Steam, but compete with it.

Steam has these policies to lose money in long term profits, so they can take a significantly smaller amount in short term gains.

That's why. But dont' for a second think I support any of these customer unfriendly policies, for any business. However, developers could pull from GoG or GMG and they (GoG/GMG/etc.) would suffer GREATLY for it. So they have less power over developers. Also, their percentage of profits would be cut by a more significant percentage for giving refunds or paying developers for games they refunded, than would Steam.

Yeah, good one bro, at this rate Steam will be %100 DRM-free in about 100 years. It would only make a difference if Valve mandated removal of DRM on all Steam titles, except for a simple authentication when you purchase the game. If you think all publishers (or hell even developers) are going to give up DRM without being forced to, you're crazy.

The vast majority of DRM-free games we have on the market now are DRM-free because of mandatory DRM-free policy, not voluntary. GOG doesn't allow DRM on products, and even for indies they are subject to their fans directly to buy their games, who demand no DRM or a simply serial check for installation. In addition basically the number 1 demand for Kickstarter funded games is DRM-free versions. If they didn't accept this, they wouldn't get the money from backers.

Ubisoft lost up to 90% of their PC gaming business due to DRM policies like always-online, which is probably the reason they are even on GOG today and why their own client has less obtrusive DRM than Steam.

Hell, didn't MS recently give up on the internet check DRM on the new Xbox recently because of pressure? It is possible to force companies to give up DRM, it's just that no-one is forcing Steam to do anything, they are letting them walk over the entire PC gaming community. Purely due to the sycophancy of the Steam fanboys.

gog is no longer an underdog, it is now something like the 4'th largest download site, and the 2 or 3 largest DD store.

GMG is not very big tough, I will give you that :)

Or, to put it a different way, Steam users are generally happy with Steam as it is.

Sycophancy implies that Steam fans think that it helps their case with Steam, which I don't think is the case. People are fans because they find the service convenient, and most posts in favour of Steam, at least in this part of the interwebs, feel more rational than some of the anti-Steam ones.

Is it justified to vote for convenience over principle? That's a good question. Probably not one that will spur a good discussion, but still a good question.

Steam would never voluntarily become DRM-free unless publishers move in that direction. Valve wants the biggest selling games there, and big publishers want DRM. Valve offers them its DRM, and it's a good marriage in most cases, unless the publisher prefers to open its own store to compete with Steam.

Well, you would think even beginning to dismantle third-party DRM on Steam would be an improvement, and just use Steamworks, but I doubt even that will happen any time soon. As a multi-billion dollar company they could just flex their muscles a bit to accomplish this and score a significant win for consumers, but they won't presumably because they don't want to rock the boat.

In PC you have to always look the requirements. There are some which doesn't work really, mostly old games. Like Jedi knight 1 for example. I just get some weird colors. I don't really blame Steam, basically just too old and annoying game.

Who wouldn't have had problems in GOG games? I mean they are old.. =)

In fact when I pre-ordered Witcher 2 it didn't even originally have so basic stuff that you could customize your controls and those some resolutions are still badly implemented. So that game wasn't playable till later weeks/months.
In fact some new Indie games doesn't have those. Simple stuff.. And a horrible oversight.

One gripe in Steam is GTA IV latest patch which in my machine made it horribly slow and crap. Tried it couple of times and there is a way to undo that but it passed that point for me that I'll never want to download it again. But it's Rockstars fault making a crappy patch. So modding a game is usually harder.

Haven't contacted any steam support ever because that's how many problems I've had with it. Pretty much none. So I don't know how arrogant bastards they are, prob no more than goggers blaming others for playing games which have some DRM and ruining game industry. =)

I like games which support widescreen and are well optimized and has some FOV options (too many games have nowadays horrible that), that goes no matter where I buy it. Steam doesn't force game makers to be lazy and make some shitty port but they still do.

I would like games being DRM-free of course but like I would wait years some new game to get there.
I'm too old already. =)

Hmmm. Surely I also don't like Steam much, but you don't like them checking for updates? Well many other softwares including Windows do it also. And the startup menu you don't really need, you can have shortcuts for all/most games on the desktop as usual. And SimCity 4 would probably be incompatible with your system even if Steam never existed.

So all in all there is little that is related to Steam or Steam's unique functions. A bad-looking start menu - that can happen with almost every programm.

LOL!

Sometimes I really love little one-liner's like this. Thanks for giving me a laugh this morning. ;-)

Post of the day! :D

the op's a joke. if you quit Steam because of compatibility issues (SC4 runs just fine on my W7 machine, as does every other game I've ever bought on Steam, old or new) you're going to hate this place. there are plenty of games on GOG that have huge compatibility issues with modern systems.

I play mostly small indie games these days.

I was playing this one game once, I think it was called Life. Has anyone here played it?