Well, I undertand you were not up to date with the forum here, but, you know, when the Steam/DRM threads tops the saturation quota for the week, "the community" starts to get a bit pissy...

And yet I AM the paranoid for not buying that crap?!? I do not follow. If you can help...

I have a walled of computer at home and some at work (both for security reasons). But I do not play fucking games on them. And if somebody would even wave a gamepad at one of them, they would be in big trouble.

Having a gaming machine (heck, this even goes for consoles) in 2012 that doesn't have an internet access is either antiquated or eccentric. Both of which if fine by me, but this isn't really the target group of game developers. What comes next, people complaining about missing Win 98 compability? No 3dfx support?

Normally I would say, if you want to play offline, go console, but that train already has left the station. Which I consider a lot worse, the selling point of consoles was the "plug and play" mentality that you get a game that works without any hassle out of the box. Nowadays, with patching and DLC consoles have lost one of their main selling points.

I myself asked that same question a week ago. I got the impression that when the game is already installed and activated and so on, the game would work even if ISP would screw up and you wouldn't have internet access for a while or something like that.
But pretty much if we use digital service like this or that, better have constant internet.

Infact I'll have to try that steam thing at some point.

And what we would do if we couldn't instantly chat in steam how we hate that game which was 2,49 € in sale.

I'm not a fanboy of steam but since it is really cheap to buy there I have lots of games in it.
I don't know what you guys do wrong but every game I tried to play in the offline mode worked perfectly. You just need the internet connection to download the game and maybe run the first time, don't remember quite well.
And when I was using linux along side with my windows I just downloaded and installed everything through linux and saving in the windows C: drive.
Everything worked really well.

I too have a walled-off PC, but that is specifically for retro gaming and only has Windows 98 and DOS 6 on it. DOS 6 hardly sees any use these days thanks to DOSBox, but Windows 98 does get a bit of use for older Windows games. The reasons why the network cable stays unplugged on that one should be obvious, and as soon as reliable Windows 98 emulation becomes possible, that PC will probably be sold or given away.

Give it 3 or 4 years and the retro gaming compatibility situation will shift up a gear. Microsoft will be ceasing any and all security updates for Windows XP in 2014 and keeping an XP box safely on the net will then also become increasingly difficult.

The cycle goes on and on. Vista's EOL isn't so much of a problem because it is to Windows 7 and 8 as Windows 95 was to Windows 98 - practically no difference in the compatibility department - but there's no telling where Microsoft will take Windows.

Nobody's demanding that modern games continue to be Win98 or 3dfx compatible in this day and age (this kind of hyperbole used commonly by Steam apologists in general on this board is indicative of the weakness of the pro-Steam arguments).

It is not, however, wholly unreasonable to demand that the games that we buy continue to work on the platform that we bought them for. If I buy a game in 1994 for a DOS PC, I expect it to work on a DOS PC 10, 15 years down the line, hardware failure notwithstanding.

I built that Win98 machine four years ago collected from old spare parts bought off eBay specifically for the purpose of retro gaming. The games still work because I do not need to connect to any servers or sign into anything to play it. The most serious problem I've had in this regard is the loss of the NFS3 DLC - a few measly cars - since the servers went down.

You surely see the problem with Steam there then, not forgetting that Valve will eventually pull support for XP and that there are numerous games on Steam that will not work on anything except XP or below (Jedi Knight to quote a known example, other games like KOTOR also have severe problems on XP).

When the Steam client ceases to support XP, you are basically faced with the problem of having no Steam access on XP (which at that future time shouldn't be on the net in the first place anyway), and having games that only work on XP in your Steam account. And as I say, we're not talking a decade down the line, we're talking 3-5 years, a short space of time in a community that happily pays for and plays games that are 15-25 years old.

Jedi Knight works fine on Windows 7 64bit.

yup yup works good for me, ATI GPU here...

From my limited experience, Windows 7 is quite capable of running everything that XP could run. Those pesky 16 bit installers are a problem however. But since I'm going "full GOG" and there are enough new games to keep me entertained, It's not as bad.

If you don't mind me asking, I'm curious from a cognitive science stand point; What kind of community did you expect GOG to have? If you could be as detailed as possible in your response that would be great. Thanks.

Yeah, 16bit installers are my main problem as well. Those and whatever engine Lucasarts was using in the Shadows of the Empire days.

I agree on most of this post, but who will make a XP compatible worm in 2014? With a good hygiene (not using IE or Outlook...) and a NAT-router, most threats aren't a big problem even now. Hey, how many virii are still Windows 2000 compatible?