this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
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The drm-free marketing that gog does has been successful, but it is just marketing. While It's true that games sold on gog are drm-free, every game sold on gog that I've looked into is also drm-free on steam. The only real benefit is that the gog installers are more convenient for backups than using a steam back up tool.
You mustn't have looked at many games then. As someone who 95% only buys games from GOG, and has a wishlist of 190+ games, the vast majority of the games on the wishlist have DRM in their Steam versions.
How would you play a DRM-free game bought through steam without steam? (Genuine question)
You just run the executable
So it's possible to download the installer through steam, store it somewhere and ten years later I can just start the installer without having steam on my system?
Asking out of curiosity, I don't use steam, I never thought that would be possible?
I don't think it is because even Steam games without DRM are still modified to work with Steam for things like achievements. There may be games without DRM and without achievements but if a game has either of them it will not work without it.
I think they'll still work without Steam, otherwise you couldn't play them offline either
They work without reaching the Steam online service, but they need Steam installed.
Yeah, that makes sense. Does kinda suck.
You can copy the entire game folder and run it that way, as long as the game is actually DRM free it should work just fine.
So no installer then? Or can you download that separately?
You would use Steam as the installer, or you can buy it on GoG and they will give you an installer for the game. Entirely depends on what game you're trying to copy.
Thank you! I have about 5 games on steam, so I haven't installed it on my system. The only interesting one is Doom 2016, so for a moment I thought I could download the installer as a backup without having to use steam anymore in the future when I do want to play it again. Would have been nice. Thanks for clarifying!
Steam isn't DRM. They offer a (very weak and basic) DRM for free for developers to use but they don't have too.
For a lot of games you can just install them using steam and then uninstall steam and the games will continue to work.
GOG is also a filter too. Everything in the whole store you know is DRM free when with other stores you have to check each game individually.
Steam is also a form of DRM in most cases though either way.
No, Baldur's Gate 3 is a cracked release on the steam version.
it's a weird case where it only uses steam API and does not hard check it. It attempts to check if the currently associated steam account is allowed to play it and shuts down if you don't, but does not do anything else if it can't detect an account (such as if you have no steam) and launch normally.
Not saying you're wrong, but there's a lot of peace of mind in knowing everything on the platform is drm free, rather than having to do some research. So it is marketing, but it's also a promise of curation so to speak.