Also, on GOG you have notifications when offline installers are updated. On Steam you need to keep games installed if you want updates. However, those games I mentioned above that I re-bought are mostly older games that don't get any more updates anyway.

I kind of have a policy where if something is under $10 I'll rebuy it here to support GOG and the principle of DRM free. I think it's mostly being stupid though, as the PC is an open platform and Steam versions will likely always be taken care of by the community if not Valve themselves. So GOG is more about the principle for me, rather than being worried about the DRM on a technical level.

In short, I think it's dumb, but I am lucky to have the money to be dumb sometimes.

I bought Daggerfall twice.

CD scratches were a problem for me back in the day.
Twice is a boring question here.

Which games have you bought three times and why?

Valve only takes care of their own games. They never take care of any 3rd party games. So if anything GOG does more maintenance than Valve ever did.

I was talking about DRM and running games in the future if Steam closes, I was not talking about whatever you're thinking of.

Well I interpreted "Taken care of" to mean "Patching". Community will release unofficial patches, sure. Valve will not. Not for 3rd party games.

This idea that Valve is going to somehow preserve our games if it were to close is nothing more than a throwaway line by GabeN. There is nothing in the EULA to suggest this and they probably have no plan for such a scenario. Even if they wanted to, they'd still need the permission from every single publisher and I doubt they would get it. It would be an administrative disaster. In fact Steam's EULA states that anything can disappear from our libraries at any point for any reason.

On the other hand, GOG already has the means to preserve our games (Offline installers) and mentions a 60 day grace period to let us download all our games, should it be forced to go out of business. All publishers who ever published here have already agreed to distribute their games via offline installers, no extra admin work needed.

I have no faith in Valve.

Mesa like that :)

Yeah, if we all only made wise decisions, each one of us would only have max. 100 games, Steam and GOG would not see a Cent from us oldtimers who still have the CD and DVD versions. And I would not have spent 120 € for Turrican 2 PC, a game that was once on a cover CD of a magazine which I bought (and lost), thereby having a market value of around 1.50€

And I agree, every (single player) game can be cracked or modified to run without DRM. Supporting a DRM platform is not always the financially wisest decision, but it helps to keep 'em coming, at least that's what I tell to myself.

I don't know who you're having a conversation with but it isn't me. The point is that if somehow Steam closes in 10 years people will make sure you can keep playing Steamworks games. Everything else is just principle.

This makes me wonder. Do you think if one day GOG were to become big enough to really rival Steam, would the latter eventually stop allocating its resources to ensure that all its games will remain playable in anticipation of the possibility that the storefront might close one day? What I mean here is that with GOG already selling DRM-free games (ofc not all of them, as there have been times when DRMs are still found in some games released here on GOG), would Valve then subtly pass that responsibility to GOG in keeping the gaming community happy with DRM-free games after Steam is no more? That said, there's always the possibility that a different company would just acquire Valve thus preventing Steam's collapse. But still, I'm interested in your opinion.

Sure, people can provide cracks and unofficial patches, but they cannot legally distribute game files if Valve were to go poof. So you'd have to install all your games, zip them up and hope they are properly portable. I imagine that would be quite a pain to deal with, if you have a large library, unless someone wrote a script to automate all that too.

Sure people could technically distribute them, but we have no such right in the eyes of the current law.

Sure we cannot distribute GOG's installers either, but at least we do not have to zip them up or look for cracks. That part is done for us by GOG. If you have a large library, you can use community scripts to automate your long list of downloads and there's no need to install them or manually archive.

While we can technically do everything that GOG does ourselves, GOG still saves us a lot of busywork and does so legally, so I think buying from GOG is more than just a matter of principle.

Should GOG ever grow large enough to threaten Valve, Valve would simply start offering offline installer service to publishers who agree, killing GOG with this one single move. Not everyone would agree, but I imagine those that are already on GOG certainly would. At that point GOG would lose the only advantage it has on Steam.

Wait, but does offline installer service always translate to DRM-free games tho (I try to focus on this part since I believe that selling DRM-free games is GOG's main selling point, unless the reason behind GOG's future potential success comes as a result of GOG abandoning this principle)? I mean there are games here on GOG where the serial keys for those games are provided separately in the library if the user ever decides to access the game's multiplayer.

If you wanna drag Hitman 2016 into this conversation, then no, offline installers do not automatically translate to DRM-Free games. In most cases all games on GOG are DRM-Free though, so DRM-Free is implied when I talk about offline installers.

It would be same with Steam. Should GOG ever threaten Steam, Valve would ask publishers if they are willing to go DRM-Free with offline installers too. Not everyone would agree, but I imagine those that are already on GOG certainly would.

I do not consider CD keys as DRM, if they can be authenticated locally without the need to go online. If a multiplayer game needs a key to be authenticated online, then you could call it DRM, but since you'd need to be online to play that game anyway, it makes this DRM irrelevant. I dislike centralised multiplayer games and prefer old-school multiplayer where players could host their games, but good luck convincing the whole industry to go back and / or offer both options. Most gamers only care about convenience, not game preservation.

Got it, thanks for your opinion! :)

GOG became my primary platform to buy games some years ago, but I still buy games on Steam, for some games I wait if they'll come to GOG, usually ask devs if there's a possibility to ever come here, if not then I buy on Steam if it something I really like.

About double dipping, totally! many games I only had on Steam I bought them here too, I still do if I get surprised by a GOG release.

DRM-Free is the most important thing for me, at the point that if I know that a new game I really wanted releases with online checks I just don't buy it even on Steam.

GOG could save us even more busywork by adding older installers as unsupported extras whenever later versions drop existing older OS support, change skill point costs or add a lot of game mechanics changing content, as downloading every installer version for each game and then figuring out if older installers are needed anymore is a massive waste of time and/or disk space, when GOG could make it so that the download script doesn't need to be left running 24/7 to ensure that you don't miss any relevant updates.

Even better would be if we had a way to tell that script to only download the extras and the "final" installers, as in barring any future remaster or newer OS version compatibility adding fixes, it seems unlikely that this or that game is going to receive any updates anymore, because then we would only need to change the script to download all the other latest installers once GOG eventually announces that they are about to close their servers in the coming months.

Now imagine if every GOG customer who has had to manually test every update on their oldest systems or buy enough hot and cold storage capacity to be able to keep everything, could spend even half of that time or money on playing and buying more GOG games without missing any vital updates, if that itself would not negate GOG's increased workload, then the fact that now even new customers could also obtain all relevant older versions of any game that has not yet been delisted should give GOG a much needed new unique selling point which Steam could not even attempt to imitate without having to finally stop forcing automatic game updates to their customers.