[DRW_]

How is it different than having to use GOG's website to install a purchase you made or download an updated version?

Developers on Steam can ship their own update mechanism separate from Steam if they want to.

I feel like people don't actually know the policies of Steam and how it mostly just leaves it up to the developer, for better or worse.

If Steam decided to block developers from being able to do DRM, it wouldn't mean all the games would go DRM free, it'd mean the games wouldn't go on Steam, like they don't go on GOG - they'd go to their own launchers.

As much as people like to believe Steam has a monopoly, publishers have been able to bring out their own launchers reasonably successfully. People will go to their launchers if that's the only way to get anticipated games. Some of the most successful games started and remained outside of Steam.

The industry would look significantly different if Steam had an actual monopoly.

[johnfonesca]

>How is it different than having to use GOG's website to install a purchase you made or download an updated version?

You buy game on GOG, dowload the installers, move it to a external HDD and you can install that game forever. This is the only thing that is actually DRM free.

Needless to say, you can't to that with ANY other store (be it Steam, Epic etc). All of them requires you to install their crap to access your bought games and they don't give you full offline installers.

[badsectoracula]

> Needless to say, you can't to that with ANY other store (be it Steam, Epic etc). All of them requires you to install their crap to access your bought games and they don't give you full offline installers.

You don't get an installer but many games are DRM-free on Steam so you can just zip up the directory under steamapps/common and you're good to go. I have ~180 games on my storage HDD from Steam.

I always try to have an offline copy of every game i buy (and i try to buy them from "proper" DRM-free stores than Steam where possible) and while it'd be nice if there was an offline installer, it isn't really much of an issue in practice. The biggest issue with Steam is that you don't know if a game is DRM-free or not before buying it and trying to figure out yourself (which is why i prefer other stores like Zoom Platform and GOG in the first place).