[PaulHoule]

I made a decision to get away from other consoles and only invest in Steam a while ago. In the 2010s I was a big Vita player but Sony backed away from investing in the Vita and I saw that the kind of Japanese games I liked were coming out on Steam so I sold my Vita.

[eru]

Steam has been (mostly) a good citizen. But there's not much in the way of legal or technical hurdles to them going down the same path. It's all goodwill and reputation.

I hope it's enough.

[mjevans]

If steam ever goes up in smoke, there will be infinite justification to never trust download only ever again.

[eru]

GoG deliberately comes without DRM, so that's still good.

[fluoridation]

You can at least make local backups of your Steam games. If a game is removed such that you can't even download it anymore, you can always just install it manually.

[j1436go]

That's what GOG offers. And I'd advise anyone to use GOG over Steam for their principles alone. Every game you purchase through their platform is DRM free and they go to a lot of effort to preserve retro titles that would be difficult to play nowadays without a lot of tinkering. They also put no limitation on how many family members you can share your games with.

[dtech]

Steam has DRM,so no. Easily cracked yes, but then you can just go the full pirate route.

[Hikikomori]

Optional DRM, but essentially on by default. Could maybe consider it malicious compliance as its so easy to bypass but still allows them to check the DRM checkbox.

[fluoridation]

The point is that with Steam you have more options than with consoles.

[lordfrikk]

Not completely true, many games on Steam in fact do not have any DRM. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48755132.