[shmerl]

> I think what you mean is that DRM is like the police, and bad DRM is like a police state.

I see any DRM as bad / police state like.

Policing can be good when it serves the proper purpose and doesn't cause other problems. Overreaching policing is bad however. I.e. preventing crime in general is good. Putting police surveillance in every home to do that is bad. I already explained above why any DRM is always overreaching. I.e. presumption of guilt and violating one's digital space. In case of Steam, its DRM is run on your computer, so it's analogous to putting policing mechanisms in your own house.

What kind of DRM does not have these characteristics? I know of none. DRM is defined as such, and as such is always bad.

[freehunter]

I know I'm wasting my time, you've made it clear that your opinion won't be changed, but just know that not everyone agrees with you. Steam is DRM, and that's not a bad thing. You can have a local police department without existing in a police state.

[shmerl]

> You can have a local police department without existing in a police state.

Feel free accepting a local police department dedicated solely for policing you located inside your own house. Or for example, imagine yourself with ball and chain, or some kind of electronic device attached which limits what you can do in your own house as if you are a criminal. Others find it completely unacceptable. That's exactly why it's police state like and it seems that you don't get the point.

[Natsu]

People are more accepting of Steam because it has other benefits (e.g. keeping drivers up to date) and most of the drawbacks are as bad or worse outside of Steam, other than the pirate editions.

That said, you're right that there's something a little off about accepting other people monitoring what you can do in your own home with your own property.

[shmerl]

> People are more accepting of Steam because it has other benefits (e.g. keeping drivers up to date) and most of the drawbacks are as bad or worse outside of Steam

That's why GOG has a good chance to provide a strong competition and actually change the landscape for the better. Comfort of usage with no DRM would be a clear contrast to other services and can eventually prompt them to ditch DRM as well.

[Karunamon]

I imagine the number of people that are philosophically opposed to DRM (rather than practically) is asymptotic to zero.

GOG's going to have to out-feature and out-customer-service Valve, because the Steamworks DRM is transparent enough that most people are not going to see that as a valid selling point.

[shmerl]

> I imagine the number of people that are philosophically opposed to DRM (rather than practically) is asymptotic to zero.

GOG think otherwise. And GOG users confirm that. Visit GOG forums and find out for yourself. Unsurprisingly, many GOG users don't use Steam at all. Whether that is because of ethical or practical reasons doesn't change the fact that they don't. GOG know what they are doing and know their audience as well.

[Karunamon]

What is Steam's DRM limiting me from doing? Every possible limitation that every other DRM system has that I can conceive, they've already addressed in some way.

You keep bringing up "limits" and "preventions", yet I am at a complete loss to describe anything that Steam meaningfully does along those lines. Even the incredibly broad fair use arguments that could be made against other systems don't work here.

Actually, come to think of it, not every game on Steam uses Steam DRM (aka Steamworks).

[shmerl]

A significant amount of games on Steam require you to run the client to play them (i.e. no service - no game). Also, you can't use Steam backup tool without being connected to the service (or more exactly, you can't install games from that backup).

While technically, some games which don't require the client to run can be manually copied to back them up, Steam forbids using them in the TOS if you don't have an active account. Now imagine a scenario when you have hundreds (or more) games in your library, and such kind of DRMed service just goes bust. Having no access to all those games would make all the downsides of DRM so much more clear, though it would be quite late already.

Either way, Steam is clearly geared towards DRM approach. In contrast, GOG doesn't require anything like that, and neither enforces anything like that. Once you bought some game, you can back it up all you want and install / play it regardless whether your GOG account continues to exist or not.

[Karunamon]

Actually, offline mode is a thing. You still go through the client, but the service being available is neither here nor there.

However, I find that the client offers enough on its own (the in-game overlay, mostly) that I'm more annoyed when I can't get it to work with a game. I have re purchased games I already owned on physical media and other ways to get the Steam integration (and I'm not alone there).

Steam going bust, in addition to being really unlikely, would be a mild annoyance at best, since bypassing it is a simple matter of replacing a DLL.