That's the one reason I don't use Steam. I'm not saying Valve is evil or anything like that. But GOG's transparency and commitment to DRM-free games should be the market standard.
GOG's storefront backend is also much nicer than Steam's. The latter is a dungeon crawl through like 3 different UIs, I still don't know how to navigate to the depot page reliably despite using it for years.
DRM-free was a nice idea 20 years ago, the problem is that it doesn't scale. There is just way to much media out there to keep track of and especially with games you are looking at frequent updates and patches, that your DRM-free backup won't get, unless you turn backup up a full time job to keep track of it all.
If GOG went down tomorrow, those games would be gone just the same as the Steam ones, since I gave up trying to back them up a decade ago.
On top of that, those updates can be kind of useful. None of my GOG games run on Linux, while most of my Steam games run on Linux. Also annoying: None of the GOG games run on a genuine Win9x either, as what you are getting is an updated version for modern Windows, not the original game.
Either way, I just don't think DRM-free is the proper solution for media management today or in the future. The olden days of static media are largely gone and the modern world is just way more fluid. So far none of the proposed solutions are able to capture that properly.
I'm a pretty heavy GoG customer and I disagree with a lot of this premise. Most games aren't getting updates past a year or two after their release, and the ones that are aren't DRM-free. And even if they weren't, I'd rather be able to play an older revision of a game I own than not own it at all.
Your Steam games run on Linux run due to Valve's (truly excellent) work on their compatibility layer. However, that work is not exclusive to Steam. I can play my DRM-free GoG copies of big budget Windows games just fine on Linux. There's an extra step you have to invoke, but they still run superbly. Supporting DRM-free is the best we have in an increasingly hostile customer market.
> There is just way to much media out there to keep track of and especially with games you are looking at frequent updates and patches, that your DRM-free backup won't get, unless you turn backup up a full time job to keep track of it all.
I don't want to write a redo of the infamous Dropbox comment, but if you really want to go /r/datahoarders on it, you can simply have a GOG downloader running in a monthly (or whatever) cronjob.
> None of my GOG games run on Linux, while most of my Steam games run on Linux.
That's funny, I don't have that issue at all. I have whatever GOG 3rd party client running on Bazzite do the downloading & updating for me, and the only game with which I had an issue was Timberborn.
>If GOG went down tomorrow, those games would be gone just the same as the Steam ones, since I gave up trying to back them up a decade ago.
That's a you problem. I keep mine backed up. GOG even makes it easy to just go grab the latest patch if you downloaded the base game years ago.
>None of my GOG games run on Linux, while most of my Steam games run on Linux. Also annoying: None of the GOG games run on a genuine Win9x either, as what you are getting is an updated version for modern Windows, not the original game.
Solvable with Wine/Proton (or a Proton fork). If you want to be lazy Heroic launcher makes it easy and even logs into GoG if you don't have them backed up locally. Heroic launcher lets you pick what you want to use to run the game whether it be Proton/Wine/Etc, this even works with Game-Porting-Toolkit on MacOS.
> If GOG went down tomorrow, those games would be gone just the same as the Steam ones
Absolutely not. Libraries and archives are able to keep digital copies, with limits imposed on how they may share them, not on what they're allowed to keep. They're not allowed, without a convoluted exemption, to break DRM. So if Steam disappears, we're all collectively dependent on our ability to break DRM to maintain our culture accessible. Games that use draconian authentication could simply disappear. With GOG, the only thing stopping us from having easy access is our ability to walk to our local library.
> Libraries and archives are able to keep digital copies, with limits imposed on how they may share them
Share them by bundling them with DRM[1]? Like archive.org does with books and games that you can't download, but only virtually borrow to watch in your browser (trivial to work around, but it's there nonetheless). DRM-free in a word with current Copyright isn't the solution unless you want to wait 90 years to be able to access anything.
> So if Steam disappears, we're all collectively dependent on our ability to break DRM to maintain our culture accessible.
Piracy has been preserving games since the dawn of time, so yeah, that'll continue as usual. The games that are hard to preserve are the dynamic ones, the MMORPGs that get updates every week and where large parts of the game are the player communities within it, none of which fits neatly into a DRM-free .zip file.
Your discourse assumes two things: piracy will maintain the archival part without fail and that universal access is the natural end goal. None are true.
Counting on piracy means we will lose stuff. By definition, piracy has adversaries whose job it is to stop it. We cannot count on pirates never to lose any single cultural artifact because their existence is adversarial. Archives and libraries do something legal, they keep culture alive for future generations. Waiting 90 years to obtain the right to make copies is a tradeoff. The point of libraries and archives is not to give you web access to every rom with a single click, it's to preserve culture. Access is a bonus, not the point. That's why most of a museum's collection is in their vault. What Archive.org is doing is with their collection is a compromise, and is actually criticized by many other archives who see their adversarial stance with copyright owners as detrimental to the mission of preservation.
> Waiting 90 years to obtain the right to make copies is a tradeoff.
That's a little more than a trade off, it means nobody alive today will ever experience those games. And those people 90 years in the future, probably won't care. There is no culture kept alive here, burring it all in a landfill would do just the same.
DRM-free by itself really doesn't help here. DRM-free ala GOG doesn't even allow used sales, as your game ownership is still tied to an account and can't be relinquished or transferred. And buying DRM-free games from random people without ownership track record, ain't exactly a desired good to begin with.
As far as I know, there is no used marked for DRM-free games.
You need a proper copyright reform to actually addresses all of this. Or step outside the law and go the pirate route, which actually keeps old games alive and playable.
DRM is a software layer that restricts your ability to run a given program, in this context it's specifically a form of access control. It has nothing to do with anything you just said.
DRM-free gets confused with wrapper-free or launcher-free in games. This is probably triggered by the observation that many Steam games won't run if Steam isn't running. However, this is a basic check in steamapi.dll which can be easily replaced.
> None of my GOG games run on Linux, while most of my Steam games run on Linux.
Stop spreading misinformation. Even if you're a non-techie you can add non-Steam games to Steam's launcher (my extremely tech illiterate friend just did this) and they'll run with Proton.
It comes down to a game by game basis, and it's still extremely rare (outside of recent 2025/2026 anticheat AAA title stuff) that any game would have a Linux specific/impacting patch.
Yeah, of course you can, but that isn't exactly an argument for DRM-free GOG if you need the evil Steam to get your games running, or mess around with DOSBOX, Wine, Heroic, Lutris or whatever else is the workaround of the week. If you want to jump through extra hoops you can strip Steam DRM with a few clicks too.
Meanwhile with Steam you click once and the game runs, since they jumped through all the hoops for over a decade to make that work, while GOG sat around and still hides their MSDOS games in a self extracting Windows executable, that neither runs on DOS nor Win9x.
Anyway, back to the point: DRM-free is just a teeny tiny fraction of what might prevent you from running a game.
Also it's not like GOG is digital rights management free in the purest sense: You still have to have an account and they still track what you own, it just isn't enforced at the .exe level, but it makes things like used games sales still impossible, since you can't relinquish or transfer your ownership.
Overly focusing on DRM-free just misses how the software landscape has changed in the last two decades and what things actually matter.
This is nonsense; GOG has a very simple API to list and download games you own, and all you have to do is run a downloader script (many are available online, including mine) in a cron job to keep the latest versions of games on your disk.
