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Comment by pdpi | Hacker News Reader

It’s important to take Steam DRM in context. In a world where DRM was becoming more intrusive by the day, and you had to contend with every game having its own unique way to mess your system up in its fight against piracy, Steam provided one single DRM system that almost everybody agrees to use. For consumers, worse than no DRM, but miles ahead of the status quo it replaced.

Also, Steam does have an offline mode. You just have to ping the mothership every few weeks iirc.

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To add to this, the original Witcher is the game that made me decide I was never again going to install a game directly. It was going to be steam or gog, and I've kept to that over the years with few exceptions (rpg maker games, etc).

As a freelance developer I would run vmware with a dedicated partition for the VM. The VM was linux and the partition itself was either ext3 or reiserFS (can't remember).

Since Windows didn't recognize the partition, the DRM for witcher repartitioned that drive so it would have a "secret" partition to track who knows what.

That affected my ability to earn money and was doing things to my PC I would never have accepted if asked.

compared to that, steam is a godsend. I understand people complaining about steam, but to this day I'm still a huge fan of steam for what it forced the gaming industry to accept.

I still prefer GoG due to its policies, but steam is fantastic.

You can download all 3 Witcher games without DRM after buying them on GoG. Did you have the standalone version? I don't understand why they put a DRM in it.

This was back when Witcher first released, they removed the DRM at some point.

Here are a few links referencing it.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/33250/discussions/0/558752451...

https://www.gog.com/forum/the_witcher/tags_drm_in_the_witche...

In some ways, Steam has provided an experience better than having no DRM. I can hop in a friend's computer and download any game I've purchased. Or I can delete old games to free up space and redownload them later (without having to deal with DVDs or external USB drives).

The tradeoff is handing over the control of my game library to a company. I can see how that tradeoffs can be compelling to some and not worthwhile to others.

The thing is Valve is the sort of company that has built that elusive relationship - trust - so much so that I would expect them to arrange for some way to keep people most of their games if the service was shutdown, and if they didn’t, it would be a surprise.

If Valve ever stabbed me in the back I could just pirate my library back, so I'm not that worried.

Yeah it feels like people forgot about the Sony Rootkit DRM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...) that ended up exploited by malware.

It's also important to remember that SteamWorks DRM is optional. There are many games that will work without steam installed.

Most of the games from big studios still use their own DRM on Steam because Steam DRM is worthless, I can crack it in 5 seconds for any game on steam, that's why you often see games that have Steam+Denuvo or Steam+CustomDRM.

I use gog.com instead of steam where I can. They provide DRM free installers for all their games (this may have changed more recently not sure).

Anyway gog is really great :)

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