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Comment by poopooracoocoo | Hacker News Reader

But that is how licensing works for Steam games (that require it). I don't want invasive rootkits, locked down software, or resource consuming software. Steam is light compared to other alternatives. The best option is to buy games from GOG (or another DEM-free store) or from publishers directly, assuming they don't have a crappy launcher. Epic Games Launcher, 2K Launcher, Riot Client, Rockstar Games Launcher, etc are awfully slow and consume a lot of memory and disk space. Steam just happens to be the lightest of them all and therefore people tolerate it more.

What Steam does isn't what annoys most. It's what game publishers do with their own launchers.

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> buy games from GOG

I wish I could agree, but nope, noooo.

My GOG account suddenly broke (500 server response upon login) back in 2016 after adding The Witcher 3 to it, and despite repeated attempts over the years to demand that they fix it and restore my games, it remains broken. All I've got are empty promises to look at it, but no results.

You’re totally right that this is bad, unacceptable customer service and worth criticizing. Don’t take my next paragraph as an attempt to downplay your problem, because I agree with your justification.

That said: unlike Steam games, your GOG games are not lost when your account gets FUBARed, so long as you backed up the installers. GOG provides that capability; Steam does not. I do back up my GOG installers, just in case I ever get locked out like this. I can’t do that with Steam.

> so long as you backed up the installers

But assuming you don't, because it would take a huge amount of space, games are lost when you lose your account on GOG as well.

You either have the games or you don't. You can't have it both ways.

With the prices of hard drives these days, anyone that truly cares about this stuff can save up and back up game installers. You don't need a fully fledged NAS server with four drive bays loaded to the brim if all you're going to do is occasionally sync the installers with GOG.

Hard drive prices are around a cent per gigabyte these days. With today's absurd game sizes, that's a $20 "keep it after the cloud service shuts down" surcharge. Not great, but not impossible to overcome either.

Nobody backs up their installers because it's much easier to just rely on cloud providers keeping around your game installers forever. That doesn't mean it can't be done if you actually care.

Yes, I remember how happy I was when GOG was announced, that a digital store with that ethos would exist. It's a shame that it has since become soured like that for me.

Steamwebhelper.exe routinely consumes 100+ MB of memory

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