Honestly, I'm continually surprised at how badly people miss this even as, e.g. Sony et al just take away stuff you "bought."
So, to put directly. Do not reword it, you will screw it up.
You must be able to hold it in your hand.
I digitally own SimCity 3000 Unlimited from Gog. The copy lives on my NAS. The NAS could break, sure, but so can a CD.
Can I hold it? Well, sort of. The same way I can back up my physical CDs to a hard disk, I can also back up digital things I truly own to a CD/DVD/BD or other media.
As long as the thing I'm holding in my hand is all I need to be able to make use of what was given to me at the point of sale, I see no issue.
On the other hand, Valve, who I think most would agree is a company that has been on the less bad side of digital distribution for the most part, has sold "physical" copies of games that actually still required Steam to install and use. And in that case, from the layperson's perspective, it sure seems like you can hold it, and yet you don't own it.
So IMO this argument just doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
Not really an issue these days but it certainly was back in the day
It's the steam version, but Crusader Kings also hangs for a bit if you block it's network access
- The Steamworks DRM, which is a lightweight EXE packer. Seems about as simple as UPX. Presumably it goes and checks that you own the app ID via Steam RPC on startup.
- Checking that the user owns the app ID via the API. A simple check that's pretty simple to bypass using a Steam emulator.
- And then finally the ticketing system, which allows third-party servers to validate that a user owns a given game according to Steam.
Of them the ticketing system is the most serious: it's something you can't really bypass easily. However, it also is only applicable to things that require servers. I know in Valve's own games, its only something that comes up with game servers, and I don't even know if it's forced on in their dedicated server. It seems like a stronger version of dedicated servers that used to have CD key checks.
DRM is DRM, and these mechanisms impact your ability to use things the way that you should be able to. That I would never deny. However, I will say that because it's relatively lightweight, for software that sticks to just what Steam offers and doesn't try to get creative, they're mostly only going to prevent casual piracy, and I think the main purpose of these mechanisms is mostly to just clear the technical bar for being a copy protection mechanism by law. When it comes to preserving these games beyond the end of the Steam service, it probably won't be a big deal, and it will actually be third-party DRM options like Denuvo and SecuROM that are harder to deal with and could potentially pose a threat for preservation and keeping access to games you own.
So while I don't really like Steam DRM, severity matters. If "no DRM" was just simply not on the table, I'd take Steam-native DRM as a good second choice. It is still a problem that it is technically illegal to break those locks to just be able to use something you bought with your own cash, but I think that's something we need to fix in the law, and I think we can, and honestly, despite the direction things are going, I do believe we will. Just a shame that I'm less sure I'll live to see the day at this point.
Having to crack things at all just to play them is bad. But, if it's easy to do it yourself, it is still better than going the route of downloading stuff from dubious sources. There's a whole ecosystem you have to understand to know what you can trust with piracy and not everyone knows where to look.
For the ticketing system, it's kind of a non-issue because that's a server-side mechanism. If a game requires that, it requires a server and won't work offline at all anyway.
For Denuvo, SecuROM, Themida, VMProtect and others... Yes, that stuff is an actual threat, but Valve doesn't make people use those. (Valve also doesn't make people use Steamworks for DRM either, and there are in fact games in my library whose Steam depots are free of any DRM at all and happily run outside of Steam with no Steam needed.)
Not to the user it isn't.
How big of a difference this makes definitely depends on the kinds of games you play. Obviously the triple A games on Steam are, with rare exception, DRM'd to the gills. The older games and indie games, a lot less so, sometimes none at all.
You have to check of course, but probably a good idea to do so before trying to find cracked/pirated versions.
You mean legal ownership, right? Because people can illegally take your physical belongings.
If you don’t keep a copy of the game yourself, and one day you can no longer access it because GoG ceases to exist, that doesn’t mean you never owned it. It just means you failed to back it up. You could also fail to backup a CD when it inevitably stops functioning.
I thing the word you are looking for is possession. When something is physically in your possession, it does not mean, that you have "physical ownership", that requires you to have actual ownership, which is defined by the law, so "legal ownership".