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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

I made a decision to get away from other consoles and only invest in Steam a while ago. In the 2010s I was a big Vita player but Sony backed away from investing in the Vita and I saw that the kind of Japanese games I liked were coming out on Steam so I sold my Vita.

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Steam has been (mostly) a good citizen. But there's not much in the way of legal or technical hurdles to them going down the same path. It's all goodwill and reputation.

I hope it's enough.

If steam ever goes up in smoke, there will be infinite justification to never trust download only ever again.

GoG deliberately comes without DRM, so that's still good.

You can at least make local backups of your Steam games. If a game is removed such that you can't even download it anymore, you can always just install it manually.

Steam has DRM,so no. Easily cracked yes, but then you can just go the full pirate route.

Not completely true, many games on Steam in fact do not have any DRM. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48755132.

The point is that with Steam you have more options than with consoles.

Optional DRM, but essentially on by default. Could maybe consider it malicious compliance as its so easy to bypass but still allows them to check the DRM checkbox.

That's what GOG offers. And I'd advise anyone to use GOG over Steam for their principles alone. Every game you purchase through their platform is DRM free and they go to a lot of effort to preserve retro titles that would be difficult to play nowadays without a lot of tinkering. They also put no limitation on how many family members you can share your games with.

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