Counterpoint: Steam and Valve are amazing, they have found the sweet spot between supporting gamedevs and supporting gamers, they actively invite competition, and the golden age of pc gaming will begin to decline when gabe eventually passes on the reins
@Tak I think it's unwise to put any corporation on a pedestal like that, and like so many things Valve has their good and their bad things (eg. the increasing creep of DRM).
@joepie91 This is not putting them on a pedestal, this is judging them by their (overwhelmingly positive) actions. It's amazing that largely CDPR has managed to create this myth of "steam is drm", when the only people putting drm onto games are the game publishers.
Also, despite their name, they're a privately held company, which maybe helps explain part of why you don't see a lot of the ridiculous behavior public corporations indulge in.
@Tak Steam absolutely is DRM, and that has nothing to do with CDPR. DRM with a smiley face painted on it is still DRM (mod access restrictions, workarounds needed to get an offline copy, multiplayer service gating, etc. - these are all features provided by Steam as a platform).
@joepie91 Copying files is a workaround? What even are "mod access restrictions" and "multiplayer service gating"?
@Tak Developers can toggle mod access so that you don't have access to the workshop without having the game in your account, and to my knowledge can apply the same restriction for multiplayer matchmaking. These are all forms of DRM, as is "not giving you a stand-alone installer that can work offline and requiring you to do an undocumented file copy instead".
@Tak "Feeling like it's pretty reasonable to..." is irrelevant - it's still DRM, whichever way you slice it. You cannot play the game in full without going through Steam's authentication system. This is particularly relevant since this system usually is *instead of* local multiplayer connectivity. Whether it's 'reasonable' simply isn't a factor here, 'reasonable' DRM (by your standards anyway) is still DRM.
And I honestly have no idea what you're going on about re: updates. I'm not suggesting to provide an offline installer *instead of* the current system. I am suggesting that they should be *also* providing an offline installer. Not doing so is a deliberate choice and a form of DRM, counting on most people not knowing how to extract game files, ie. obscurity.
@joepie91 I feel like it's pretty reasonable to say "if you're going to use steam multiplayer matchmaking you need to own the game on steam", same for the steam mod workshop 🤷 . Also I notice that it's "developers can toggle".
This is kind of what I meant about them finding the balance between "good for gamedevs" and "good for gamers".
The whole "give me a standalone installer that I can run offline" thing - how does it work for updates? One of the big advantages of steam is that you easily and painlessly have everything up to date and installed on any device - whenever I get a one-off from itch or someplace, I always end up with it out of date, forgetting where it came from, having to figure out how to reinstall it on different machines, jumping through hoops to get the same version on different machines, ad nauseam.