this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
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Stop spreading this lie.
https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/212632089-GOG-User-Agreement?product=gog
This refers to downloading, after you donwload the DRM Free Game from Gog there is no license or online check forever, the game is just yours.
You can also do that on Steam, that doesn't make it any less piracy.
Not that there is anything wrong with that, but let's stop pretending that GOG is somehow better than Steam.
Not reliably as in Steam there is no contractual limitation on games having their own phone-home DRM plus some games are tightly integrated with Steam features (which Steam incentivizes) and don't work well offline, plus you need to known were the installers are cached as you can't just download them to a location of your choice and how to use stuff like the Goldberg Emulator otherwise only games which have ZERO integration with Steam will fully install and run offline.
In GOG, access to download the offline installers is right there in the product page in your library and contractually the games can't have any DRM as "No DRM" is GOG's unique value proposition as a games store.
Steam doesn't make it too hard to go around the phone-home DRM they put in place (making it better than just about all other phone-home DRM out there) but that's not at all the same as "here are the installers for you to use whenever you want online or offline and they're guaranteed to have no DRM".
Nobody is saying you cannot do on Steam, the big difference is that you can do that on 100% of Gog games, on Steam only on a very small percentage.
And there are other noticeable difference, on Steam you have to go through the file and backup them, on Gog you get the drm free installer for the last version of the game and any previous version that you want.
Is clear to me that on this regard Gog is much better than Steam, would be crazy to say otherwise.
Actually, FYI, you can do that for a large percentage of Steam games, maybe even most, if you use the Goldberg Emulator that replaces the steamapi DLL.
Steam DRM is one of the easiest to bypass around, and I like to think that's very much a purposeful choice.
However, the entire thing is designed for it not to be easy to do for somebody with the technical know-how of the average gamer, plus it's not reliably possible and there's no way to know upfront if it will work or not when making a purchasing decision on a game in Steam.
Meanwhile "No DRM and with downloadable Offline Installers" is literally the Unique Value Proposition of GOG as a games store - access to download offline installers is there in the games page after purchase and that installer is guaranteed to work forever and ever if you still have the hardware and OS version supported by the game.
Yeah there are ways of course, but if we insert in the discourse unofficial tool and methods to remove DRM whats the point of the discussion?
What's even the point of complaining about denuvo if we think like this? There are methods to remove that too. Any type of DRM is bad for consumer and should not be justified, doesn't really matter how hard is to bypass.
I'm just correcting that incorrect statement of yours that:
What the previous poster described is in fact possible with much more than "a very small percentage".
Mind you, I agree with you on what you just wrote in this last post of yours and in fact made the exact same point in response to the previous poster.
It's just that "very small percentage" part that I disagree - if you're technically proficient you can "hack" your way around Steam's closed system for most games since it's not really closed tight.
Then again a total impossibility of installing and running most Steam games independently of Steam if one has the right technical knowledge is not really the problem with Steam. The problem with Steam is threefold:
The whole "it's not totally impossible" thing is just a trick that the previous poster and other such Steam fanboys try to pull when confronted with people pointing out that GOG is open and Steam is not: they misleadingly equate "the dependency of games on a central system can usually be hacked around in Steam" like to like with "GOG's is a purposefully open system that sells games guaranteed to not dependent on a central system" which is something very different in terms of intention of that feature being there, how well informed a potential buyer is of it before a purchase, the ease of use of it and how guaranteed it is for that to be the case. That's deeply deceitful, not even an apples and oranges comparison but more an apples and ghosts one.