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Comment by optforfon | Hacker News Reader

How are logging in and installing someone's software even remotely similar?

I personally find Steam, buggy, ugly, intrusive and effectively spyware that is logging and tracking god knows what. I feel very uncomfortable installing it on my machines and in general having to go through software A to get to software B makes a lot of people uncomfortable.

By contrast, logging in confines the the website to tracking my activity on the website itself - which they probably can do with a cookie anyways...

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> I feel very uncomfortable installing it on my machines and in general having to go through software A to get to software B makes a lot of people uncomfortable.

The only difference between Steam and GoG is that GoG runs software A on their servers and in your browser, whereas Steam runs software A on your machine in the custom-skinned browser they give you.

Any security or privacy ramifications of the two different approaches are quit irrelevant to a discussion of whether it constitutes DRM in the generally accepted sense of technical measures to prevent you from copying, sharing, etc. digital content that you already have in your possession. It's not DRM to require some authentication before they'll serve up the download to you. DRM is what gets in the way after the download.

I think I understand the distinction you're making. However I think it's only technically correct. I understand that I can boot up a VM with Steam, download the game, copy it from the VM to my machine that doesn't their software and it'll probably work. But that's in the realm of "technically possible but completely impractical". In practical terms I actuality have to run their software on my machine to have access to the software I buy through them.

The only difference between Steam and GoG is that your browser is already providing the VM to sandbox (albeit without hardware enforcement) GoG's code running on your machine, while for Steam you have to supply your own VM if you want that degree of isolation. (If you happened to be running Qubes OS then this matter of degrees of convenience would be trivial.) In either case, running some of the store's code on your machine in order to obtain the product is unavoidable. In neither case is it DRM.

You cab launch the client and immediately go into offline mode if you are concerned about your privacy

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