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Comment by tpoacher | Hacker News Reader

The big difference is being able to download games / installers locally and expect them to work without having to first sign in to an account.

you can only do that with gog, not with steam

ps: however, there have been a few games where multiplayer features required a gog galaxy instance, which I don't agree with given their whole no-DRM spiel

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The problem is convenience; I've been using Steam streaming quite a bit lately, for example.

Plus you get Linux/Proton too on Steam [1]. And the Deck if you're into that.

I used to go to GoG first but convenience is winning lately :(

[1] I remember, but can't provide links, that CDProjekt/GoG got called out for their bad "port" of Witcher 2 to Linux/Mac. Guess what, instead of improving things with 3, they simply dropped any pretense of official "ports". Not good for cross platform customers...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTY5ODM reports on the reception of the witcher 2 port. https://www.pcworld.com/article/416185/broken-promises-games... mentions the missing, but shortly promised witcher 3. https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/the-witcher-3-didnt-c... would be the source for the witcher 3 being cancelled because of witcher 2, but the article is down. Might have never been true.

Edit: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2017/07/the-witcher-3-didnt-co... is the new link, so the article wasn't retracted.

For Witcher 2 I did have a Windows gaming PC available so I just ignored the Mac "port". Mind, I was hackintoshing at that time so I actually had a decent GPU. But it was laggy and stuttery on Mac OS while it worked just fine(tm) on the same machine in Windows.

Generally, my gaming is very delayed as per this xckd:

https://xkcd.com/606/

So at the point i wanted to play Witcher 3 it was crypto price crisis then covid chip crisis and console availability crisis and I simply did not have a modern GPU in the house. I played W3 on a PS4 :)

Dunno about cyberpunk, I tried it on PS5 but all that inventory and menus are no good with a controller. One day I'll get the Windows version.

Patient gaming is a virtue :) But do yourself a favour and get Cyberpunk ASAP, in the Christmas sale at the latest. As a deus ex fan, Cyberpunk has been the best game I have ever played, ignoring nostalgia. And it looks like there won't be a further extension or big patch, so nothing to gain by waiting now.

Ryzen 5 3600, radeon rx 6600 should be the performance baseline hardware for 1080p.

I actually have ps4 discs, which got me a free upgrade to the ps5 version. Credit to CDProjekt when it's due.

I now do have a desktop with windows and a geforce 4060, so i should be fine.

I just need to figure out which edition to get on Windows. Because as a negative credit, I had Witcher 3 and both addons and I never got access to the super duper whatever edition on GoG, in spite of actually having already paid for the content.

I'll one day figure out which is the super duper whatever Cyberpunk edition, add it to my wish list and wait for a sale.

> The big difference is being able to download games / installers locally and expect them to work without having to first sign in to an account.

This is exactly why I use GOG and not Steam.

There are DRM free games on steam, you can use steamcmd cli to download them and run without having to use steam itself. Its up to the dev/publisher if they want DRM or not.

The number of games like this (that work without Steam) is vanishingly small ime, and there is no way to tell in advance whether a game will work or not. (I have actually had a lot more success with the Epic Games Store.)

Not saying that there's a lot of games where the publisher/dev made this choice, just responding to OP saying its not possible with steam. Unfortunately the store doesn't show drm free games either.

I am aware that there are some games that you can download and happen to be able to play offline if the steam launcher executable simply happens to be a dumb link to the 'true' executable which checks for a steam connection first, and you could in theory find out where the 'true' executable lies in the game folder, because of the way it's designed. But I would hesitate to call this a "DRM-free" game in that sense; more like "the DRM is trivial and easily bypassed if you know what to run".

Furthermore, there is no guarantee that just because it works "DRM-free" now, it will continue to do so later. Or, just because it "works", it doesn't mean that somewhere half-way into the game there isn't a "check" or "achievement" that won't crash your game.

etc.

And in any case, Steam does not have a commitment towards DRM-free, not even in the sense of at least committing to flag such games as such. It's all 'accidental' at best. And while it's the last games company that you'd expect to go bankrupt 'now', all your games are in theory 'licensed' content, not 'owned' purchases. It's entirely up to them to remove content without notice (because you bought a game in one country and then moved to another, e.g.), or go bankrupt and say well sorry, some games might work if you download them but we don't guarantee anything.

Whereas in theory, GoG will let you make a full local backup of your entire collection, and in the few games that (annoyingly) "subtly" break the DRM-free promise (typically due to the way multiplayer is handled), these are clearly signposted in the store pages.

After you do what I said you can copy the directory and run it anywhere without steam or internet connection. You said its impossible, like steam forces it this way, but it clearly doesn't even if only very few Devs make this choice.

Altough incomplete, PCGamingWiki has info on whether games work without steam DRM. AFAIK they are usually tested by moving the game folder and running without opening Steam.

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_g...

e.g. https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Hades

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