I really wish GOG made Galaxy for Linux already.

They can revoke stuff from your library.

They just usually don't have a reason to do so.

(Also, you might not be able to get older versions of the game anymore. Meaning that you may be stuck with unwanted content changes in some games.)

And there's also kids who don't have credit cards yet too.

This was the case for me, to some extent, for some time. But then, the more I used of Steam, the more I realized there are a variety of issues, ranging from minor inconveniences like having to deal with the Steam client (and its interface and footprint) to being at risk of losing access to all of my Steam games due to losing access to the account for a variety of possible reasons (some of which could happen even if I didn't do anything wrong on my end).

These days, if I buy, I buy DRM-free. That's an arrangement where publishers/developers properly respect customers. If it's not available DRM-free, it's ethically justifiable to pirate.

I can agree that Valve has done some good things, such as making digital distribution go big, making indie games viable, and doing a lot to advance gaming on Linux.

But I'd also argue that that doesn't obligate me to spend money to patronize them, particularly when I can get a better (by virtue of being DRM-free) product elsewhere.

Sidenote: I tried getting something off APKPure the other day and it only came in the form of XAPK files. Do you know how to get the APK out of them? (A cursory check suggests that XAPK might be a proprietary thing made by APKPure that only works with their own APKPure app, which feels pretty dirty to me...)

I do wonder how pirated games can somehow stop working after a while. I'm guessing there's some sort of anti-piracy thing that hasn't quite been fully removed. I had this experience with one game which was known to have Denuvo; a newer crack fixed it.

Ironically, Steam being shit is a major reason I've come back to seeing the value in piracy.

I know to keep the Task Manager handy when I do my testing!

If you have to crack the DRM, it's not DRM-free anymore.

The ones that are copy-and-paste-the-files-and-run-them, sure. But just because DRM is easy to crack doesn't mean it's not DRM.

(The one exceptions might be those super old forms of DRM which basically just need the manual and that's it. Sometimes, those were actually done in creative ways that made narrative sense in the game, too. So those are like, obsolete DRM that's auto-circumvented.)

IMO Steam is only "pro-consumer" in comparison to some of the really nasty DRM schemes out there. In recent years they've done a bunch of annoying things, including:

• making it harder to access older versions of games
• gradually changing the fundamental operation of the Steam client to become browser-dependent for everything (it used to be a much lighter and faster application that ran using their own code before it became basically Chrome)
• basically orphaning the Steam skins feature with update after update successively breaking more and more things (related to the above)
• making it harder to use older versions of the Steam client (okay, this might be hard to avoid technically, but still)

And of course, it's still basically DRM-agnostic for any additional layers of DRM, such as and including Denuvo. As well as having no convenient way to just turn off updates, which means that if you don't take your own precautions and a bad update got installed, well, good luck.

To be fair, Steam's own DRM is still relatively light (compared to some other schemes), and it sometimes does technically have DRM-free games (if Steam acting as a downloader doesn't count as DRM), and it offers tons of cheap games, but all of these features (or better, such as DRM-free installers) are easily available from various competitors. Steam's main attraction these days, frankly, is its selection, with a bunch of games that can't be bought elsewhere. which is a sort of market dominance that it only maintains by virtue of already being big.

Ahh, good ol' price discrimination.