[1] http://www.gog.com/forum/general/list_of_drmfree_games_on_st...
1. Publishers decide to treat all potential users as criminals, and insist on using DRM in their products.
2. Distributors accept that, and help these unethical publishers to sell those products.
3. Users accept being treated as criminals, and buy these products from distributors.
It starts from the publisher of course, but anywhere down the line, one can refuse to accept this. Distributor can refuse dealing with DRMed products from publishers. Users can refuse buying DRMed products from distributors. Any participation in that chain proliferates DRM, and one can't excuse this participation with the fact that it was initiated by the publisher.
Supporting unethical practice can't be excused with fear of going out of business by the way. Also, publishers need distributors and users not any less than distributors and users need publishers, if not even more. Therefore voting with your wallet (on either distributor or user level) is not senseless. Except that distributors have more leverage on publishers, because of their scale, in comparison with an individual who buys only DRM-free products. Therefore distributors can be blamed more for DRM proliferation.
Publishers of new games (especially expensively developed new games) are more likely to fear a loss of revenue, especially in the crucial early period after release, without DRM.
I'm not really sure why bigger size of the budget should reduce the common sense of the publisher. Legacy publishers are obsessed with DRM, but DRM has nothing to do with revenue whatsoever. It doesn't reduce any piracy, and only cripples the experience for legitimate users. It's stupid from common sense business perspective, and there is an increasing amount of big budget games which come out DRM free. I view it as simply mentality issue. Legacy publishers can't understand that they should start being customer focused. New ones have no issues understanding it, therefore they don't use any DRM.
Practically all do, I already explained above. Being unable to back up the installer is already DRM, and it's coming from Valve themselves, not from the publishers.
Always on-line DRM and such is another level of nastiness, but the above is DRM too.
My theory is that if Steam goes belly up, I can do a backup of my games, and use the same avenues pirates use to circumvent Steam. Hopefully they would release control of their games though if they went belly up.
As far as poor customer service, I suppose I have been lucky so far.
Yes, that's one of their downsides. Even their reasoning is becoming less and less sensible. They claimed they still can't figure out how to offer long term support on Linux. May be Docker can help them.
GOG's position is totally understandable.
FatELF would of addressed at least some of these problems, but was largely rejected by the larger community of people not shipping proprietary products on Linux: https://icculus.org/fatelf/
Ping me at [email protected] about this anytime.
they just have saner fallback times than other ill talked solutions from EA. but besides its pretty eyes, its the same virus.
good luck running online games as root.
These settings are up to the game developer themselves. You are right about the offline mode, but it does not apply to all games.
You are right in general though. Going DRM free not only won't hurt any publisher, it will only gain respect from customers and will improve the quality of their products in a sense of improved usability, because any DRM means a crippled product (i.e. limited platforms availability, inability to make backups and etc. and etc.).
The problem is, that most legacy publishers are rarely customer focused and think that DRM helps their profits. And unprincipled distributors like Netflix are ready to oblige. But the irony is, those publishers only hurt themselves by continuing using DRM. It's mostly innovative publishers, or self published studios (and crowdfunded projects) that have common sense and avoid using DRM. Luckily some distributors are also principled enough to reject DRMed products from publishers. But such are a minority still.