Conina said:
Yeah, that's the nice thing about GOG games... you can be sure that they are DRM-free. On the other hand: thousands of Steam games are also DRM-free, even if Valve doesn't advertise that. The SteamWorks tools aren't mandatory, every publisher can release its games DRM-free, if they want to. Probably Steam has more DRM free games (at least 10% of over 100,000 games) than GOG (currently ~7250 games) You can play these DRM-free Steam games by starting the executable in the game folder of the path "Steam/SteamApps/common". Yesterday I was curious and spent the day checked the first 500 titles of my Steam library, if they run without Steam (going by folder name, so starting with numbers, then starting with "a"). For that I switched to new windows user account where I am logged out of Steam. The first result: over 200 out of the first 500 tested Steam games booted without any problems and I was able to start the single player game. Some games (f. e. all games of the "Amnesia Franchise") even have a dedicated "NoSteam" executable in their folder:
Many classic PC games on Steam are running in a DOS-Box or via an old ScummVM version... those games are of course DRM-free. ScummVM has constantly expanded the list of supported classic games (mostly DOS and Windows games, but also a few Amiga, C64, Mac and even PS1 versions). I have a lot of classic games which I bought on Steam before they got ScummVM support... in most cases, I can simply copy those Steam folders, start the newest version of ScummVM and add those games to my ScummVM library. Steam versions usually get recognized easy by the ScummVM client because they are so popular. Many of those games run even better on the newest version of ScummVM than on Steam settings. ScummVM has also the advantage to have clients for A LOT of systems/devices. For example, I love to play old point&click adventures on a tablet (iPad or Android)... I remember playing the (still PC-exclusive) "Sam & Max Hit the Road" in 2005 on my PSP via ScummVM while having our own USA road trip; also "Day of the Tentacle" and some other LucasArts classics. |
Ah, thanks for the analysis. So yeah, I was aware that many Steam games are DRM free, but there is no real way to find out, is there? I did go to the Amnesia Rebirth store page after reading your post, and I see no indication. So GOG remains the way to be certain, it is DRM free.
The dedicated Steam-free binary is a good idea, I keep it in mind if I ever want to make a game (I am a programmer, not an artist, so every game of mine would suck, but I think it could be an interesting programming challenge).
As I am on Linux for a long time already, ScummVM and DosBOX were already my friends to keep the classic games of my youth alive, these emulators work great on Linux.
