the-syreth-clan
Frankly, my experience with Steam was marred from our first encounter. Way before I started caring about DRM side of it.
I've started as a huge supporter for legal things. Even though I say I've pirated things since it became a thing, it was actually more of a necessity. For example, PSX has never ever been imported legally in my country, and neither were the games for it, and so every unit, to my knowldge, that was in the shops has already been jailbroken, since 99% of the games has been pirate discs and people needed consoles that could launch those. I've hunted for legal stuff, like, at every corner. Somehow - some fucking how - I've got a legit PAL Need For Speed Underground 2, while everyone else had the usual pirate version that came from an NTSC disc. Therefore my NFSU2 had Peugeot 106, and nobody, literally no one believed me when I've told them about that car.
So, anyway, fast forward to the appearance of Steam - that was my first huge disappointment with legal mediums. I've bought myself Saints Row 2, and what I've found inside? Something that told me to download Steam. Which I've did. And then it told me to download the game itself - 6GB of data. Which, back in the days, was massive. I've never managed to download it. I've ended up playing Saints Row 2 only way later, when I've got myself XBox 360. For me, that was a cheap shot, and I've started to gravitate towards pirated games, because back then those still had CDs inside the box. Last licensed game I've bought was Fallout 3 - after that pretty much every game came out with DRM, and so I've stopped buying those.
The final straw with Steam came when I decided to make an offline backup of all my game installers. So I used Steam Backup Tool to get all my games offline. As a test, I tried to install the Mafia II on a separate machine without Steam and internet connection. And - surprise, surprise! - it refused to launch. So I downloaded a pirated copy, and, as you probably guessed, it worked alright. It was at that point when I cut Steam away from my life for good.
Later came Steam emulators, which actually allowed to launch clean Steam files offline, but too little, too late. I'm definitely not coming back.
Somnolence If I did move, I'd swap over to GoG. Good business model, strong selection, some Linux support, and CD Projekt is pretty good as far as game companies go.
GOG was the last legal distributor I was supporting until 2022 or so. When Russia decided to conqur Ukraine, GOG simply blocked all russians from buying games, and, well.
If they can cut the whole country that easily, the basically saying it straight: we, GOG, do not need your money that much. Think about it.
I definitely won't give them any of mine anymore, ever, even if they will one day unblock Russia.
All in all, I've gone fully black flag. If I really like the game, I usually contact the devs, asking them how I can donate directly to them or, mayhaps, help them in some other way.
Surprisingly or not, all devs so far told me to keep my money. The guys behind Hotline Miami told me I should better buy a beer in their honor. The other asked me to do some beta testing of his next game. Et cetera.
