this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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For games, always buy from GOG if you can. Unless it's a game I really want I only buy from GOG.
Many Steam games are actually DRM free. You can just copy the game folder onto a flash drive, sometimes modify a single file, and then run it from the flash drive in any PC.
You should still buy from GOG first imo, but I wouldn't entirely count out Steam.
Well, it's still a hack, not something officially supported, I wouldn't really consider them DRM-free when you still need Steam to run the game officially.
I'm not ruling out Steam either, they've done a lot of good for gaming and I buy games there if I really want them and there's close to no chance they're coming to GOG (like the recent Dragon Age), but more and more often I decide that I don't actually want that game that much.
if it’s not on GOG, you can also check itch.io!
iirc all games there are DRM-free as well (tho I could be wrong)
But then you should also back up the optional downloadable install files for each game. Just using the launcher is not a fail proof way to keep your game collection
Indeed, there are many tools to do that, one of them of my own making: https://github.com/RikudouSage/GogDownloader
But even if you don't back them up, at least you signal that DRM-free is important to you by buying there.
...or Humble Bundle if they offer the actual software download.
Not if they just offer Steam keys.
In my opinion.