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The new owner of GOG discusses taking on Steam, the devil of DRM, and following in Nightdive's footsteps
(www.gamesindustry.biz)
this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2026
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They've got some of those things. They recently added a workshop equivalent, and they've had a multiplayer SDK for a long time. The multiplayer SDK is actually a problem, because it means multiplayer often only works on Galaxy, which is just DRM by another name.
And Steam's DRM was pretty invisible to me until, ironically, I got a Steam Deck. Then I started running into games that needed to be authenticated while I was on a train with no internet.
As long as games stop using shitty Epic Online Services, I'll take GOG's.
The advantage to Epic's is that they offer cross play for free. I'm honestly not sure what the problem is.
Epic Games is a scumbag company :)
And slop company recently
oh thats pretty cool actually,but if the multiplayer SDK is just DRM with a diff name i would rather stick to Steam.
and what games are those,i never had that experience with my steam library(except for only requiring the Steam Client to run). maybe this comes from other drms the game has?
The one that stuck out to me was Metaphor: ReFantazio. It has Denuvo, but the message didn't identify it as such and read like Steam DRM. Dragon Ball FighterZ has no listed additional DRM on the Steam store page, but if I booted up the device offline then tried to run the game, it would refuse to boot until I went online. I ran into it a few other times other than that, but don't recall which games they were. Sometimes it's just an unlucky roll of the dice with when Steam decides it's time to authenticate the game again.
Then there are other DRM schemes, like Ubisoft's and EA's, that are even worse. At best, they require you to explicitly set your Deck to offline mode before traveling; just not having an internet connection isn't good enough.
yeah makes sense its external DRM from Denuvo,Ubisoft and EA these are strict ngl.
and this is why i stick to only Steam's DRM.
Steam's DRM will still lock you out if you're logged out (not in "offline mode" that can only be entered by logging in online and then toggling it). Some games on Steam are truly drm-free and navigating to the executable will start the game without even running Steam at all. It would be nice if Steam exposed which games are truly DRM-free.
Note that native Steam shortcuts will never work without being logged into Steam (in normal or offline mode), because they're steam:\\ protocol links. To play DRM-free Steam games steamless you need to navigate to the actual file or make an OS shortcut to the executable.
oh yeah your right actually.
am also mostly fine with that DRM,but it kinda sucks i cannot run video games that rely on it if i was in a environment where i didnt want the client.
or if i want to use Steam offline i can uhh stay signed in.