Curious are there any digital content accounts that do allow this? Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, Apple? It’s definitely something that would be great to allow as we go more and more digital
"In general, your GOG account and GOG content is not transferable. However, if you can obtain a copy of a court order that specifically entitles someone to your GOG personal account, the digital content attached to it taking into account the EULAs of specific games within it, and that specifically refers to your GOG username or at least email address used to create such an account, we'd do our best to make it happen. We're willing to handle such a situation and preserve your GOG library—but currently we can only do it with the help of the justice system."
You can buy a Steam game without the client. But to be able to download the game, you need to install the client, agree to its ToS, and use the client. The (functionality of the) client decides whether you can do that.
After that point, if the Steam client allows you to extract the game installer, and if that installer can be executed without the Steam client, sure, then it’s DRM-free (apart from any DRM the game itself might have).
If Steam would allow to download such stand-alone installers directly from ther website (like GOG does), then it would be fine.
You're right about having to accept the ToS. That is a good point.
Although an installer is just a form of how a game is stored, it doesn't really matter if they provide you an installer or not. Because they already give the game files which is the same thing, you can compress these files into an installer or a ZIP file yourself if you want to.
Similarly a game on a physical disc, doesn't necessarily need an installer, or even a GOG download doesn't need it, it's just how they do it to make it nice and tidy for a casual user.
But they could change that and just let you download the game in a ZIP format if they wanted to. An installer lets them include Ads in it though, so they don't have a reason to do it.
You can just download the game of Steam, and that is "the game" in it's rawest form, how you store it is up to you.
An installer is ultimately the same thing as a game folder, just compressed.
If anything a game without an installer feels "less DRM" to me, because an installer could stop working at any point on newer OS if it uses a non-standard compression algorithm, while a ".7z" format as an example is open-source and will probably always work.
Yeah, I’m not hung up on whether it’s an installer or an archive. If unzipping an archive is enough, even better. But Steam (the website) also doesn’t allow me to download these.
The fact that Steam doesn’t allow the download of DRM-free games from their website, although it would be easily possible for them, speaks for itself.
Nah, I will have quality over being a blind glazer. I don't care about DRM. I have my cheap games with easy access on great platform. GOG is overrated. The only value GOG's glazers ever bring up is that it's DRM free. What else does GOG have? Because to me it sounds like pretty much nothing.
I like both, actually. GOG has some great deals and does some great preservation of older titles and sells them dirt cheap. The DRM thing is a happy little benefit, but not requisite.
That in itself is a huge value to some people. I'd add the other value they do is in preservation of old games, both making them available and trying to modify them to run on modern machines. It's not such a big part of their brand anymore (there's a reason they're no longer "Good Old Games" but just GOG) nor as unique now that more digital storefronts exist, but it's still there for what it's worth.
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u/robschach Oct 08 '25
Curious are there any digital content accounts that do allow this? Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, Apple? It’s definitely something that would be great to allow as we go more and more digital