It's amazing that an always-on DRM company can become the "good guy" by staying the same level of asshole they've always been, while every other company became much worse assholes.
Because in practice that "always-on DRM" is actually just purely an advantage for the customer with zero downsides. It only sounds like you're making a good point when you frame "provides the best shopping and library experience in gaming" in the least charitable way possible. The Valve hate-boner is so weird.
There are disadvantages. e.g. if you don't want to update a program (maybe the new version breaks your modded setup), too bad. Or if you need Windows still for compatibility, it no longer supports Windows 7, so you have to go hunting for old versions of the client and fiddle with it to prevent updates (if that still even works), at which point you'd might as well just mod it to remove the DRM instead.
Basically, it creates a failure point for setups that should otherwise last and be stable several more decades.
Not that I see. The publisher can add old versions as a "beta" that you can select if they want (e.g. Kerbal Space Program and Factorio do this), but otherwise you can only run the latest. Your choices for updating are "when launching", "when Steam decides", and "immediately". There is no "when I decide" or "never". e.g. Bethesda has apparently broken Fallout 4 multiple times over the last 1.5 years with no ability to revert after it had been stable for 5 years.
> always-on DRM is actually just purely an advantage for the consumer
Look me in the eyes and read this quote to me again. Then think about how yourself from 20 years ago would feel about reading this quote from someone else. You've gone so far down the rabbit hole but you don't realize you're in one.
Their DRM seems to be okay, but they do have some weird bugs.
My biggest gripe with Valve right now is that I bought a copy of No Man's Sky on GOG, and then I also had a copy on Steam. And so I let my son play my Steam copy through Steam Library sharing so we can play co-op while I play my GOG copy. Unfortunately, because I launched my GOG game through Steam, Steam's DRM won't let him play at the same time as me because they think we're playing the same copy.
It seems to be that they simply look at the title of the game and or the executable name to figure out what game it is, but they don't check to see what storefront it was bought from. I'm not sure about this though, I have to do more investigation.
In case you launch the GOG game because of Proton, then I suggest using Heroic launcher to start it instead. You can use Proton there too, automatically downloads and everything, same as Steam. And there will be no clashes with Steam.
You don't need to launch your GOG game via Steam, you can just remove its shortcut from Steam and launch it separately. Then your son can launch and play the Steam game in parallel, so both of you can play coop.
DRM is optional on Steam, many games don't have it (or roll their own). In many cases of Steam DRM, activation is only one-time, after that, granted the hardware doesn't change significantly, the player can be offline indefinitely.
I'm no fan or DRM, but the current implementation is far from "always-on".
