Yes there is a difference. Steam sells you a license that can be revoked at any time. The games have DRM, and rely on cloud servers to authenticate you. If you turn your internet off they will all stop working after a certain period, even if fully downloaded. And if Steam or the DRM owner goes out of business you will end up with nothing.

If you buy and download something from GOG, it is yours. You can still play it in the next millenium as long as you have suitable hardware or an emulator.

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mariusor 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The games have DRM, and rely on cloud servers to authenticate you.

That is not true as a global rule. Game developers can release fully independent versions of their games even on steam.

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yjftsjthsd-h 3 hours ago | parent [-]

They can. Do they? Statistically?

	▲	mariusor 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If I am a person interested in this specific thing (backing up my games) I would for sure check. Wouldn't you?

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candiddevmike 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Not all steam games have DRM

	▲	badsectoracula 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is true but you don't know ahead of time before you buy a game, you have to gamble on it being the case or not (i've found that while some lists exist in places like pcgamingwiki, they tend to be both very incomplete and often wrong). Usually indie games tend to be DRM-free though, so if an indie game isn't available on GOG or Zoom Platform (another DRM-free store), i end up buying on Steam.