Recently I came to the realization that I am now down to a single installed game that is not part of a distribution service like Steam, UPlay, Origin, etc. it just goes to show that if your internet connection goes down, it really limits what you can do with your games. Some you can play in offline mode but others you cannot.
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IIRC Steam has a “Going Offline” mode. You can still play all games (well except Strictly On-Line MultiPlayer!) when there’s an internet outage.
GOG is still king … oh sorry,
KING
of these things.
Some Amazon games can be launched directly form the folder they reside in but it hurts that Epic Games cannot be played if there’s no internet.
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Oh I forgot about Epic. I used it for a while when I bought Borderlands 3 but uninstalled it soon after I finished the game. I was not at all impressed with Epic.
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I love Epic for making UE cross-platform & open source, makes my life as dev much easier, but their commerce platform can burn in hell for all I care.
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I’ve collected all 200 free games on Epic and I play none of them.
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If my Internet goes down, I’m going to assume that I will have bigger problems than gaming.
I think GOG games can be launched off-line
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Good point and I would imagine that is especially the case for people who telework all the time.
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Yes, you can download an offline installer and not use a launcher at all (unless the game implements one). They offer any patches as separate downloads as well.
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I recently made the decision to have a local copy of all my games (as part of a wider decision to stop trusting cloud services).
Not because I’m worried about not having internet but still having time and ability to game, but because of the anti-consumer changes to ToS companies keep making.
And viewing things from that way, despite the convenience Steam brings, GoG is the way forward for future game purchases for me!
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With steam, it’s worth just navigating to the game executable in its folder and trying to launch from there. Not all games use the Steam DRM.
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I am confident that there are ways around Steam DRM in the case that Gabe goes back on the promise of removing it should steam go down…
I have a hard time believing that he’d have any leeway to do that since the games still belong to their respective publishers.
This is all pretty hypothetical at this point, Valve are too big to fail ATM. We are seeing a general push by companies away from user ownership more towards subscription models. With the current political climate being what it is, it’s gonna get worse before it gets better.
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Indeed - but in the past the whole “online activation” thing was explained away by Gabe promising that if Steam somehow fell over they’d make sure they pushed a “last patch” to the launcher that’d allow you to play the games you own.
It’s been a long time since that was mentioned, and of course a majority of games these days now have simply no content if not “online”… but those were the things we worried about a decade and a half or so ago 
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