Not sure what you're getting at. There's very few things we need, sounds like they're sacrificing a little to avoid giving a company they deem unethical any money.

I love games and can’t play my steam collection now. But if I have to give that up so that some silly bug elsewhere in my system doesn’t expose me to a ransomware attack (or worse), so be it. I’ll find another way.

You should be able to play games in your steam library. Just open your Steam\steamapps\common\ folder and find the exe for the game you want to play.

Steam's DRM (CEG) customizes the executables so it won't play without the Steam client running and logged in to the correct account. There are lots of not-DRM-enabled games on Steam, but they're decidedly in the minority.

That's why GOG.com is my first choice. They even provide a nice Steam-like installer (unfortunately, no Linux version of the installer), while letting you download your games DRM-free, archivable and standalone.

Not all of the games on GOG are DRM-free at this point. Some require GOGGalaxy, their version of the steam client. I went through a frustrating refund process after learning about this after making a purchase.

I have yet to find a game that absolutely requires Galaxy. Could you share which game was it?

Hero's of Hammer watch required it, and would not run without it.

Only game that requires Galaxy is Gwent, and it's free to play.

Really? That sucks, DRM-free has been their major selling point from the start. Why was the process frustrating and which game was it?

There are a number of tools called “steamworks emulators” that allow one to bypass this outright for many games. These are generally seen as piracy tools, but there’s no good reason you couldn’t use them when you wanted to play your purchased game collection without DRM.

Be a bit careful when experimenting, though. You may run into problems syncing your cloud saves for some games if/when you go back to the official client.

Now you've swapped one attack surface for another (of a dubious origin).

Open source. https://gitlab.com/Mr_Goldberg/goldberg_emulator

As you'd expect there are (or were, a few years ago when my account was temporarily banned for a few days) cracks to unlock the executables. You might need Steam still installed for this to work the first time, I'm not sure.

Legally I don't know where that stands, but morally I'd say we have a right to play the games we paid for.

Uhg, this drives me nuts. Apparently I'm not allowed to play Sepiko: Shadows Die Twice while traveling outside of the country. A VPN can temporarily get things going again, or staying in Offline mode, but what a pain in the ass...

Nope, that won't work for most Steam games. However, that's why there's GOG (gog.com), DRM free games. You can download the game installation kits using your browser and if you ever decide to stop accessing their site (or stop having access to the Internet) you can still play/install downloaded games.