i havent the patience or time to weed thru this whole thread, but heres my two cents, one of the biggest risks of steam and other drm stores is losing all your purchases, regardless of whether a ban is warranted or not. Most customers dont realize they are only renting the opportunity to play the titles they buy and at any time they can lose their investments. its why most of my library is here on gog, and no matter how much of a tw**t I decide to become they cant erase my purchases from my hard drive.

as to the OP, should have thought a bit more of poking the monster, righteous or not its never a good idea to do that and expect not to lose access. i do have sympathy for your loss but feel you did it to yourself. coming here to vent is not going to help, you could try to hire professional legal help, they might modify the full ban rather than go the whole legal route if presented with a professional request but I doubt it, the EULA is written to favor them and they have a huuuuuuge legal team that deals just with this.

anyways, good luck

Maybe. All I've gotten over the years is a t shirt from the Gallery folks. I have also received a large stack of Cease and Desist orders as well. :)

We used to have a rather active 0 day website that tracked exploits and held themselves to a high independent standard. They weren't connected to any company who was trying to sell subscriptions to make a buck. They finally went under because of all the C&Ds they received.

Many companies would rather send a C&D to keep things under wraps instead of deal with issues. Of course many ethical hackers have a 24 policy that they publicly release the exploit if they don;t hear anything.

edit: I know I'm going around with a "security" company with a wide open WordPress website. I've notified them three times and all they've done is put me on their mailing list as well as sold my tagged email address to third parties. Dead silence. I still have enough connections in the hacking community where one quick posting and their website gets a visit but I was nice enough to contact them so my name is known to them.

True. But that would be the fault of the person who didn't make a backup. General rule of thumb make backups of your backups. If you do have backups You can play your games without gog should by some weird chance your perma banned or gog shuts down. Steam you need the client for most if not all modern games. That is DRM paladin181

Oh, I totally get that pain! You know, when you subscribed to something in the past and you changed your mind, or you just forget whether you did and wanted it cleared off? Usually, that should bring you a happy relief. Less stuff you don't want in your mailbox! But, the moment you hit that unsubscribe button, you get 5 spam mails coming your way, as they darn completely sold off your addy. -_-"

Its not DRM on the titles that don't require the client. They can be backed up as well. I think there is a disconnect here. I'm not claiming Steam is DRM free in any regard, just that some of the games are actually DRM free the same as on gog.

Some, and not reliably (if used as intended).

I think the difference is really:

Steam is a service: If they don't serve, your left (in theory) down in the dumps. You can alleviate this in a few ways. But not fix.
GOG is a shop: You buy stuff. To keep them, you're responsible to care for them. Download. Keep safe. Like your would do with physical goods, and you actually get more value, because digital data is (usually) not deteriorating.

I do believe if the topic creator gets a laywer, it might be forced into binding arbitration that might not get you more than $10,000 USD. That is in the TOS. If that part is vaild is a good question. We need proof either way. Produce the e-mails they claim of you creating tons of tickets. If you have only a few and your e-mail provider also only has a few (they could be requested in court), then you have documentation aganist the claim.

When my Steam account was compromised I started a ticket, attatched a key proving ownership, and tried to call them after it was taking over a week, in the hopes of actually GETTING SOMEONE. In the end had to call the consumer affairs dept. in their state to get on their case (it was over a month). ONE ticket is enough. Two might be pushing it.

Are you certain? What about users with negative rep, in hundreds, maybe minus thousand? I am asking out of interest, because soon, i will reach such scores, since gog staff did nothing for rep abusers.

Youuuuu meaaaaaaaaaan likeeee meeeeeeeeeeeee?

The sad/hilarious thing is there are some users who seem to share this delusion and from time to time throw hissy fits about it.

This thread is pure gold...

Sounds like you're talking past each other here. For the games that are DRM-Free on Steam your description applies just as much to Steam as it does to GOG. Both are also services. The support/website with online ongoing storage of your games is a service. But yes, "Overall" for most games on Steam, or at least more than on GOG your games are also tied to that service. But not all of them.

Steam doesn't offer the installers. Your ability to install the games is tied to your account and to the steam servers. The games that are DRM-free on Steam are still not guaranteed to work on other PCs (because moving a folder is different than reinstalling a software). Actually, most of them won't work, the biggest ones in particular.

And yet there are many that do work this way, case in point the DRM-Free games on Steam thread in this forum highlighting which games those are.

The fact that they aren't clearly marked does not in any way invalidate that those games do exist and that for those games the situation is exactly the same as GOG.

The situation is the same only if you don't preserve the game installers. In that case, yeah: being banned on Steam or GOG is the same. I mean, it's obvious: if you use GOG as if It was "another Steam", without getting advantage of the DRM-free bonuses, you'll end up having the same issues of Steam. The difference is that GOG gives you the ability to avoid those issues.