I recently bought new computer parts and built my own pc. It's not the best there is but it is many times better than the pentium 4 I had till recently. I want to buy new video games and obviously, nowadays, most of them are bought online only. I looked into steam but the idea that I must log into their service to play games that are already on my harddrive and paid for irritates me. It means that once you buy them, you can never leave steam unless you want to lose all the games you bought. I didn't buy a PC to put on "shackles". So I looked for alternatives but there doesn't seem to be much information on that topic of steam-like services.

So I wanted to know if anyone knew about a steam-like service that doesn't require such a thing. I was particularly interested in desura and GoG but I don't know their policies and limited information on the subject seems to pop up on google although admittedly, I may not be using the right keywords.

In case anyone wants to know, my new specs are:
XFX HD 6870 2gb
8gb ram DDR3
P8z77 V-pro
western digital 500 gb 7200 RPM
LSP 750W

GoG is pretty restriction free.

You can leave Steam whenever you like; Particularly with the older games, Steam is a delivery network and nothing more. I can launch quite a few of my Steam games without opening Steam. Additionally, there's no fees for Steam.

You only need to login once, then just restart in Offline mode and you don't have to login again...unless you want to update or play online, that is.

Stay the *** away from Origin.

EA is a publisher I try to avoid as much as possible so that won't be a problem. Their greed is obscene and they have shown more than once their lack of desire to make their customers happy.

Do you know anything about Desura?

The name rings a bell but I'm not familiar with it.

Impulse, or whatever Gamestop renamed it to, used to be decent, GoG you get an installer and that's it, no DRM, but Steam...I can and have accessed my Steam account from several different parts of the world, and it doesn't give a *** - I love that I can access my library wherever I may be.

I've used Desura and can vouch for it, it's quite similar to steam in terms of overall user experience, except it's cross-platform.

I'm also a gog user, in fact I am a Gog devotee.  I think they're great.  I can get all my programs from them running.  Even though they don't technically support Linux, I can usually find whatever information necessary to get a game running on their forums--that's assuming it doesn't work right away, which it will if it's a DOS game.  (dosbox works great on Linux, better than wine even).