All of this is based on the assumption that the way it was done is the way it will be done. Who will own and run Steam 30 years from now? Gabe Newell will be long-gone, his nepobaby next-CEO will be closing in on retirement if they don't check-out early to enjoy their vast wealth like Gabe has done. What does Steam look like 60 years from now? Adults using it today are mostly dead and all of their licenses revoked fo…
I can assure you that offline installer you got today from GOG will not work on Windows 20 or whatever OS will be the dominant for PC in 30 or 60 years time.
You can literally run 30 year old software on your Windows computer today.
Yes but if you set up a website to do this they could sue, which I think is reasonable as many if not most people would be happy to both sell and keep a copy
But it was so much simpler when you had the disc. Whoever had the disc had access to the copy and it could be sold and resold as many times as people wanted. I don't think people are so against DRM, because a disc like that was essentially a form of DRM. They are against an online DRM scheme which could change in the future. I know there were sone disc DRM that could like revoke the disc license, but let's go back be…
It was much harder to sell things online back then too
Can't find anything about those broken promises at a glance
It was HITMAN released on GOG with always online DRM and removed after backlash. They obviously refunded to everyone. https://www.gog.com/en/news/release_hitman_game_of_the_year_... https://www.gog.com/forum/general/release_hitman_game_of_the...
> Can I still download offline installers? Yes. This is the only line I was looking for. I stopped buying on Steam sometime ago because I realized I was just renting licenses. GOG is the only major storefront where I feel like I actually own the product. As long as offline installers remain a core tenet, I don't care who owns the company. That said, it helps that it's someone returning to their roots rather than a pr…
Steam games are still great as long as you approach it open-eyed as a long-term rental. You can get really good deals, and as a parent of 3 young boys, their family sharing is an amazing bonus that I didn't even consider when I started getting games ~20 years ago. I have definitely gotten my money's worth. (If you consider it akin to going to the movies or a theme park, rather than buying an object.)
Of course I vastly prefer GOG and try to get all games there, but GOG still only has a tiny fraction of the games I want to play.
GOGs biggest problem is they don't have enough new titles.
I've gotten all the old titles I want... Now I want new stuff! (There are even plenty of recent games I would pay for again just to have a GOG copy. I don't mind rewarding good developers by purchasing multiple copies.)
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.
So long as it's easy to find out after buying, this isn't a real barrier, since you can just refund it if it doesn't meet your standards.
I bought a lot of stuff from GOG a long time ago, but the only thing I've use them for in the past 5 years is claiming Prime Gaming rewards on Twitch. I don't think I've even downloaded a single one of them. I'm curious if that agreement with Amazon might have hurt GOG. Did it cost them some money when people like me to claim all those games without ever converting to a paying customer?
I also have wondered about the Amazon/Twitch deal. I suspect it's all net-positive income for GOG but much like Google funding Firefox, if Amazon ever decides to take it away I wonder how much damage that would do to GOG. Certainly some damage of awareness. I think the only thing I've bought on GOG was the Yakuza 0-6 collection, the other hundred+ games were free. I've at least downloaded and played some of them, Lutris on Linux works fairly well. (Many were ones I already bought and played on steam, which is kind of annoying, but some of them were ones I was planning to buy if they went on sale, so whatever. I'm more mixed about how it, plus Epic's game giveaways, can damage the entire concept of paying for games. Gamepass factors in too, but Steam's routine sales also ruined me from the idea of paying "full price". I can't look at Switch or Oculus/Meta pricing and think it's worth it.)
> especially if you are willing to wait for some days or weeks after launch (an important sales window for the publishers). “Important” is an understatement. Even for long-term success stories, the first three or four months often accounts for half of a game’s revenue. And, despite so many people theorizing that “pirates don’t have money and wouldn’t pay anyway”, in practice big publishers wait in dread of “Crack Day…
Do you have a source for sales data when a crack becomes available? If so, that seems like definitive proof that piracy does affect sales.
When the Nintendo Switch became hackable, ie can play any game, Nintendo saw a massive decrease in sales in Spain. Btw people in Spain pirate the most games in Europe. The decrease was at least 40%. The idea that this is a service issue and piracy doesn’t affect sales is just PR speak. If the game is offline, it’ll be pirated a lot.
Steam uses outsized market power to take an enormous %30 cut so it also does major damage to the games industry.
The 30% cut is standard, and was so at retail even before Steam existed IIRC.
Besides being standard, it's also reasonable solely for game developers not having to worry about chargebacks and financial fraud at all. Let alone all the other stuff your game gets, and stuff your game has the option of making use of (like network infrastructure for multiplayer games).
I used to love gog. I purchased a bunch of stuff back when they were talking a big game around supporting Linux with their Galaxy client. But while gog was talking, Valve was actually doing . Building an actual Linux client. Making multiplayer actually work. Not to mention all the work they've done with Proton and upstreamimg graphics drivers. I hope gog succeeds. I just value Linux gaming support over not having DRM…
There is only 1 Steam client for Linux, and there will only ever be one client, and that client has had basic issues (context menus being a completely new window that steals focus, comes to mind instantly) that have been unresolved year after year. For GOG, there are plenty of clients for Linux [1][2][3][4], And they are open source, I can go and talk to the people making these clients directly, I can give feedback,…
It took me seven tries across two years to get Cyberpunk 2077 playing on Linux using either raw install files with or without Lutris/Bottles, GOG Galaxy in a wine env, or whatever Heroic Launcher offers.
I'm glad it mostly works now, but i would've been better off buying it from Valve. The effort Valve put into making games Just Work is unparalleled. The minor UI issues (like context menus getting rendered in place as windows which breaks niche window managers) are nothing compared to the hours required to brute force the right Wine/Proton setup for every game to make it work.
Most of the games that now work in unofficial GOG launchers only work because Valve paid someone to make games run well on Wine, either by directly using Proton or by using one of the many libraries Valve has directly paid for work for.