Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder

gog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 574 posts

Re: GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder

#511

Post by jama211 »

mikepurvis wrote: post #330
jama211 wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that sales exist is a thing for every game just about

Sure, but when you speak of Arc Raiders selling 7M copies by late November, basically all of those were at $70-80 because the game just came out. Maybe I'm not contributing meaningfully to the dialogue, but talking about total sales across a 5 year lifespan means you're necessarily including all those packrat users who picked it up on deep discount and haven't even booted it up once (or, like me, played two hours and…

Sure, might make some difference. Probably not that helpful given we’re just doing back of the napkin stuff anyway

Re: GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder

#512

Post by jama211 »

SXX wrote: post #329
jama211 wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it very much didn’t break this game how did it? Best selling game to date.

This was only possible because CDPR still had immense amounts of cash flow from both witcher 3 and from CP2077 pre-orders.

Pre orders are _for that game_ so they count as success for that game, and also may people were still buying it bugs and all. I reckon without Witcher 3 cash flow they’d have survived still anyway, it may not have even been as big a factor as you think.

Re: GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder

#513

Post by freehorse »

georgeecollins wrote: post #373
generic92034 wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business. So, how does it work for Valve to sell games which are also available at GOG without DRM? If too many people are pirating, why would anyone buy the Steam version?

That's actually honestly a really good point. Things are changing. In real dollar terms games are getting cheaper and the size of the market has grown so I don't know if maybe a DRM free store will soon support premium games. I can't think of a game available on GoG that sells on Steam for > $20. I am sure one exists, but in general these are older, cheaper games. You could also point to games that the Epic store giv…

> I can't think of a game available on GoG that sells on Steam for > $20.

It is easy to check such claims. This shows what kind of games are in gog since 2024 at >$20 (it may change the currency depending on your country though).

https://www.gog.com/en/games?priceRange=20%2C152.99&hideDLCs...

Far from complete but also a few big titles are there. Granted this is the price in gog but most of the times ime it is the same price as in steam, or around the same.

> Nobody likes DRM, the game industry didn't used to have it.

Aren't DRMs a pretty old thing at this time? I remember the days when DRM was basically about having to use the cd to launch the game as the game would check for that, even if everything needed to run the game was in the hard drive. People would use cracks or virtual drives even if they actually bought the game to avoid doing that. At least now DRMs are far less obstructive to someone who owns the game.

Re: GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder

#514

Post by araes »

SSLy wrote: post #466
araes wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suspicion is you're correct, and is it's probably something like payments or money to developers who have games on the GOG platform. However, the definition in the document is kind of self referential. "Cost of Sales" is 100% "Cost of goods for resale and materials sold" and "The Cost of goods for resale and materials sold represents mainly the cost of sales of goods for resale and materials sold via the GOG.COM plat…

all the numbers are in thousand units. So more like 1M games a quarter.

Much more reasonable then. Like noted earlier. Really horrible financial layout. Teeny text (btw, thousands)

Re: GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder

#515

Post by mikkupikku »

Aurornis wrote: post #506
mikkupikku wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got gamer friends who live in countries / situations where ten dollars is an exorbitant amount of money. Buying a new release at 60+ just isn't a realistic option for most of the population. So what should they do? Go back and change where they were born? Abstain from participating in modern culture? Or reach out and take the thing which is free?

Your friends can afford the type of gaming PC necessary to play those $60 titles, but they can’t afford to buy any games for said PC? And they can’t even wait for them to go on sale? They need to buy them right at launch, at their full $60 price? > Or reach out and take the thing which is free? It’s not free. It has a price.

You can play most games to some degree on hardware that's 10+ years old, but yes, hardware is usually something they've scrounged and saved for.

And do tell, what is the practical price of pirating a game you couldn't afford anyway? Risk of a virus? Some abstract cost to society itself? Nobody cares.

Re: GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder

#516

Post by jncfhnb »

chii wrote: post #309
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the cut can't be lower? The rush to defend Valve's monopoly is so weird since HN usually hates fat cat billionaires. Valve is raking in so much money as a middleman that Gabe Newell has ~$1 billion worth of yachts alone, in addition to the rest of his wealth, yet gamers want Valve to keep on bleeding them and game studios?

> And the cut can't be lower? why should it be lower (or higher)? steam's cut should be whatever they set, and the market responds. The natural equilibrium would get reached. The value steam provides, imho, certainly justifies their cut imho. There's plenty of other platforms to release games on - including free ones (such as itch.io, or your own website).

Platform economics create monopsony problems. If you don’t play ball with steam, you don’t get access to most customers. End of story. These things are winner take all.

Imo 30% is disgusting and needs regulation.

Edit: see also, credit cards

Re: GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder

#517

Post by jandrese »

cogogo wrote: post #176
ninth_ant wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business. This is an opinion, stated as if it’s fact. There are many factors contributing to the ongoing success of steam. Ease of access, a strong network effect, word of mouth from satisfied customers, a strong ecosystem of tools and a modding platform, willingness to work across many platforms and a variety of vendors including competitors, an…

I grew up playing pirated games on the Apple II 35 years ago. The fact that many people pirate is not an opinion.

If the Apple II had something similar to Steam do you think you would have pirated as much? Ignore the fact that the tech wasn't ready yet and imagine a world where buying Apple II software was as frictionless as buying a Steam game. Also imagine that the software went on deep discounts regularly that allowed you to build up a big backlog of games to play. Do you think you would have been motivated to seek out the seedy underbelly of the software world looking for illicit copies to add to your backlog? Certainly there are some people like that, but they might be a fairly small minority. And then suddenly DRM isn't really helpful because even if it might stop a minority of people who weren't going to buy your game in the first place it always costs you in frustration for paying customers.

Re: GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder

#518

Post by slavik81 »

computerex wrote: post #280
basisword wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I have pirated games that I own simply because it's easier to play. Can you share some examples of instances where the legal route is too difficult? I haven't felt this way in a long time. What are the changes necessary for you to purchase?

Any game from Ubisoft/Activision/EA. A little while back for example I wanted to fire up my steam copy of Battlefield 4 and couldn't do it, game wouldn't launch.

My copy of Mirror's Edge from EA is unusable due to DRM. It's still listed on my EA account as belonging to me and I can download the game from them, but it can only be installed five times and I have reached that limit.

Re: GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder

#519

Post by citrusybread »

jpetso wrote: post #246
citrusybread wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried using Heroic? I don't use it on the Steam Deck so maybe I'm missing something, but I use it on desktop linux all the time and it's been seamless for me.

The Steam client has to restart in order to pick up the newly added external titles, at least last time I tried. In gaming mode, restarting the client means restarting the system, which is ever so slightly annoying. Apart from that though, it works just fine on the Steam Deck.

I just tried it today actually - I just had to exit the steam deck UI mode, enter desktop mode, add them with Heroic, and then restart the deck UI mode from the desktop shortcut and it worked!

Re: GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder

#520

Post by citrusybread »

pipes wrote: post #268
citrusybread wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried using Heroic? I don't use it on the Steam Deck so maybe I'm missing something, but I use it on desktop linux all the time and it's been seamless for me.

Lutris and when that fails, manually doing it myself. One big annoyance is that to browse community controller configs you need to change the name of the game to it's steam numeric id (which can be found in the URL for the equivalent game on steam website). I'll try heroic. I try to buy gog versions but sometimes I just think "when will I get time to configure this, I could just buy the steam version"

That's interesting, I'll keep it mind. I also got sucked into steam defaultism, because they do so many things right.
Post reply on HN