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

521–530 of 574 posts

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

#521

Post by internetter »

RoyalHenOil wrote: post #306
fooqux wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally think that, between the two, gog is far more likely to disappear than steam. I'm happy both exist. I've nothing against gog (except maybe for their broken promises around Linux support, but I do understand changing market forces) and like I said, I hope they succeed. They've got a good mission.

GOG might disappear, but your games won't. If Steam disappears, your games will become inaccessible.

It's actually mostly the same in both cases. If steam or GOG goes down, you can no longer download the games you bought. But what about the games you have downloaded? Well GOG games will work out of the box, however the steam "DRM" is really just basic protection to stop you from copying the files to your friend's computer, and can easily be removed by already existing tools like Steamless and Goldberg Emulator. So I'm not really that worried about the vast majority of my steam library. The only thing I'd worry about is spiking storage costs when steam's demise seems imminent!

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

#522

Post by internetter »

shevy-java wrote: post #390
Fiveplus wrote: post #23

> 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…

My hardcore gaming days are over, but I feel that the gaming industry has in general been abusing the hell out of gamers in the last some years. That also includes the hardware industry, trying to sell overpriced stuff. Granted, it is the gamer's fault for submitting to that mafia, and I am not directly affected nowadays myself (save for RAM prices going up thanks to the AI mafia milking us all), but I would be hugel…

For what it's worth my laptop with 16gb of DDR4 and a 2070 seems to run every game as well as I could want it to. I'm happy with what I have in this regard. a little less than 10% of steam users are still using 1000 series Nvidia cards.

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

#523

Post by freehorse »

Aurornis wrote: post #508
freehorse wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is, how many of the people who pirate a game would instead buy it if pirating is not an option? How many of the people who would try a new game by downloading a pirated copy will actually continue playing it, instead of just trying a bunch of different games, in which case they would prob have refunded anyway? The mere fact that X number of pirated copies are downloaded and executed does not mean that X…

> The question is, how many of the people who pirate a game would instead buy it if pirating is not an option? I don’t think this is as much of a question outside of social media attempts to justify piracy. If only 10% of the pirates would buy the game, that’s still lost sales. The social media justifications for piracy always assume that the only reason anyone pirates a game or video is because they either couldn’t…

I do not care about the moral judgements. If somebody cannot afford the game or doesn't want to pay, then they will most probably not buy it, whether they pirate or not. Sure, there is always money to squeeze, but 10% sounds overestimation, esp when the squeezing comes essentially to the expense and inconvenience of the people who actually buy the thing. Which is solely what I care about here. In any case, DRMs never stopped games from being pirated.

Pirating is far from a "choice of convenience" nowadays. Getting a pirated copy is much more complicated than getting it in gog, you do not get updates (I assume you have to search and install it again), and involves serious risk installing malware. Especially with how bug-ridden new games tend to be nowadays, I cannot imagine getting a newly released game without some form of auto-updater.

A lot of successful DRM-free games exist, and games that have DRM are still pirated just fine. Pirating existed in games since ever. It is not for the lack of DRM that a game may fail to sell.

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

#524

Post by Hammershaft »

chii wrote: post #399
Hammershaft wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The equilibrium has been reached and it's more studios going bankrupt, less games getting made, gamers spending more for less, and Gabe owning over $1B in yatches

> more studios going bankrupt studios that don't make good games correctly should bankrupt - ala, those so called AAA studios. > gamers spending more for less gamers buying overpriced games from bad publishers/studios that overspend and under-deliver are learning finally. There has never been more indie games, and the selection has never been more diverse, and those available games has also been cheaper. If you got t…

You seem to be missing that I'm describing the effects of Valve's massive %30 tax on the game industry. There are studios that would've survived and continued making games people enjoy if Valve had less market power and charged %10-%15. There are dollars gamers would've saved instead of spent if that tax was lower.

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

#525

Post by pipes »

citrusybread wrote: post #520
pipes wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Though, I think gog does better versions of some old games. For example I think their doom 3 includes the original not just there bfg edition. They really try to give you a patched "should just work on a windows pc" version.

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

#526

Post by 867-5309 »

guizadillas wrote: post #293
867-5309 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

good luck sourcing the (supposedly) malware-free release

the source is almost always the same forum, what's your point?

is such a forum always well-ranked on search engines? the point is to evade malware, obviously

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

#527

Post by Aurornis »

freehorse wrote: post #523
Aurornis wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The question is, how many of the people who pirate a game would instead buy it if pirating is not an option? I don’t think this is as much of a question outside of social media attempts to justify piracy. If only 10% of the pirates would buy the game, that’s still lost sales. The social media justifications for piracy always assume that the only reason anyone pirates a game or video is because they either couldn’t…

I do not care about the moral judgements. If somebody cannot afford the game or doesn't want to pay, then they will most probably not buy it, whether they pirate or not. Sure, there is always money to squeeze, but 10% sounds overestimation, esp when the squeezing comes essentially to the expense and inconvenience of the people who actually buy the thing. Which is solely what I care about here. In any case, DRMs never…

> Sure, there is always money to squeeze, but 10% sounds overestimation,

10% was an example of a low-ball number. I estimate the number is much higher.

> I do not care about the moral judgements.

If you don’t care about moral judgments, why have this conversation at all? Nothing matters, do what you want, pirate everything you can get away with.

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

#528

Post by wilg »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #456
wilg wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I genuinely don't understand what people think "own" means here. Downloading from Steam you "own" it in exactly the same way as if you install it from a CD: you have a license to the game. There's nothing to own in any case, unless you literally own the copyright to the game which of course you don't. Also Steam doesn't apply any DRM unless developers add it, so backing up your Steam library folder to an external dri…

That's true, the CD is a license in the same way steam is. But practically it's different, because in many cases there's no mechanical way to revoke the license from that CD; it'll keep working after music rights expire or the game producer gets cancelled on Twitter or whatever. The game won't just evaporate like it can on steam

You can just back it up though.

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

#529

Post by benoau »

dangus wrote: post #464
benoau wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don’t care because I’ll be dead. Data-hoarding archivists don’t like to hear this, but this is how it’s worked for all of human history. It’s not practical to consume and remember all the media every person has ever published. This is getting totally beside the issue of DRM. What will happen is that the greatest games will be remembered if they’re lucky and the rest will be discarded by time, even if they are DRM-f…

> It’s not practical to consume and remember all the media every person has ever published.

It's not about you being able to "consume it all", it's about future generations being able to look back and see how gaming and humanity evolved and explore this history. Many people will research the greatest hits, the greatest developers, the greatest accomplishments, just like any other historically-interesting thing.

My favorite song from roughly 1492 is a small ditty I came across some years ago called Branle Englese, amongst many centuries-old pieces of classical music I enjoy playing. I don't know if it's specifically 1492, as the details have been lost to time unfortunately.

Do you recognize the value of other history? Should we 'delete' it all or just games, rather than challenge a fairly recent status quo that emerged and undermines their preservation?

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

#530

Post by BirAdam »

ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #501
BirAdam wrote: post #475

Completely anecdotal, but… I spend quite a bit of time reading and writing tech history. I am not academic in this pursuit. I read old newspapers, magazines, websites, books, and interviews. Take some notes along the way, and then write an article. Usually, each article is a short history of a company that made significant contributions to the industry. For companies that still exist today, the end of these are artic…

I love the genre, if you can call it a genre. Share please!

https://www.abortretry.fail
Post reply on HN