[HN Gopher] GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder
___________________________________________________________________
GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder
Author : haunter
Score : 831 points
Date : 2025-12-29 16:43 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.gog.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.gog.com)
| bogzz wrote:
| It's so nice to have these little oases of ethical businesses in
| tech. A shame that it feels like the desert is only growing
| exponentially.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| Does anyone know the backstory here? Is CDprojekt not the right
| owner anymore? I am clearly not following the ownership closely
| here ( but maybe I should have ).
| embedding-shape wrote:
| It's part of the FAQ at the bottom:
|
| > Why is CD PROJECT doing this?
|
| > Selling GOG fits CD PROJEKT's long-term strategy. CD PROJEKT
| wants to focus its full attention on creating top-quality RPGs
| and providing our fans with other forms of entertainment based
| on our brands. This deal lets CD PROJEKT keep that focus, while
| GOG gets stronger backing to pursue its own mission.
|
| > What is GOG's position in this?
|
| > To us at GOG, this feels like the best way to accelerate what
| is unique about GOG. Michal Kicinski is one of the people who
| created GOG around a simple idea: bring classic games back, and
| make sure that once you purchase a game, you have control over
| it forever. With him acquiring GOG, we keep long-term backing
| that is aligned with our values: freedom, independence,
| control, and making games stay playable over time.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| Apologies, I accept FAQ exists, but I am simply asking if
| there is more to the story than corporate release.
| ls612 wrote:
| GOG isn't as good of a business as CDPR's development
| studios so it is getting spun off.
| Triphibian wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if this action was in advance of
| some kind of acquisition. GOG gets spun off as protection,
| so they can stick to their mission while somebody like
| Microsoft, Sony, Tencent or the Saudis add The Witcher and
| Cyberpunk to their portfolios.
| cherryteastain wrote:
| Please release a Linux client or, even better, officially support
| and invest in developing Heroic Games Launcher so we can play our
| DRM free GOG games on a libre OS.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| That and/or proper remote desktop implementation.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Literally sitting with Lutris in front of me downloading a game
| from GOG right now. Can Heroic Games not handle it themselves
| like Lutris? Seems easy enough for other FOSS projects to do,
| I'd rather GOG continue focusing on ensuring the games run on
| modern hardware, and acquiring licenses to good old games,
| rather than now expanding the support for their already
| mediocre launcher.
| sitkack wrote:
| Exactly, or open the protocol and let the community write it.
|
| Third option is to ensure the downloader runs under proton,
| which I think it does but haven't tried.
| shmerl wrote:
| Protocol is well documented already, GOG aren't really
| blocking community clients:
|
| https://gogapidocs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
|
| The problem is mostly that their backend isn't wired for
| Linux builds so you can't use the APIs for native Linux
| versions.
| dundarious wrote:
| Heroic works perfectly, in a manner identical to Lutris (from
| a user perspective). I tested both several years ago and have
| been a happy Heroic user since.
|
| However, neither support 2 key features of GOG Galaxy:
|
| 1. cloud saves
|
| 2. achievements
|
| These are 2 of the most significant features of competitors
| like Steam, IMO, so missing them for GOG on Linux is
| unfortunate.
| izacus wrote:
| That's simply not true at all, Heroic Launcher supports
| both cloud saves and achievements. I've been using them for
| a long time on Deck now.
|
| Please don't lie :/
| dundarious wrote:
| I was mixing up the fact that "Linux native games do not
| support GOG's Cloud Saves feature" (direct quote from the
| app itself), with a general lack of support. Given it
| says "Use the Windows version instead", I am quite wrong,
| it clearly does support them for Windows games.
|
| If you think that's a "lie", consult a dictionary.
|
| As for whether my general point stands, I think it's a
| reasonable inference that if GOG Galaxy supported Linux,
| it would support Linux games and cloud saves for those
| games, and only then would Heroic and the like be able to
| implement such a feature. I could be wrong, as it depends
| on details I don't know, and I'm just making an educated
| guess.
| dundarious wrote:
| I just installed a GOG Windows game in Heroic, and the
| Settings state "This game does not support Cloud Saves"
| even though my account has cloud saves clearly visible
| for that same game on the GOG website.
|
| Given I'm using Heroic from AUR on a supported OS, and
| installed with default settings, I consider this cloud
| save support to be less than stellar, but that's a
| separate matter, I'm not trying to turn this thread into
| a support issue.
| izacus wrote:
| And yet somehow you outright opened it with a direct
| falsehood.
| dundarious wrote:
| Yeah I was wrong and admitted it and explained the
| genesis and nuances of it. "And yet somehow"... why say
| "somehow" as if it's a mystery now? "outright opened" is
| a very poor construction as well. "direct" in "direct
| falsehood" is not doing much there either. Please work a
| little harder at your scolding and condescension, the
| quality is somewhat low. Better yet, engage thoughtfully
| and charitably instead.
| Uvix wrote:
| Heroic's cloud save support is flaky; I've had it upload
| saves to the wrong path so Galaxy on another machine
| can't download them.
|
| As for achievements, I wouldn't say it's had support for
| "a long time"; they were added in August 2024 (v2.15.1).
| izacus wrote:
| So it supports both for a year and a half, what are you
| nitpicking now exactly?
| Uvix wrote:
| That it's had either for "a long time". Maybe once
| they've been there and working correctly for five years
| I'd feel that's an accurate adjective.
| shmerl wrote:
| I use lgogdownloader, but yeah they should improve their Linux
| support. At the very least the immediate benefit would be
| Galaxy protocol support for their Linux builds.
| Gormo wrote:
| > Please release a Linux client
|
| The whole point of GOG is that you don't _need_ a "client" --
| it's just a store.
|
| If you want to use something other than a standard web browser
| to install your games, there are plenty of options, including
| projects like Lutris and lgogdownloader.
| shmerl wrote:
| I think the issue with requests to "release the client" isn't
| as simple as "you can use an open source alternative".
|
| Their Galaxy backend only handles Windows and macOS builds of
| games. Linux builds aren't included now. There are hacks
| around it like using access to individual files over HTTP
| through zip format for Linux installers as pseudo Galaxy
| (lgogdownloader supports that) but it's still just a hack.
|
| Another piece is multiplayer integration that games can ship.
| That depends on their support too (authentication, matching
| and etc).
| golyi wrote:
| Awesome news really, I've bought countless games from GOG (more
| than Steam I think at this point) and it's a company I'll always
| support. Great business decision.
| brachkow wrote:
| It is great because game preservation isn't what game industry
| shareholders usually interested.
|
| CD Project makes great games, but gaming industry is all-or-
| nothing. They already had colossal flop at their previous
| release. If another flop happens shutting down GOG is clearly
| would be on a table as a cost cutting measure.
| nicolaslem wrote:
| I don't think it's fair to call Cyberpunk 2077 a colossal flop.
| It had an awful release, but the company stood behind it and
| fixed everything that needed fixing. Five years later it is now
| an acclaimed game that sold 35 million copies.
| paxys wrote:
| Yup, Cyberpunk 2077 has sold more copies in the same time
| frame than Witcher 3, which is routinely highlighted as one
| of the best and most successful games of all time.
|
| You have to give kudos to CD PROJEKT for not just abandoning
| the game after a bad launch (which is what every other major
| studio would have done in its place) but patiently fixing
| problems and constantly adding content _over 5 years_ to get
| to the state it is in today. And the game has no online
| requirement, no multiplayer, no microtransactions. Just one
| paid expansion which added a ton of new content. Rare to see
| this behavior in the industry today.
| mashlol wrote:
| > which is what every other major studio would have done in
| its place
|
| Afaik CDPR doesn't make many games. If one flops, that
| might be the end of them. I don't see abandoning a game as
| a valid option for them from a financial perspective. Makes
| much more sense to fix the issues and sell more.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I think it's more related to their reputation? People
| will buy the next one if they trust CDPR will fix
| anything wrong with it even if it flops.
|
| Kinda how you trust paradox strategy titles to get
| several years of updates and expansions.
| SXX wrote:
| Studious dont abandon failed releases because they are
| evil. Its just releases fail because they run out of money
| so there just nothing to burn to save them.
|
| CDPR just was lucky enough to make enough money of failed
| release to fix it. Most companies get no chance to do it.
| kryptiskt wrote:
| EA is notorious for throwing games out there and
| abandoning them as soon as they don't turn out to be
| massive hits. That is a company that has plenty of
| resources to support the games and fix the bugs.
| SXX wrote:
| Not gonna protect EA the company here, but lots and lots
| of other games also flop on release because money.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Definite kudos to them for that, though notably it's down to
| 65% off now, so presumably many of those copies were for not-
| full-retail price.
|
| And the Switch 2 port likely cost considerable engineering
| effort and underperformed as well.
| jama211 wrote:
| The fact that sales exist is a thing for every game just
| about
| mikepurvis wrote:
| 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 in
| that initial window wasn't especially grabbed by the
| story, characters, or progression systems that the game
| was wanting me to engage with). It's different when
| something really pops off on release and sells all those
| copies in the first few months.
| jama211 wrote:
| Sure, might make some difference. Probably not that
| helpful given we're just doing back of the napkin stuff
| anyway
| aeyes wrote:
| What game was a colossal flop? Cyberpunk was released too early
| but they kept on delivering patches and then the players game.
| It's their highest earning title.
| jama211 wrote:
| I also started playing it this year and the experience at
| least now has been fantastic
| GaryBluto wrote:
| IIRC they fixed various bugs but they didn't fix the broken
| promises. The biggest problems with Cyberpunk were
| architectural, things that would basically require
| redesigning the game to match what was promised.
| gamesieve wrote:
| Online sentiment has drastically changed about how bad
| those broken promises were - a near-complete turnaround,
| similar to what happened with No Man's Sky. Basically from
| when the DLC was released, most people started feeling that
| they fulfilled the essence of everything that was promised.
| SXX wrote:
| IMO Cyberpunk is fundamentally not the game their
| marketing promissed. They marketed it as actually non-
| linear RPG and beyond very beginning of the game they
| just could't deliver on it.
|
| After tons of patches and DLCs its just became a very
| very good game. Just not what was promissed.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Those kinds of promises only engage a small niche of
| nolife who follow news about upcoming games.
|
| Most customers only hear about a game when it is released
| and reviewed and/or recommended by a friend and will
| never have heard about them.
| SXX wrote:
| Yet those niche nolife hardcore fans is exactly what
| makes or breaks games. If 10,000 unhappy hardcore fans
| will go around pouring shit on your game and company then
| you likely never get 1,000,000 players who could've
| potentially liked it.
|
| Nolife hardcore fans will also be the the first to buy
| your game, review it and tell everyone if they did not
| liked it.
|
| CDPR got huge amount of trust after Witcher 3 and they
| mostly had to start over after CP2077 release.
|
| EA can survive if 4/10 of their games flops completely,
| but company like CDPR will likely just end there.
| jama211 wrote:
| Except it very much didn't break this game how did it?
| Best selling game to date.
| SXX wrote:
| This was only possible because CDPR still had immense
| amounts of cash flow from both witcher 3 and from CP2077
| pre-orders.
| jama211 wrote:
| 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.
| 71bw wrote:
| >CDPR got huge amount of trust after Witcher 3
|
| ...which was a complete shitshow on release as well...
| jama211 wrote:
| I don't know what you're talking about and if I did I
| probably wouldn't care, the game is great.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _The biggest problems with Cyberpunk were architectural,
| things that would basically require redesigning the game to
| match what was promised._
|
| 86% of all-time Steam reviews for Cyberpunk 2077 are
| positive, and if you only look at recent reviews, it's 94%
| positive.
|
| I don't think the game has architectural problems that
| prevent it from being a massive success.
| tester756 wrote:
| >CD Project makes great games, but gaming industry is all-or-
| nothing. They already had colossal flop at their previous
| release. If another flop happens shutting down GOG is clearly
| would be on a table as a cost cutting measure.
|
| Cyberpunk was really successful from $$ standpoint and
| continues to generate huge revenue even today.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| From the FAQ:
|
| > Is GOG financially unstable? No. GOG is stable and has had a
| really encouraging year. In fact, we've seen more enthusiasm from
| gamers towards our mission than ever before.
|
| I'm really happy to hear this, as I always feared their hard
| stance on no-DRM would scare off publishers and developers, but
| seems that fear might have been overstated. This year I
| personally also started buying more games on GOG than Steam, even
| when they were available on Stream. Prior to 2025 I almost
| exclusively used Steam unless it wasn't available there, but now
| GOG is #1 :)
|
| Glad it's moving in even better directions, thank you Team GOG!
| eterm wrote:
| I had the opposite takeaway.
|
| Companies with strong financial performance don't tend to use
| words like "encouraging". That is the language you get from
| companies that are in trouble and hoping for recovery.
|
| Talking about people's enthusiasm for their mission is just
| straight up dodging the question itself.
| Ekaros wrote:
| If I read their income statement from Q3 correctly it is
| comparatively not doing great.
|
| 01.01.2025 to 30.09.2025 net profit 910 thousand PLN I think.
|
| 01.01.2024 to 30.09.2024 net profit 32 thousand PLN.
|
| With "from 1 January to 30 September 2025: 4.2365 PLN/EUR and
| from 1 January to 30 September 2024:4.3022 PLN/EUR."
|
| It is not that much. So splitting it off probably make sense
| for the CD Projekt.
| apetresc wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand your figures. What is "32
| thousand PLN", surely their entire annual profit for all of
| 2024 was not literally 32K PLN (approx. 9K USD)? Is this
| measured in millions? And whatever they're measured in,
| surely 32K to 910K in the span of a year is considered
| excellent progress?
| Ekaros wrote:
| No it was actually just circa 9 thousand Euros from
| GOG.COM. And it seems there was period of having
| potential loss of million PLN as well in Q3 of 2024 I
| think. So it looks quite variable based on which products
| release.
|
| See: https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/wp-content/uploads-
| en/2025/11/c...
|
| Starting from page 28.
| bcye wrote:
| Maybe they are just heavily reinvesting?
| Ekaros wrote:
| I think reality is that being game retailer is harsh
| market if you are anyone else but Valve with Steam.
| Selling copies redeemed on Steam is workable, but seeing
| that pretty much all big publishers are back on Steam
| should tell a lot of state of the market. And GOG has
| bigger mind share than actual market share.
| Detrytus wrote:
| Still, making only 32k PLN ($9k) profit on 137M PLN
| ($38M) revenue seems like a really badly operated
| business.
| andriamanitra wrote:
| Profit is not an appropriate measure of how well a
| business is operated. I'm sure they have been
| prioritizing growth because the whole point of the
| platform is to introduce competition to Steam. Keeping
| the margins low (or even negative) is smart when the
| primary goal is not to make profit but to insure the
| parent company against monopolistic behavior.
| IsTom wrote:
| A counterpoint is Amazon's profit on revenue until 2017
| or so.
| SirHumphrey wrote:
| Amazon was basically conducting a price war founded by
| AWS division. Unless GOG is trying to undercut Steam this
| is a bit apples and oranges.
| NoahZuniga wrote:
| Reinvested money isn't a cost, so the amount of
| reinvesting doesn't impact the profit number in their
| report.
| npodbielski wrote:
| In what country? Of course I do not operate business with
| milions of income, but investing in Poland is usually a
| cost. In example buying hardware or paying for servers is
| an invoice so it is cost of you doing business. Of course
| it depends on accounting and your taxing method. But yes,
| your profit in Poland is more or less money you got from
| clients minus money you paid to someone.
| araes wrote:
| Cost of Sales is eating them alive.
|
| They lose ~72% of every PLN/EUR/USD they bring in. Their
| financial statement is Really confusingly laid out.
| However, pg 36 has comparison. GOG is actually not THAT
| tiny of a segment (percentage-wise, absolute EUR / PLN
| numbers are still small). 49k PLN / 300k PLN for the CD
| PROJEKT Red and 350k total.
|
| Compared to CD PROJEKT RED, insanely horrible cost of
| sales ratio.
|
| July 1st, 2025 to Sept. 30th, 2025 (Numbers are in PLN,
| directly from document) CD
| PROJEKT RED GOG.COM Sales revenue
| 303,133 48,982 Cost of sales 23,310
| 35,151
|
| January 1st, 2025 to Sept. 30th, 2025 (Numbers are in
| PLN, directly from document)
| CD PROJEKT RED GOG.COM Sales revenue
| 658,575 143,285 Cost of sales 61,307
| 103,075
|
| PLN numbers can be verified (GOG quarterly is really on
| the order of 10,000 EUR) by looking at pages 30-31 with
| export sales summaries.
|
| For comparison to the 72% ratio, their main video game
| creation business spends 7-8% on cost of sales.
|
| From page 8 "Selling expenses represents costs of
| marketing activities relating to the GOG.COM platform and
| the work on the development and processing of sales
| executed through that platform."
|
| From some of the rest of the document, it seems like
| "maybe" some of that is prepayments and costs related to
| providing the software.
|
| Personal view, while it may be beneficial to not have to
| deal with GOG from an operational perspective, a
| significant percentage of sales are on the platform for
| their own software, and CD PROJEKT's title releases
| heavily influence sales figures on GOG, so it may end up
| limiting themselves from an otherwise beneficial
| distribution channel. Probably provides better
| negotiating position also if you're trying to barter with
| Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Valve, ect... However, if the
| partnership continues with the next owners, may not be an
| issue.
| rasz wrote:
| Does Cost of sales include game developers cut? because
| that 143/103 fits their 30-70 split.
| araes wrote:
| 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 platform "
|
| Kind of self referential. Everything else is in the CD
| PROJEKT RED group (Cyberpunk 2077 Ultimate Edition on
| Nintendo Switch 2 cartridges).
|
| If your suspicion is correct then that would also imply
| that historical games are either almost always the same
| 70/30, or GOG is not really making that much on
| "historical" games (ie, most of the money is recent indie
| releases). And, kind of implied that they're not really
| selling that much. At maybe 10 EUR average, that's only
| like 1000 games a quarter.
|
| Notably, its really difficult to find anything other than
| an online article that actually talks about the 70/30
| split situation. Google links to Wikipedia for evidence
| that then links to a 2013 Engadget article. Nothing
| appears to actually spell out the financial terms on
| GOG's actual site.
|
| If you happen to know where that type of legalese is on
| the GOG site, that would actually a helpful ref.
| SSLy wrote:
| all the numbers are in thousand units. So more like 1M
| games a quarter.
| araes wrote:
| Much more reasonable then. Like noted earlier. Really
| horrible financial layout. Teeny text (btw, thousands)
| nottorp wrote:
| You mean they're not charging from some Luxembourg
| subsidiary any more?
| embedding-shape wrote:
| https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/investors/result-
| center/q3-2025... [has a bunch of files at the bottom too,
| for more data]
|
| > Consolidated net earnings during the reporting period
| stood at 193 million PLN - 2.5 times more than during the
| corresponding period of the previous year, which results in
| a net profitability of 55%.
|
| Maybe I don't understand "profits above all" sufficiently
| well as some of my peers, but that seems Good Enough to me.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Overall CD Projekt is doing well, but cut associated to
| GOG.COM is paltry as shown above.
| izacus wrote:
| No company with an ounce of brain and a good accountant
| reports profit in eastern Europe :)
| JLO64 wrote:
| Polska is in Central Europe tho
| izacus wrote:
| Haha, we all Slavs keep telling that to ourselves, don't
| we? :P
| juped wrote:
| Eastern Europe starts at your home country's eastern
| border. E.g., if you're Russia, it's Japan and Alaska.
| SirHumphrey wrote:
| And Balkan on the southeastern.
| 71bw wrote:
| To cite what might be deemed the lowest quality source
| possible: [1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Europe
| embedding-shape wrote:
| You'll find as many perspectives on what country belongs
| to East/West/North/South Europe as there are countries in
| Europe.
| rvba wrote:
| Is this taken from some LLM?
|
| The first two numbers perhaps make sense, the 4,3022 looks
| like EUR/ PLN exghange rate..
| embedding-shape wrote:
| I guess I trust them that if they would be in trouble, they'd
| say so, not say "GOG is stable". But I've been wrong before,
| could be in this situation too, I guess I'm more hoping that
| they wouldn't lie to their users in their face like that.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| I had the same takeaway -- in fact, I think it's CD Projekt
| who hopes to distance themselves from GOG.
| VoxPelli wrote:
| This goes for publicly traded companies much more than
| privately owned ones.
|
| GOG is now becoming private like Valve rather than publicly
| traded.
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| Exactly, if you say that your company's financial performance
| has been "encouraging", that's not good.
| rasz wrote:
| >>a really encouraging year
|
| This years DOScember was really huge. Tons of streamers and
| viewers on Twitch for example, retro gaming is picking up steam
| (/s).
| eleveriven wrote:
| There's clearly a real segment of players who value ownership
| and longevity enough to vote with their wallets
| npodbielski wrote:
| I am happy that deal with Amazon didn't hurt them. Doing
| business with such big corp is probably not good for anyone.
| roxolotl wrote:
| I always search GOG before Steam. It's slightly less user
| friendly in the most minor ways and sometimes a bit more
| expensive. But getting DRM free games is worth every penny and
| extra few moments. Steam is really great for what it is but
| you're not buying games you're leasing them. Excited to hear GOG
| might get more focus and investment.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| > you're leasing them
|
| For the duration of your life, to be fair.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| For the duration of the businesses' life.
| Thegn wrote:
| For the duration of gaben's life, to be fair. Beyond that
| there be dragons.
| paxys wrote:
| No, for the duration of whenever Steam decides to say "fuck
| you".
| mariusor wrote:
| Which is the same as what can happen to GOG if you don't
| have the files backed up. And if you do happen to have them
| backed up, is there such a large difference between having
| the installer vs the full game installation stored?
| paxys wrote:
| Yes there is a difference. Steam sells you a license that
| can be revoked at any time. The games have DRM, and rely
| on cloud servers to authenticate you. If you turn your
| internet off they will all stop working after a certain
| period, even if fully downloaded. And if Steam or the DRM
| owner goes out of business you will end up with nothing.
|
| If you buy and download something from GOG, it is yours.
| You can still play it in the next millenium as long as
| you have suitable hardware or an emulator.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Not all steam games have DRM
| badsectoracula wrote:
| 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.
| Jach wrote:
| 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.
| mariusor wrote:
| > The games have DRM, and rely on cloud servers to
| authenticate you.
|
| That is not true as a global rule. Game developers can
| release fully independent versions of their games even on
| steam.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| They can. Do they? Statistically?
| mariusor wrote:
| If I am a person interested in this specific thing
| (backing up my games) I would for sure check. Wouldn't
| you?
| Uvix wrote:
| I _would_ but since there 's no way to know before
| buying, all games on Steam need to be treated as having
| DRM and not supporting backups.
| paxys wrote:
| There's also no way to know after buying. Games you own
| and have installed can be automatically updated in the
| background with new DRM.
| dangus wrote:
| Which is basically never. They have no incentive to do that
| except for extreme circumstances, and they have all the
| leverage in the world over game publishers.
|
| Delisted games tend to stay in your library for redownload.
|
| I never understood the cynicism for digital media, it's
| been multiple decades now and the model clearly works.
|
| Obviously I prefer zero DRM but it's also not a hard line
| requirement for me personally.
| paxys wrote:
| Ever bought anything from MSN Music? Yahoo Music? Desura?
| Microsoft eBook Store? Walmart MP3s? Anything using Adobe
| Content Server? MusicNet? CinemaNow? UltraViolet?
|
| It is laughable to think that digital media "clearly
| works". Companies shut down and stores shutter _all the
| time_. In most cases there is no recourse for customers,
| because - surprise - you didn 't actually own the rights
| to what you bought, just a revocable license. You have to
| be pretty young and/or naive to think that this can't
| eventually happen to Steam as well.
|
| And even if you fully trust Steam to stick around and
| keep its word, digital licensing means you can still get
| screwed. For example - if the publisher's license to in-
| game music expires, the game will automatically be
| updated to remove all the tracks (e.g. GTA Vice City and
| San Andreas). For larger issues and conflicts the game
| might be removed entirely (e.g. Spec Ops: The Line). Or
| the publisher might decide to just switch off the DRM
| servers, even for single player games (e.g. The Crew).
| Outside of gaming there are countless examples of
| publishers "upgrading" music tracks you own to different
| versions or censoring/altering content of books you own.
|
| The only recourse to all this is to buy and store DRM-
| free versions of your media.
| stodor89 wrote:
| > "buy" Hozier's album
|
| > change countries
|
| > oh, you own this album for Bulgaria, but not for the
| US, so you can no longer play it
| tart-lemonade wrote:
| Region-locked physical media (and before explicit region
| locking, PAL vs NTSC vs SECAM vs variants like PAL-M)
| also have this problem to some extent.
| oarsinsync wrote:
| Yes and no. I took my physical media with me along with
| my player, and all was fine.
|
| I took my digital media with me along with my computer,
| and all was not fine.
| tjpnz wrote:
| Censorship. Like GOG?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| You never know, Gaben is getting older. Who knows what
| the next CEO of Valve will do?
| SXX wrote:
| At least with Valve we can hope its gonna be okay for 4
| reasons:
|
| 1. Even though Gabe is formally CEO he from his own words
| was barelly controllibg company for years. He spend more
| time on his other projects.
|
| 2. Flat structure and and a small team. I know few people
| who has worked at Valve and while there are some
| downsides company of ~400 employees with a lot of
| internal power play is just more resilient than normal
| corporation. Many of people on the team are just rich
| enough already and they dont need to go and cash out.
|
| 3. From what is publicly known Valve is family owned
| basically since Gabe own major part of company. And while
| a lot of people would hate example of e.g Ubisoft its
| good example how family controlled business often sink
| before selling out.
|
| 4. It would be just hard to sell Valve and remove control
| from the team without destroying both company and gaming
| community goodwill.
|
| Yet I fully agree that Valve just like other company can
| be sold off just for userbase and run to the ground.
|
| Valve just have better chance to stay customer friendly
| than your overall VC/PE/BlackRock owned corporation with
| 10,000 employees and 50 for-hire top managers / board
| directors.
| bsimpson wrote:
| Physical media rots too. I don't watch my DVD collection
| anymore because I don't have access to a working DVD
| player, but I've read that a lot of those discs don't
| play anymore because the publishers cheaped out on
| materials when they minted the discs.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| This in not an equivalence.
| benoau wrote:
| 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 forever, the games removed from circulation gone
| forever because nobody can ever have a license to use
| them again. They might be onto their 4th, 5th or 6th CEO
| by then, half a century removed from Gabe and any
| expectations we have around the ways he did things.
|
| There's a lot of room for improvement securing some sort
| of legacy for Steam.
| fernie wrote:
| 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.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Most C64, MSX, Apple,Amiga, Atari ST and Dos games can
| still be played on all majors operating systems.
|
| In fact I used "most" but I can't name one that couldn't
| be played.
| benoau wrote:
| If anything it will be easier than ever to run those
| games, the platforms you mention can be run in a web
| browser these days with nothing at all to install or
| configure or download.
| cropcirclbureau wrote:
| Are you willing to put monies on that?
| oarsinsync wrote:
| > I can assure you that offline installer you got today
| from GOG will not work on Windows 20
|
| Given the lengths the Windows development team has gone
| to, to preserve backward compatibility, to the point that
| there was individual-game-specific workarounds codified
| in Windows, makes this claim the same as the GP's, that
| Steam will change 30-60 years from now.
|
| The cynic in me thinks you're both right, mind.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| If it works on WINE today, I would expect it to work on
| WINE tomorrow. Worst case, you can probably just install
| an older WINE on a newer OS to ensure it.
| wewtyflakes wrote:
| It would presumably work in a virtualized environment.
| paxys wrote:
| You can literally run 30 year old software on your
| Windows computer today.
| toast0 wrote:
| 30 year old Windows software is kind of rough. Tried to
| get some old games working on my Dad's computer this
| holiday season. DOS based game is easy. Windows 95 based
| games are hard... First you almost certainly need winevdm
| for the installer because the installers were almost
| always 16-bit; then I was getting errors that I can't run
| on Windows NT, only Windows 95 is supported, and
| insufficient ram errors because the memory available is
| too much.
|
| Found some other options (fan remake) for now, but
| probably I need to shell out the $3 for a modern port or
| run a whole emulated windows95. Probably wine with
| options would also work? SSI games, Allied General and
| Pacific General.
| MarsIronPI wrote:
| I bet it'll run on Wine.
| andoando wrote:
| I mean I don't really give a shit. Im buying a game to
| play it now, maybe next year.
|
| Besides you only need Steam if the publisher chooses to
| use Steam DRM. There's clearly an incentive for it, don't
| think its purely Steam's fault.
|
| If that's the model the publisher offers, that's the
| model you have. Its your choice to participate in it or
| not.
| this_user wrote:
| > What does Steam look like 60 years from now?
|
| Does it matter? You are treating this like these games
| are some valuable collector's items, when they really are
| just toys you play once and then never touch again for
| the most part.
|
| But let's assume you had physical copies of all of these
| games you own on Steam. Once you are gone, there is a >
| 90% chance that whoever inherits it, will throw it away,
| just like Millenials now are throwing away all this junk
| they are inheriting that Boomers used to collect.
|
| The point is, Steam is good enough for all practical
| purposes, which is to acquire and play games in the now.
| benoau wrote:
| My library includes games I played with my father and
| games I played with my own children. Given the option my
| children would certainly revisit their favourite titles
| with their own children one day, or for their own
| nostalgic memories.
|
| One thing you are missing with your logic is that "throw
| it out" is probably more like "give to charity", the
| unwanted goods are not necessarily being _destroyed_ and
| may be redistributed to people who do value them. If my
| kids didn 't want my Steam account I'm sure there's
| others who would, and preservation groups and museums
| that would probably take it.
| dark-star wrote:
| No. At least in some countries (e.g. Germany) they would
| be forced to reimburse every buyer if they removed access
| to a game someone bought.
|
| The fact that somewhere deep down in their EULA there
| might be words that make it clear that you're not really
| "buying" anything, just renting/leasing/whatever,
| wouldn't stand in court since the important part is the
| big shiny "Buy now" button, and "buying" has a specific
| meaning here.
|
| So yeah, the only way they could "take the games away
| from you" is if Steam went bancrupt
| MarsIronPI wrote:
| > So yeah, the only way they could "take the games away
| from you" is if Steam went bancrupt
|
| Yeah, that's not impossible, and I'd rather keep what I
| buy even if the seller does go bankrupt.
| dangus wrote:
| 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-free and
| unencumbered by reaching public domain status.
|
| Can you name your favorite silent movie? How about your
| second favorite? How about your 10th favorite?
|
| What's your favorite song from 1492?
| benoau wrote:
| > 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?
| prmoustache wrote:
| They can't control the licenses rights for some assets
| like music that can expire and become undistributable.
| You may not know it until you install them on a new
| computer n years from now.
| m4rtink wrote:
| I find even just the possibility of this happening
| frankly insane - if the current licensing or copyright
| system allows something like this, the we need a new one.
| prmoustache wrote:
| It has already happened and been documented here.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| There have been several earlier generation game consoles
| that have had their online stores closed already.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Compared to Steam directly, yeah, sometimes a bit more
| expensive. But as soon as you go to sites selling steam keys
| (proper ones, not resellers), it's "almost always, a lot", as
| steam itself rarely has good prices. Now that might still be
| worth it, but it's relevant
| dangus wrote:
| I'm just going to go ahead and plug is there any deal dot
| com.
|
| You can sync up your Steam wishlist (it's a little weird to
| setup but once you figured it out it works).
|
| I almost never buy games directly from steam anymore, there's
| almost always someone else with a discount on steam keys.
|
| And sometimes GOG has the best deal!
| Semaphor wrote:
| I love ITAD! If you use a search engine like kagi or duck
| duck go supporting bangs, you can use !itad to search
| there.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > But as soon as you go to sites selling steam keys (proper
| ones, not resellers),
|
| What is a company/individual if not a reseller if they're
| selling Steam keys? You cannot sell Steam keys without being
| Steam or the developer itself, and not be called a
| "reseller". Or what sites are you referring to here, stuff
| like Humble Bundle where you get Steam keys with the bundles?
| Semaphor wrote:
| Resellers sell something they bought. Or that's the idea.
| The sites are marketplaces, sometimes having people sell
| keys from different countries, sometimes stolen credit card
| keys. There are several game devs saying they'd prefer
| people pirating over using those sites.
|
| Real stores sell steam keys because they are selling
| directly from the developers. Steam is actually nice (or
| preempting monopoly talk, depending on your view) in that
| it allows that (I think there are limits, but IIRC rather
| generous)
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > Real stores sell steam keys because they are selling
| directly from the developers
|
| And how did these "real stores" get those Steam keys
| unless they bought them, maybe even directly from the
| developers? Or are you saying game developers hand out
| these keys for free to the store, then the store sends
| the developer money for each key they sell? I'm not sure
| that makes a lot of sense.
|
| What is an example of one such site selling Steam keys
| who you wouldn't consider a reseller?
| Lammy wrote:
| Humble Bundle usually gives you Steam keys
| Ekaros wrote:
| Apart from times when they have run out and continue to
| sell...
| Semaphor wrote:
| Normal store: fanatical.com
|
| Key reseller: https://www.loaded.com
|
| You really don't need to be so combatative.
| flumpcakes wrote:
| I cannot see a difference, what is the difference between
| a "normal store" and a "key reseller"?
| kgwxd wrote:
| How is GOG functionally different from Steam? They're still
| just a middle man. For actual DRM-free software, both GOG and
| Steam are nothing more than a convenience layer. If they're
| anything more than that, the software simply isn't DRM-free.
| Gormo wrote:
| Not sure what you're trying to say here. The distinction is
| pretty clear: GOG distributes standalone installers without
| any DRM, and Steam does not.
| kgwxd wrote:
| What does the installer matter for DRM-free software? For
| software with other forms of DRM built-in anyway, who cares
| if the installer has it?
| yeputons wrote:
| Correct, but GOG provides games without _any_ DRM, both
| in the installer and in the game itself.
| phatfish wrote:
| The whole reason for GOG existing was they strip dead DRM
| from old games so the work again without "warez scene"
| cracks; and fix all the OS/driver incompatibilities along
| the way.
|
| As far as I know all the games you can buy on GOG will be
| completely DRM free.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Same but I strangely miss the social aspect of achievements on
| Steam. I prefer GOG but wish the achievements synced.
| prmoustache wrote:
| You are the first person I hear that seems to care about
| that.
| gs17 wrote:
| I care about it a little, not comparing with friends, but I
| do like the "X% of players" stats.
| tymscar wrote:
| Its one of the main reasons why I buy on steam. Makes games
| much more engaging, especially for me because I prefer hard
| action games with little to no story.
| Shacklz wrote:
| I typically think of myself (and try to act like) a rather
| rational person. The amount of hours of my life that I've
| done silly, mindless and occasionally annoying things
| because some Steam achievement required it is something I
| can't quite square with that. There's something oddly
| satisfying about getting them.
|
| It's certainly not a primary purchase decision factor but
| I've not bought games because they did not come with steam
| achievements.
| rkomorn wrote:
| This is yet another reminder for me that the world is
| full of different people.
|
| I view achievements as one of the most annoying
| developments in games (and unfortunately some
| productivity software these days, in the shape of
| "badges").
|
| They're yet another gamified growth/engagement pattern to
| contend with in life.
| slfnflctd wrote:
| I can take them or leave them, but maybe because I don't
| care much I feel like I get net enjoyment from them.
| Especially the funny ones (e.g. dying in an unusual way).
| MarsIronPI wrote:
| It seems to me (speaking from a non-gamer perspective) that
| Steam has nailed down the "app store" vibe better than GOG. I
| haven't looked much at GOG Galaxy, but AFAIK it's not a
| Steam-like app to search, buy, install and update games and
| DLC. I think that's a big part (the only part, maybe?) of
| Steam's value proposition.
| dleslie wrote:
| Galaxy is a woefully unmaintained product. It's had known
| and unfixed CVEs for years now.
|
| https://app.opencve.io/cve/?vendor=gog#:~:text=The%20Galaxy
| C...
| legitster wrote:
| > you're not buying games you're leasing them
|
| Counterpoint, the cost of "owning" offline games is not zero
| and their lifetime is not infinite.
|
| I have a stack of old games on CD (or older) and getting them
| to run on anything is a massive pain in the neck. (In fact, for
| nearly all that I care about I also have bought a Steam license
| in addition).
|
| Ultimately, everything comes down to user experience. We can
| pat ourselves on the back for buying something forever, but
| experiences and the media they are stored on are both
| transitory.
| roxolotl wrote:
| Yea 100% it's not as easy to use. But as far as I'm aware
| Steam doesn't provide any guarantee games will keep working
| and GOG actually has it as a mission statement that, as least
| those selected as "Good Old Games", will[0]. Now of course
| that requires GOG to survive so it's sorta the same thing
| like you're saying.
|
| But I'd argue there is a material difference between "if you
| try hard you can run an original copy of Doom" and "if
| business X decided so you can never access those things
| again".
|
| 0: https://www.gog.com/en/gog-preservation-program
| dleslie wrote:
| Not to disagree, but proton has made it quite easy to run
| games I've previously struggled with. The nice thing is
| that it works with any binary, not just those you've
| purchased. Yes, it's wine, but valve has done wonders for
| its performance and compatibility.
| krige wrote:
| GOG's mission statement is applied very selectively. For a
| long time they did not support windows 10, and even now
| it's really spotty. It's frequently on a per-game basis,
| and sometimes games that used to work, don't anymore.
| amatecha wrote:
| Yeah but at least you can get the games. On my old
| MacBook (my only "modern" Mac), Steam auto-updated itself
| to a version that no longer runs on that machine. If that
| was my only computer (luckily it's not), I'd not only be
| completely locked out of the games I already installed,
| I'd also be unable to install any others -- despite the
| fact the games run perfectly on the machine. At least on
| GOG I can just go to the website and download the
| installers, no matter what [relatively-recent] computer
| I'm using.
| chrisjj wrote:
| > I have a stack of old games on CD (or older) and getting
| them to run on anything is a massive pain in the neck.
|
| Anything? Inc. the recommended spec platform?
| eleveriven wrote:
| Steam does an amazing job at convenience, but GOG scratches a
| completely different itch
| cubefox wrote:
| > Steam is really great for what it is but you're not buying
| games you're leasing them.
|
| And you are not paying the large Valve tax (30%), so the
| publisher gets significantly more money from your purchase.
| thomascountz wrote:
| In case I'm not the only one who didn't know what GOG stood for:
| "GOG stands for freedom, independence, and genuine control."
|
| But actually, it stands (stood?) for Good Old Games. :)
| kej wrote:
| It was "good old games", then they announced that good old
| games was going away and after everyone panic-downloaded their
| whole collection they announced that they weren't going
| anywhere but they were just going to be GOG without it standing
| for anything.
| throwawaymobule wrote:
| That was after they had new releases for a while.
| ragall wrote:
| Denoting a translation is not the only thing that "stands for"
| stands for.
| on_the_train wrote:
| No, it literally doesn't stand for good old games. Not for a
| very long time.
| metadope wrote:
| I stand agog as I breathlessly await the next exciting element
| of this discussion.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| I'm waiting for MAGOG so the Biblical End Times can begin.
| paxys wrote:
| It seems these days every video game publisher wants its own
| storefront and game launcher. Weird that CD PROJEKT is instead
| giving up a very popular one.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| I wish you could always go straight to the publisher, I don't
| want an extra middleman in the transaction. GOG is fine because
| after the transaction you can download the install media and
| they're out of the mix, but the Steam/Epic model is terrible,
| it needlessly turns an open platform into a closed one.
| paxys wrote:
| Agreed. I know Steam has done some good things for the
| industry, and people love them for it, but they are also
| single handedly responsible for turning PC gaming from "buy
| and own forever" to a revocable license model. GOG is
| probably the last place remaining where you can actually buy
| games.
| shmerl wrote:
| I think it's good. CDPR essentially can be increasingly driven by
| shareholders. If they are making GOG private now, they can pursue
| their own vision without being pressured.
| crest wrote:
| It's nice that it should be a non-event for users.
| Fiveplus wrote:
| > 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
| private equity firm looking to strip-mine the assets.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I also refuse to install their shop, Web powered "native" apps
| only the unavoidable ones.
| yunnpp wrote:
| I think the only value it adds is cloud saves. The UI is
| otherwise the worst way to explore your library or the store,
| crawls to death performance-wise and isn't even a good UX in
| principle.
|
| For example, if you're on page X of a search, click on a
| game, and go back, guess where that takes you? Yup, page 0
| baby, going to have to click next X times again (there is
| also only previous and next; you can't fast-jump.) There are
| many more examples like that, I have filed survey responses
| several times on issues like this.
|
| The real goat would be if GOG Galaxy were available for Linux
| and integrated with Lutris/Proton so that you didn't have to
| worry about setup. Currently that relationship flows in the
| other direction, which I always found odd: Lutris integrates
| GOG (and Steam) games in its UI.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I have it easier having Windows as main OS.
| yunnpp wrote:
| I suffer Windows at work, so I stay clear of it in my
| personal stuff.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I used to think like that, but doing Linux installs since
| 1995's Summer eventually gets tiring, especially in
| gaming and graphics workstation laptops, thus it lives on
| VMa for me.
| yunnpp wrote:
| Just avoid Nvidia and you're good. Intel/AMD hardware
| works out of the box with Mesa.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| > The real goat would be if GOG Galaxy were available for
| Linux and integrated with Lutris/Proton so that you didn't
| have to worry about setup.
|
| Heroic Launcher can download the game files for you and any
| dependencies, including Wine/Proton/etc. You basically
| install the launcher (can be available from your distro's
| repository), use your GOG login in the app and it shows
| your library. Then click install and it'll download the
| files locally and after that you play the game. The
| experience is more or less the same like in Steam, at least
| as far as downloading and playing games is concerned.
|
| I normally download the offline installers and use them
| with UMU Launcher (which is Proton without Steam, mainly
| meant to be used as a backend for projects like Lutris,
| Heroic, etc but you can use it directly from the command-
| line) but i just tried Heroic Launcher and all i had to do
| was run it, enter my GOG login and after it downloaded my
| library info, i was able to download and play a game the
| same way as in Steam.
|
| I'm not sure what official GOG Galaxy for Linux would add
| here TBH.
| shmerl wrote:
| _> I 'm not sure what official GOG Galaxy for Linux would
| add here TBH._
|
| Two major things:
|
| * Backend Galaxy support for Linux builds
|
| * Multiplayer, achievements, cloud saves, etc. i.e.
| proper integration with optional GOG services for Linux
| versions.
| yunnpp wrote:
| I was not aware of that launcher, thanks.
| daedrdev wrote:
| Im pretty sure I read in the past GoG still sells you a license
| to a game in perpetuity, rather than ownership Of corse,
| practically there is little difference since they provide
| offline installers, so its much better to use GoG if you care
| about this.
|
| The reason they also do this is because of copyright, the
| license allows games to forbid you from redistribution more
| copies
|
| If Im wrong about this please let me know, I read some articles
| claiming this is the case but I am not sure if they truly were
| correct.
| SirMaster wrote:
| >practically there is little difference since they provide
| offline installers
|
| Well it makes it hard or impossible to sell your copy of the
| game to someone else after you are done with it like we used
| to be able to do with console game discs and cartridges?
|
| Seems like a pretty big and practical difference to me.
| daedrdev wrote:
| 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
| SirMaster wrote:
| 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 before that was a thing
| to like the Xbox/360 and PS1/2/3 era style.
| daedrdev wrote:
| It was much harder to sell things online back then too
| rvnx wrote:
| You can also buy boxed things and have the problem. For
| example FL Studio, you buy the boxed edition 300 USD, and
| all you get is a serial number. Once it's linked to an
| account, it's over (and it's actually the only way).
|
| If legislators want to do something good, they could force
| platforms to allow transfer of games between accounts.
| knollimar wrote:
| Doesn't this fly in the face of Vernor vs Autodesk and
| other lwgal precedent? Not that they can't change this,
| but legislators have a vested interest in protecting
| software rights
| 3uruiueijjj wrote:
| Lots of (most?) Steam games don't have real DRM and you can
| run them just fine without the Steam client. So if you want
| to, you can usually download the game and then back up the
| files yourself.
|
| GOG giving you a standalone installer saves you some effort
| compared to that, but in neither case do you really "own" the
| game.
| Delk wrote:
| > Im pretty sure I read in the past GoG still sells you a
| license to a game in perpetuity, rather than ownership
|
| Just about every commercial software license says the
| software is licensed, not sold.
|
| Of course the practical difference is in whether you can
| trust you'll be able to keep using the product indefinitely
| or have to rely on the publisher's goodwill.
|
| (Also, whether the idea that a software product is only
| licensed and not sold is legally valid of course depends on
| the jurisdiction and legal interpretation. IIRC back in the
| day some people tried to argue that you couldn't resell a
| game or other piece of software you bought on physical media
| because the software was only licensed to you, not sold. That
| argument didn't necessarily fly.)
| georgeecollins wrote:
| OK, but the model that Valve pioneered is the model that
| supports 90% of all commercial PC games made today, a higher
| percentage if you cut out MMOs and free to play games, which
| you certainly don't own.
|
| I love GoG and I have worked closely with a lot of people there
| on projects they are great. This announcement seems like good
| news.
|
| No one has to sell games on Steam. No one has to use a model
| where they "rent licenses". They could sell you everything DRM
| free. They don't because too many people pirate games to make
| that a viable business.
| rantallion wrote:
| > They don't because too many people pirate games to make
| that a viable business.
|
| This is what we've been told since time eternal but it seems
| more likely that those pirating are those that wouldn't be
| inclined to pay at all.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| people are commenting in this HN thread like piracy hasn't
| been thought about, deeply, by many thousands of people for
| ages in the games industry. i could link to numerous people
| writing very wise things about it - the CEO of a certain
| competitor to GOG and Steam comes to mind, he basically
| wrote the Luther thesis on games piracy - but then i'd be
| downvoted.
| jonasdegendt wrote:
| I'm interested, please link!
| nottorp wrote:
| If it's Epic, they went the predatory free to play route
| and are financed by gacha money from Tencent.
|
| If it's EA or Ubisoft, they make boring design-by-
| commitee "AAA"s - lately with IAPs thrown in - and I
| don't even look at what they release.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > eternal but it seems more likely that those pirating are
| those that wouldn't be inclined to pay at all.
|
| There are a lot of different reasons people pirate games,
| and other stuff, not all reasons apply to everyone, and
| some reasons on apply to a few.
|
| I used to pirate 99% of the games I played when I was
| young, because my family simply didn't have money to buy me
| video games. Once I grew older and had more disposable
| income, I started buying more games on Steam. Now I have
| more disposable income than I know what to do with, and I'm
| back to pirating games, but only for the ones that don't
| have proper demos available. I probably spent $1000 on
| games I no longer play and cannot refund, because I'm over
| the 2 hour limit, and nowadays I pirate the game, and if I
| enjoy it, I buy it as a way of supporting the developer.
|
| I'm probably not alone with this sort of process, but it's
| probably also not the only reason other's pirate.
| Telaneo wrote:
| > They don't because too many people pirate games to make
| that a viable business.
|
| Given how many games on Steam are sold either DRM free (you
| can just transfer the files over to another PC and they just
| work) or functionally DRM free (Steam's DRM is trivially
| bypassed, so one step removed from DRM free), this doesn't
| really scan. Other than games with Denuvo and multiplayer
| games, DRM is a non-issue for actual pirates.
|
| It seems a lot more likely to me that the people in charge
| will have a fit at the idea of releasing the games DRM free,
| but don't actually care to know anything about the details.
| So long as the DRM checkbox is ticked, and they don't know
| about the fact that Steam's DRM is trivially bypassed,
| everybody mostly gets what they want.
| HeavyStorm wrote:
| Also, many such games are on gog DRM free, and certainly
| pirates don't care where they get their games.
| hhh wrote:
| Yes they do. When I used to pirate a lot of games because
| I was broke I was gleefully happy to see a GOG release.
|
| The scene exists for a reason, it is a very trust based
| ecosystem.
| guizadillas wrote:
| Yeah I usually trust anything a girl who is particularly
| fit repacks
| 867-5309 wrote:
| good luck sourcing the (supposedly) malware-free release
| guizadillas wrote:
| the source is almost always the same forum, what's your
| point?
| 867-5309 wrote:
| is such a forum always well-ranked on search engines? the
| point is to evade malware, obviously
| dannyw wrote:
| I also like an empress although part of the fun comes
| from her rantings.
| guizadillas wrote:
| she really cracks me up with her rantings
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| > They don't because too many people pirate games to make
| that a viable business.
|
| You're saying this about Steam, the 'Piracy is a service
| problem' company.
| computerex wrote:
| People only pirate games because the publishers make it too
| painful to play games legally. I have pirated games that I
| own simply because it's easier to play. This pattern has been
| shown time and time again. When people pirate, it's usually
| due to a problem with the experience. People pay for
| convenience.
|
| Now a days a lot of people are pirating games because the
| quality of games has gone down the drain. Publishers are
| releasing unfinished games and pricing them at record high.
| Consumers are pissed at the lack of value.
| oriolid wrote:
| I'm not completely convinced. When I was a teenager I
| pirated games because I didn't have money (and games were
| incredibly expensive back in the day). The people who I
| copied them from did it to show off their collection and
| connections, or just because they were my friends.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| > I'm not completely convinced. When I was a teenager I
| pirated games because I didn't have money
|
| Yes, but if it was impossible to pirate, you'd still have
| no money to buy the games, so in the grand scheme of
| things nothing would change.
| buran77 wrote:
| For people who have no money to spare for games it really
| doesn't matter if games come with DRM or not. They
| wouldn't afford them anyway so "for free" is the only
| option that matters.
|
| For people who have money for games but don't want to
| pay, the presence of DRM matters very little. 99% of
| games are usually trivially cracked, especially if you
| are willing to wait for some days or weeks after launch
| (an important sales window for the publishers).
|
| For people who have money for games and are willing to
| pay, DRM turns out to be maybe an inconvenience, but
| definitely a guarantee that they don't actually own the
| game. The game can be taken away or even just modified in
| a way that invalidates the reason people paid in the
| first place.
| mindcandy wrote:
| > 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" because the
| moment the crackers release the DRMless version, the drop
| in sales is instant and dramatic.
| fwipsy wrote:
| 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.
| bendangelo wrote:
| 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.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| Both you and GGP make concrete claims but fail to provide
| evidence. Can anyone cite published sales data or is this
| all mere conjecture?
|
| We've been exposed to what seems like FUD about piracy
| killing sales since approximately forever - you wouldn't
| dOwnLoAd a cAR - but seemingly zero actual evidence to
| date.
| mindcandy wrote:
| My source is first and second hand reports from
| management of game companies having worked in the
| industry for decades. But, they don't make numbers like
| that public.
|
| The best public report I can find is https://www.scienced
| irect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S18759... which shows a
| median difference 20% of revenue for games where Denuvo
| is cracked "quickly" but also no significant difference
| if Denuvo survives for at least 3 months.
|
| What I've observed from internal reports from multiple
| companies is that, if you don't assume an outlier
| blockbuster game, major game studios' normal plan is to
| target a 10% annual profit margin with an expected
| variance of +/-20% each year.
|
| So, assuming you have a solidly on-target game, DRM not
| just being there, but surviving at least a couple months
| is the difference between "10% profit moving the whole
| company forward on schedule" vs "10% loss dragging the
| whole company down" or "30% profit, great success,
| bonuses and hiring increases" depending on the situation.
|
| Outside of games, I have seen many personnel reports on
| Hacker News over the years from small-time ISVs that they
| find it exhausting they need to regularly ship BS "My
| Software version N+1" just as an excuse to update their
| DRM. But, every time they do, sales go back up. And, the
| day the new crack appears on Pirate Bay, sales drop back
| down. Over and over forever. Thus why we can't just buy
| desktop software anymore. Web apps are primarily DRM and
| incidentally convenient in other ways.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| > My source is first and second hand reports from
| management of game companies having worked in the
| industry for decades. But, they don't make numbers like
| that public.
|
| As an aside, I find this kind of behavior on the part of
| companies rather irritating. It's like, if you want
| people to believe that something affects your sales, you
| need to publicly release the sales data (and do so in a
| way that people will trust). Otherwise there's no reason
| for anyone to believe you're not just making stuff up.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Why would they care if you or I believe them or not?
| BrenBarn wrote:
| I didn't say you or me, I said _anyone_. They need
| _someone_ to believe them, otherwise no one will care
| when they complain about lost sales.
| sokoloff wrote:
| That's my point: they don't need people to care.
|
| They just need law makers to support IP/DRM laws that
| allow them to continue to operate. (I made games for a
| while at a small studio; I understand some of the
| pressures that studios are under and don't support piracy
| of games.)
|
| And they can get that support without publicly releasing
| detailed time-series sales data.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| It doesn't add up though. If they were actually dependent
| on DRM as described then broad public support would be a
| massive benefit to them. Yet seemingly none of the many
| studios out there publicize such data. And this comment
| section is full of hand waving about "well I can't
| provide actual data but I talked to someone who said ..."
| it sure looks like BS to me.
| sokoloff wrote:
| What form would this "massive benefit" take?
|
| What change would their CFO see on their spreadsheets
| from this massive benefit?
| toyg wrote:
| _> Web apps are primarily DRM_
|
| I've been saying that for decades at this point. Web apps
| trade post-release support issues with slightly higher
| development costs upfront (dealing with browser
| compatibility), but the real kicker is that the company
| is now in complete control of who gets to use what and
| when.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| It's a vacuous argument. Even in the complete absence of
| piracy web apps would still have won out over desktop
| software due to turning a one time sale into a recurring
| subscription. That's what drove their adoption.
|
| MMOs show the same thing. There are plenty of multiplayer
| games with centralized servers that are effectively
| impossible to pirate. But subscription based MMOs score a
| clear win in terms of revenue.
|
| (It turns out free to play gacha is even more lucrative
| than subscription, but I digress.)
| nottorp wrote:
| > which shows a median difference 20% of revenue for
| games where Denuvo is cracked "quickly" but also no
| significant difference if Denuvo survives for at least 3
| months.
|
| So how did they measure the difference? They released one
| title with Denuvo then erased everyone's memories about
| it and released it again without?
|
| Because if you compare different titles I don't know what
| you base that percentage on.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| Clearly they didn't. If such definitive data existed they
| would publicly release it because it would be in their
| own best interests to do so.
|
| Notice that GP amounts to "well I can't actually provide
| any evidence, but if I _could_ then here 's what it would
| look like".
| scns wrote:
| > Btw people in Spain pirate the most games in Europe.
|
| They have very high unemployment among young people,
| might be related.
| lazylizard wrote:
| when i was younger there were more games i wanted to play
| than i had money to pay for..and i pirated.
|
| then i had some money and i bought more games than i had
| time to play.*
|
| now i neither buy or play games.
|
| *the point is that at this point, there is no point
| wasting time trying to pirate games. every humble bundle.
| every steam sale. u just click and its yours. you dont
| even have time to play. why waste time pirating?
| andrepd wrote:
| The thing is teenagers or poor people or people from
| third world countries that pirate for financial reasons
| just would _not_ buy those games regardless. I 'm
| unconvinced that those pirates affect sales in the end to
| any meaningful degree.
| nurettin wrote:
| When I was a kid, piracy was the norm. If your friend had
| a game you liked, you would just grab the tape, go home,
| insert into the recorder and make a copy. I didn't know
| about buying games or what I did was bad until well into
| the 90s.
| technothrasher wrote:
| > I didn't know about buying games or what I did was bad
| until well into the 90s.
|
| Really? When we were pirating games off each other as
| teenagers in the early 80s, we absolutely knew we were
| getting games for free that the publishers wanted us to
| pay for.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Also teenagers grow up eventually having money to buy the
| games on their own.
|
| I'm a Diablo and StarCraft fan because of pirated games
| played during my childhood when I couldn't convince my
| parents to let me buy them.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| I was exactly the same! But then StarCraft 2 came out, I
| went out of my way to purchase the retail box, it had
| nothing more than a slip of paper with a CD key inside, I
| grudgingly went to download it and Blizzard demanded a
| bunch of PII from me. I regret the purchase.
|
| Not making that mistake twice. I imagine this is one of
| the reasons that Steam is so successful. No surprises and
| near zero friction. Why risk going elsewhere as a
| consumer?
| immibis wrote:
| Steam requires the same bullshit. It's just that you only
| do it once, and it remembers your PII for your future
| purchases. In this way, centralised marketplaces have
| lower friction.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| As a broke ass teenager, yeah I didn't pay for them. Now
| as big money adult I bought them almost 1.5 times over.
| Once on GoG and sometimes on Steam.
| immibis wrote:
| So basically your sources weren't lost sales because you
| don't show off your mad sk1llz by buying a game, and you
| weren't a lost sale because you had no way to buy it. But
| I'm sure you did talk about how cool the game was,
| including to some people who could buy it. This sounds
| fairly typical.
| jamespo wrote:
| No, paying nothing is very compelling for a lot of
| consumers, you can see this in many other areas of content
| as well.
| Mathnerd314 wrote:
| Research from the University of Amsterdam's IViR "Global
| Online Piracy Study" (survey of nearly 35,000 respondents
| across 13 countries) found that for each content type and
| country, 95% or more of pirates also consume content
| legally, and their median legal consumption is typically
| twice that of non-pirating legal users.
| rvnx wrote:
| Fun fact, this study was financed by YouTube to create a
| legal shield.
|
| In 2017/2018, they were in the position where MPAA and
| RIAA were saying: "Piracy costs us billions; Google must
| pay" + they had European Parliament on their ass.
|
| Google financed that 'independent' study to support the
| view "Piracy is not harmful and encourages legal spend".
|
| So the credibility of "independent" studies, is something
| to consider very carefully.
| fn-mote wrote:
| My real world observations agree with the direction of
| the study, so I don't entirely dismiss it as fake based
| on its funding source.
|
| I am cautious about the conclusion, though. It seems
| clear there is a spectrum from "unscrupulously pirate
| everything" to "consume legitimately after pirated
| discovery", and quantification is necessary.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Doesn't make it false.
| eviks wrote:
| Why do you think this contradicts anything? Heavy users
| hit a budget limit and continue consuming more via
| pirating.
|
| You really need something way better than some shoddy
| survey to counter the obvious fact that price matters
| afiori wrote:
| Yeah but if a pirate would have not paid the full price
| why care? It is by definition not a lost sale, the most
| likely outcome is just an increase by one the player
| count
| eviks wrote:
| Because the price isn't binary? Also, the total spend
| isn't fixed either, it depends on how easy it's to
| pirate. So it's by definition still lost revenue, even if
| later/at reduced price
| afiori wrote:
| Consider the two cases
|
| A: I pirated a game 25 years ago and played it after
| school
|
| B: I didn't
|
| which cases do you think will make me more likely to buy
| more versions of that game later?
| eviks wrote:
| Consider reality instead, you can make any fantasy case
| you want:
|
| C. You didn't pirate, but played because your friends
| were deeply into it, so you skipped buying lunch to save
| money and pay for the game (pirating was hard for this
| specific DRM). You bought it at a discount on sale
| (remember, the price isn't fixed?). That feeling of
| overcoming hardship and friendship fused into a very
| positive experience, making it 10 times more likely for
| you to buy the next version than in A. or B. The overall
| likelihood still was tiny because now you have a family
| and don't have time to play, so that and
|
| D. Considering the amount of uncertainty (your game
| company will go out of business in 25 years) the value of
| your "more likely" is $0
| Tarball10 wrote:
| Not paying full price is not a "lost sale". People
| unwilling to pay full price wait for a discount or price
| reduction. Look at how popular the seasonal Steam sales
| are. Pirating the game very likely means they never
| purchase it at any price, which _is_ a lost sale.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| It's only a lost sale _if that person would otherwise
| have purchased it_. At least in my personal experience
| that was _never_ the case.
| hsjdndvvbv wrote:
| There is more to this RE: perceived value of respective
| sides.
|
| Edit: missed a word
| danaris wrote:
| It contradicts _the post it was replying to_ , which was
| saying, effectively, that people don't want to spend any
| money on stuff.
|
| I don't think it's required to be making some universal
| point when you clearly respond to the argument put
| forward in the post you reply to, do you?
| eviks wrote:
| No, you misunderstood the comment, it said that paying
| nothing is compelling, not that paying something was
| inconceivable or something; it was a response to a
| comment with a common misconception that pirating is only
| some "service problem"
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| I agree with your earlier comment (GGP) and feel like
| you're contradicting yourself here. "Too expensive" is
| either a service problem or at least directly adjacent to
| it. It's distinct from "well if I can get away with
| piracy then I'll do it". To say that free is a compelling
| price is to imply the latter as opposed to the former (at
| least imo).
| rvnx wrote:
| Before it was really expensive and difficult to get
| access to movies or music. Then came Netflix or Spotify.
| So money is the primary discriminator now, not access.
| And users without money would not bring revenue anyway
| computerex wrote:
| Consumers will pay for convenience and value. You simply
| cannot price a game at $80 and hope to sell it in India.
| You can't expect consumers to have half a dozen monthly
| streaming subs to enjoy their favorite content.
|
| When a product is providing value, and it's easier and
| more convenient to buy than pirating it, then people will
| buy it.
|
| Netflix killed piracy until the platform fragmented and
| now you need half a dozen subs to watch everything.
| Expectedly, free streaming sites are now better than
| ever.
| dannyw wrote:
| Yeah. Where piracy really hurts is when games get cracked
| and released before the official release date. That
| actually devastates sales; unlike a teenager with no
| money pirating a game (who they can't afford to buy
| anyway).
|
| There used to be (maybe still is?) a period where a small
| number of publishers had DRM for the first few weeks, and
| removed it once it was cracked.
| andoando wrote:
| No they don't. I am tired of this feel good nonsense. I
| pirated games because it was free and I did not want to pay
| $60.
|
| Just make your games a donation model if you really believe
| this. Or lets put up a version of Steam where all the games
| are free cracked copies of the game and see how it affects
| sales.
|
| People pay precisely because they dont want to deal with
| the hassle pf pirating
| stavros wrote:
| I can pirate games easily, but I buy them on Steam
| because it's more convenient. If it's too expensive for
| me, I just never play it (or wait for a deal). I can't be
| bothered dealing with the installers and the potential
| viruses and the hassle.
| andoando wrote:
| >because it's more convenient
|
| Yes, now imagine if we just removed the barrier to piracy
| completely. An easy to use client just like Steam, except
| all the games are free cracked copies.
|
| There is no way thats not going to drop sales.
| afiori wrote:
| What has been proven many times is that people
| overwhelmingly choose the least effort/risk option.
|
| A free Steam full of certified pirates games with
| official games updates would obviously drop sales but
| this is moot as it will never exist.
| Tarball10 wrote:
| Isn't that exactly what companies use as justification
| for DMCA and DRM protection?
|
| Without those, you'd have sites full of pirated game
| downloads easily found through search engines. DMCA
| takedowns force those sites into shady corners of the
| internet, making them harder to find and riskier for the
| average user. And (effective) DRM makes users have to
| wait for a crack which may take weeks or months.
|
| The result is that it's easier for the average person to
| just log into Steam/Epic/PSN/eShop and spend $60 to play
| immediately.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| The point is that legal threats keep any centralized
| platforms that might do vetting small. That probably
| accounts for the vast majority of the effect. Beyond that
| the old fashioned "DRM" of a CD key is generally going to
| be more than sufficient to prevent "acts of convenience".
|
| I'm sure there are exceptions but the usual claims take
| the observation about a minor speed bump and add a bunch
| of made up BS to justify consumer hostile practices.
|
| Notice that there's nothing stopping a centralized
| darknet platform that vettes torrents from popping up.
| But as far as I know no one feels like bothering. That
| should give you some idea just how low the bar is here.
| t-3 wrote:
| > you'd have sites full of pirated game downloads easily
| found through search engines.
|
| That's literally the situation today. It _is_ that easy.
| People still mostly don 't pirate games though.
| afiori wrote:
| The reason why publishers like DRM is because it allows
| them to turn anything into a subscription-lite service
| plus tracking and advertising.
| nottorp wrote:
| > just log into Steam/Epic/PSN/eShop and spend $60 to
| play immediately
|
| You spend $60 on games? I just add them to my wish list
| at launch and buy them when they're 30, 20...
|
| I have more unplayed games than time anyway.
| andoando wrote:
| It will never happen precisely because of anti piracy
| measures
| walletdrainer wrote:
| I'm fabulously wealthy and still mostly pirate things
| just because I can't be bothered dealing with online
| credit card payments.
|
| Half the time I try to sign up for any of these services
| I get blocked for fraud because I'm in one country, my
| billing address in another and my bank in a third. Oh,
| and when something does work, it only works for a while
| until they lock the whole account with a bunch of paid
| content on it.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| That is my experience with Adidas.com.
|
| I've not had issues with Steam, though my Steam journey
| was early into online purchasing adventures
| weezing wrote:
| Which services exactly do that? Because Steam or GOG for
| sure don't.
| pfisch wrote:
| You really can't though, not if the games have an online
| component or you want the game to be patched/updated as
| frequently as it would be on steam.
|
| Almost all games these days are basically like a work in
| progress, so if you pirate them then the game doesn't
| stay up to date.
|
| Pirating games is just really inconvenient compared to
| tv/movies/music.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > Almost all games these days are basically like a work
| in progress, so if you pirate them then the game doesn't
| stay up to date.
|
| Which, as a mod author and consumer, isn't always a bad
| thing. More than once, I had to drop just enjoying a
| game, to patch my published mods because some update that
| is automatically pushed out, and people have to accept in
| order to even boot a single-player game. Why? I don't
| know, but it's really annoying sometimes.
|
| Besides, nowadays cracking groups release smaller patches
| too, so while you might not get the update the same hour
| it was published on Steam, usually within a week or two
| the same group that uploaded the original release, has
| released another patch.
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| thieves lie to protect their self-image. i pirated
| because free games let me spend my money on stuff i
| couldn't steal like food at the mall.
|
| i don't pirate anymore because i have a job now.
| danielbln wrote:
| Copyright infringement is not stealing, and it's not a
| given that a sale would have happened at all - even if
| the llicit copy was unavailable.
| afiori wrote:
| If someone pirates 100 60$ games it does not mean that
| had piracy been impossible they would have spent 6000$ on
| those games
| Tarball10 wrote:
| They might spend $600 on 10 of those games, though. It's
| not all-or-nothing.
| nightski wrote:
| They might still spend $600 on 10 more games though. Or
| spend it on a subset of the games they pirated because
| they want to support the developer. Who knows.
| scotty79 wrote:
| If somebody spends $60 on a game but doesn't play it
| should they get automatic refund?
|
| If the deal is providing entertainment for a price then
| why the publisher feels entitled to keeping the money if
| the entertainment didn't happen?
|
| That's the basis of most of the Steam's business.
| basisword wrote:
| >> 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?
| afiori wrote:
| The main reason that Russia had a fame for pirating a lot
| of software was that a lot of publishers either skipped
| it as a market or did shitty localisations and pirates
| offered a far better service.
| crtasm wrote:
| They say they own the game so presumably did purchase it.
|
| Not having to deal with Ubisoft/similar game launchers
| frequently forgetting my login, nagging to update itself,
| etc. is one reason I might choose to run a cracked copy.
| Shacklz wrote:
| Ubisoft launcher being so bad that people prefer the
| cracked, launcher-free version should go down in the
| history as example of some of the worst product-
| management there is.
|
| I'm totally in the same boat; I've not bought several
| Ubisoft-games I was interested in playing because their
| launcher is such a cancer (if anyone from Ubisoft is on
| HN: What on earth are you guys smoking?).
|
| I'm too lazy to bother with pirating games these days (I
| have more games than time to play them anyway), but
| younger me would've certainly went to the high seas to
| circumvent their ridiculous insult of a game launcher.
| yeputons wrote:
| One does not have a debit/credit card at all (e.g.
| they're young, or don't have enough documents, or are an
| immigrant from a sanctioned country).
|
| Alternatively, the card is rejected because "fraud
| prevention", see e.g.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46424584
|
| Or the game is not available in my "account's region",
| which is chosen arbitrarily based on God knows what.
| computerex wrote:
| 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.
| slavik81 wrote:
| 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.
| abustamam wrote:
| I think a lot of people pirate for a lot of different
| reasons. I don't pirate games anymore because I just play
| PS5. But I definitely did so as a teenager because I was
| broke, not because the experience of buying games was bad.
|
| Now I'll pirate if providers make it hard to do things
| right. I know I never "have" to pirate, but my wife once
| "bought" a movie on Amazon. A few years later, she was no
| longer able to access it. And she didn't get refunded for
| her purchase. So guess what? Screw you Amazon, I downloaded
| that movie and saved it on my home media server.
|
| Another example, I was playing a mobile game that allowed
| me to watch ads to get a bonus. I'd always say no because
| they use one of the shittiest ad provider in existence.
| Then they started showing me ads even if I elected not to
| get the bonus, with a fun "pay $20 for ad free forever!"
|
| Well screw you game dev, I'm pirating the ad-free version
| of your game.
|
| > Consumers are pissed at the lack of value.
|
| I think this is true, but I don't think this is necessarily
| causing piracy. Why would people want to pirate a shitty
| game?
| qubitcoder wrote:
| Or, just don't play the game. I don't mean to be
| flippant, but why waste time on software employing shoddy
| practices? Wordle and Apple's mini crossword-minis are
| sufficiently stimulating and quick.
|
| My tolerance for software like that is very limited. It's
| almost an immediate long-press and uninstall.
| nottorp wrote:
| Why do you people even look at mobile games?
|
| They're all free to play and their design is
| fundamentally affected by this. You end up either paying
| with time or with money.
| abustamam wrote:
| It's a good question. My only response is that it's
| genuinely fun.
| ninth_ant wrote:
| > 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, and more.
|
| Boiling this down to one factor of "too many people pirate"
| is dramatic oversimplification.
| cogogo wrote:
| I grew up playing pirated games on the Apple II 35 years
| ago. The fact that many people pirate is not an opinion.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Piracy is much less endemic nowadays.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Yeah, because rather than pirating from cracxxxed.warez I
| can buy the game on Steam/GoG sale for $1.4.
| t-3 wrote:
| Exactly. Games are just software, there's no real unit
| cost to factor in when setting minimum prices, just
| market strategy. Running sales with different levels of
| discounts is as close to optimal as possible $/customer
| without doing stuff like individualized pricing (which
| surely requires a vast amount of computing power and
| human effort to do at scale). Only the truly penniless or
| retro-game fans need to pirate nowadays.
| kevml wrote:
| The real unit cost is worker development cost. Like any
| other tech company, this cost gets muddied in the
| platform/framework development costs versus more product
| focused costs.
| CDRdude wrote:
| "Many people pirate" is a different statement than "too
| many people pirate games to make that a viable business".
| chii wrote:
| It's because the poster assume that each pirated copy
| ought to have been paid for - which if they had been,
| then a previously failing game would've been viable.
|
| But this doesn't make the statement true - because the
| assumption that each pirated copy would've been paid for
| had there been no piracy. This is the same incorrect
| logic that music/movie copyright holders use to count
| pirated works' financial "damages".
| dmantis wrote:
| It doesn't prove that DRM free is not a viable business.
|
| I also grew up pirating, but I haven't been pirating
| games for more than 10 years now.
|
| A few bucks costs much less to me these days than a
| headache with finding a cracked version and installing
| potential malware on my computer. Not even talking about
| supporting the artists and developers.
|
| Gabe is right that piracy is a service problem. If you
| have proper easy installers, easy buying, easy refunds
| and you are from a middle class and higher - it doesn't
| make sense to download random executables from the
| internet. And if you have low-income, you won't buy stuff
| regardless of DRM and just wait someone to crack it.
| djtango wrote:
| Yeah this - people who grew up gaming in the 80s and 90s
| now have significant disposable income and are time poor.
| A game that offers tens or hundreds of hours of
| entertainment is seriously cost effective when a movie
| ticket costs half a videogame or a round of drinks.
|
| Malware is potentially very expensive if you have any
| capital (tradfi or defi) that is anywhere near your
| gaming rig. Even a brokerage of 5 figures isn't worth
| touching something that could have malware.
|
| Most the games young players play are all service
| oriented games anyway
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| This is a valuable lesson I learned when I worked with
| someone, not at Elastic, but who had previously worked at
| Elastic. Elastic was one of the original companies who
| made FOSS but with enterprise licensing work well. We
| were discussing in a meeting at this place we worked how
| to design license checking into the product.
|
| What the guy said I found very insightful: he said that
| you don't really need to spend a bunch of time and effort
| creating sophisticated license checks, you just need
| perhaps a single phone call to a server or something else
| that can be trivially defeated for anyone with a
| reasonable amount of technical knowledge. Why? Because
| the people who would defeat it are the kind of people who
| make horrible enterprise customers anyway. So in a way
| it's just like a cheap lock. Won't defeat anyone
| determined, because it's not designed to. It's designed
| to keep already honest people honest
| jack1243star wrote:
| Totally understandable and even reasonable position, but
| the paying customer gets the worse treatment, which does
| not sit right.
| wishfish wrote:
| I did something that was almost the same. Used to work
| for an educational software company that almost solely
| sold to schools, universities, and government
| institutions. Sometimes to corporate learning centers.
| Every sale was on a per-seat basis.
|
| Every single customer we had wanted to be legal. Didn't
| want to exceed their seats or do anything which would
| violate their sales agreement. In the case of our
| government clients, such violations could lead them into
| legal penalties from their employer.
|
| Despite having an unusually honest customer base, the
| company insisted on horridly strict and intrusive DRM.
| Even to the point of using dongles for a time. It
| frequently broke. Sometimes we had to send techs out to
| the schools to fix it.
|
| I ended up just ripping all of that out and replacing it
| with a simple DLL on the Windows client. It talked to an
| tiny app server side. Used a barely encrypted tiny
| database which held the two numbers: seats in use & total
| seats available. If for some reason the DLL couldn't make
| contact with the server, it would just launch the
| software anyways. No one would be locked out due to the
| DRM failing or because the creaky school networks were on
| the blink again.
|
| This system could have been cracked in five seconds by
| just about anyone. But it didn't matter since we knew
| everyone involved was trying to be honest.
|
| Saved a massive amount of time and money. Support calls
| dropped enormously. Customers were much happier. It's
| probably my weakest technical accomplishment but it's
| still one of my proudest accomplishments.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I wish they had a way to transfer licenses. I have a huge
| steam library and my son is the biggest user. No big deal
| when he was 7 but now I just want to play my ancient
| games... and we kick each other out sometimes!
|
| And yeah.. it's trivial to bypass, but I'd rather have a
| choice not to.
| murrain wrote:
| You can share a Steam library with your family.
| https://store.steampowered.com/promotion/familysharing
| vintermann wrote:
| That's what he does, from the comment about accidentally
| kicking each other out.
| 71bw wrote:
| No, the new system allows multiple users to play the same
| game at the same time (unless the publisher explicitely
| opted out).
| spockz wrote:
| Does it? I thought only as many times as there are
| original licenses in the family. Or is this yet another
| mechanism?
| TuringTest wrote:
| If you want to play the same exact title, yes. But
| previous versions would kick you out from playing a
| shared game if the owner was playing any other title in
| their library, and they've recently removed that
| behaviout.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| The first game I ever sold had no DRM, it was distributed
| by cassette tape. I did very well making games for CD-
| ROM, up until CD burners got cheap.
|
| There's nothing stopping anyone from making a business
| selling DRM free games. I think you can get original DRM
| free games on itch.io. There are probably other places.
| GoG is great, but they don't typically sell new games.
|
| If someone thinks they can make high production value
| games without DRM I hope they try and succeed. Anyone
| here who is certain it is possible is welcome to try.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| > If someone thinks they can make high production value
| games without DRM I hope they try and succeed.
|
| CD Projekt RED did exactly that with both Witcher 3 and
| Cyberpunk 2077, which were available on GOG day #1 (and
| the Steam version did not have any DRM whatsoever) and
| while the latter had a rough start because of technical
| issues, they both sold very well and were positively
| received (after some patches for CP2077 anyway).
|
| GOG also releases many new high production value games on
| day #1 too, e.g. Expedition 33 (which won a crapton of
| awards in recent times) was released on it the same day
| as on Steam. Baldur's Gate 3 was also on GOG on release
| date as is Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon right now,
| which also seems to be a high production value game with
| relatively well reception.
|
| The only games missing are those by companies whose
| business models rely on sucking out gamers' wallets dry
| with microtransactions (so they need the "protection"
| from their own customers that DRM provides) or companies
| that have people making decisions based on assumptions
| stuck in past decades.
| freehorse wrote:
| > GoG is great, but they don't typically sell new games.
|
| Many big studios/publishers avoid gog indeed, but others
| don't, and definitely a lot of new DRM-free games come
| out there all the time. Maybe it is because of the types
| of games I want to play, I usually I have no trouble
| finding them there, with some notable exceptions of
| course (souls games, outer wilds).
|
| Both clair obscur and Baldur's Gate 3 (goty 2025 & 2023)
| were in gog since the beginning (bg3 already since its
| beta). They both definitely sold very well, despite(?)
| that. All Larian and Obsidian games get there as they
| come out, as are quite many CRPGs in general, not even
| counting CDPR's ones. A lot of great/popular indie titles
| appear in gog around the same time as they do on steam in
| the last years.
|
| GOG is not just for old games.
| freehorse wrote:
| Similar here. When I pirated I did not have the extra
| money to buy the games anyway, so I would not have bought
| them. I would also rent a bunch from a video game store,
| when this was actual a thing back then, which was much
| cheaper. And a couple that came with pc magazines. Not
| sure how that worked in the context of the video game
| industry, but anyway downloading a full game over these
| internet speeds was a pain.
|
| Once I was more economically stable, I did not download
| pirated games anymore, and I even bought a bunch that I
| had played and really liked, even if I barely played them
| again.
|
| I am not putting any moral stance on this, I was not
| entitled to play anything without money to pay, but my
| point is that for me a lack of option to pirate these
| games would not have implied me paying for them. Probably
| I would have done something else with my time.
| Sayrus wrote:
| People pirate Steam Games anyway. Stating that people
| pirate too much to make it viable is purely opinion and
| not based on numbers. Sure, for AAA games you get 2 to 3
| months without a cracked version, but this stops
| afterward. For non-AAA games, the steam version is
| usually crackable from day-1.
| dark-star wrote:
| Seriously, for cracking steam games, all it takes is to
| drop a single DLL inside the game's folder. It can't get
| simpler than that.
|
| Yes, that obviously only works for offline games, but
| yeah, cracking Steaam games is as easy as cracking any
| other game, maybe even easier
| tommica wrote:
| That is cracking, but one still has to download the files
| from somewhere before they can crack it. Finding
| legitimate files is still time consuming.
| dark-star wrote:
| Yeah, but you just need anyone who bought the game on
| Steam, a friend or co-worker for example, not some shady
| website.
|
| You want to avoid shady websites for the game download,
| and shady websites for the crack download. You can do
| both of this with Steam
| nalekberov wrote:
| Games are cracked at day one, sometimes hours after.
| Apparently DRM is not a solution here. If pirates know
| that, people at Valve certainly do.
| croes wrote:
| >The fact that many people pirate is not an opinion.
|
| That's not the opinon part. That pirating is the reason a
| game business isn't viable is.
|
| Would you have bought every game you pirated? How much
| money did you spend on gaming because you got hooked
| because you could play more games than you could afford
| otherwise?
| trinsic2 wrote:
| It's an opinion that "Most" people pirate games and it's
| also an opinion that pirating games translates directly
| to lost sales. As Gabe said and I agree with him piracy,
| if it's anything a service related problem. You don't
| need DRM to overcome that. You just need to make a good
| product and respect you audience. The people that pirate
| for the wrong reasons will do it anyway and you don't
| gain much from restricting copies.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| >> The people that pirate for the wrong reasons will do
| it anyway and you don't gain much from restricting
| copies.
|
| That is also an opinion. Also-- as an aside-- I am
| curious what you think the "right" reason is for piracy.
| DRM free games is not a new idea. They have always
| existed and people have tried different models with them
| like including advertising. Do you remember the Ford
| driving simulator? The skittles game. there have been
| other models and there is a huge universe of DRM free
| games for decades.
|
| If you don't gain much from restricting copies, please
| explain to me why it is so common in the best games?
| jaapz wrote:
| Have they actually tried releasing those same games DRM
| free?
|
| Just because everybody does it is not really a convincing
| reason
|
| Also many DRM games are cracked quite quickly after
| release. How does that help sell more copies?
| nottorp wrote:
| Are you confusing the absence or presence of copy
| protection with how a game is supposed to make money?
|
| > why it is so common in the best games?
|
| What best games? It's common in design by commitee
| predatory crap like EA/Ubisoft titles.
|
| Thing is, a pirated copy isn't a lost sale. It's more
| like free marketing. It's possible that the above
| assholes would make more profit if they stopped spending
| on copy protection and advertising and just made and sold
| games.
|
| In a world where it would be impossible to pirate
| software, I bet they would have at best 25% more sales.
| No one can afford to pay for every game, especially at
| launch price, so they'll just make do with fewer of them.
|
| Linky about marketing costs:
|
| https://www.trueachievements.com/n53671/aaa-game-
| development...
|
| Juicy quote:
|
| the CMA says that "this publisher also submitted that for
| one of its major franchise's development costs reached
| $660 million and marketing costs peaked at almost $550
| million."
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| True, this is an opinion but I am guessing you don't know
| my background. And having some expertese doesn't guarantee
| my opinion is correct. But I guess I can say I am
| considered enough of an expert to be asked to speak on
| panels about the game industry or serve on juries for
| awards. And you are right it is a complicated question.
| zx8080 wrote:
| > I am guessing you don't know my background.
|
| Don't be shy, share it.
| straygar wrote:
| Maybe it's this George Collins:
| https://www.mobygames.com/person/2294/george-
| collins/credits...
|
| And this being one of the panels mentioned:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPSAb1BDHgI
| georgeecollins wrote:
| Since I am completely embarrassing myself: - Review of a
| DRM free game I sold in 1980 https://archive.org/details/
| BallyArcadeAstrocadeArcadianAltS... - That you tube link
| is pretty old, I was on a panel at Games Beat this year,
| I think because a more interesting person got sick.
| nopurpose wrote:
| can we have another battlezone, please?
| jirf_dev wrote:
| All the factors you listed are a huge component of Steam's
| success but are mainly for the benefit of consumers. Lack
| of offline installers is something that makes the vast
| majority of suppliers comfortable with putting their game
| on Steam. A platform ideally wants to capture as many
| consumers as possible but also needs to capture as many
| suppliers as possible to create a rich marketplace.
| Negotiating the balance of consumer vs supplier demands is
| what makes Steam successful as a platform.
| gregates wrote:
| Indeed -- the only reason I personally still use steam is
| that a few of the games I want to play are not available
| in any other (legal) way.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I've followed a couple indie game developers over the years
| who started with lofty ideas about selling DRM free games.
| As soon as they add an online component of any type (e.g. a
| leaderboard for ranks or high scores) they're blown away by
| the number of connections coming in because the number of
| people playing the game is so much higher than they would
| have expected from sales alone.
|
| If you're the kind of person who actually pays for games
| even when you could pirate them with a few minutes of
| searching, you probably don't fully understand how
| widespread the problem is. Many people will simply not pay
| for something if there is an option to get it without
| paying by default.
|
| The only developers who can afford to do DRM-free games are
| those with such a high volume of users that they've passed
| their target threshold for income and are okay with leaving
| money on the table. For every 1 person you see claiming
| they will only spend money on DRM-free games in comments on
| HN or Reddit, there are probably 100 to 1000 more who don't
| care about the DRM status of the game, they just want to
| buy it and play for a while.
| freehorse wrote:
| 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 number of sales would have
| happened.
|
| Moreover, for offline games, there have always been ways
| to crack DRMs. I do not have data on that, but I have
| seen pirated versions of all these DRMed games and I
| doubt that DRM on its own actually inhibits pirating.
| Let's not forget that DRM precedes steam, and before it
| was usually about having to put the cd in order to launch
| the game. I have used cracks for games I actually owned
| because I did not want to use the cd, and often a damaged
| cd could mean being unable to play the game otherwise,
| even if all assets and files were installed on the hard
| drive. When a new kind of DRM came out, the only question
| was how long it would take for it to get cracked.
|
| Pirating software comes with its own price/risks. The
| people who have less to lose are probably the ones that
| do not have the money to spend on all these games in the
| first place. In general going from number of pirated
| downloads to sales lost is far from straightforward.
| There is a lot of misunderstanding here about who and why
| downloads pirated games.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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 afford it or wouldn't buy it
| anyway. The same arguments were made when Netflix clamped
| down on account sharing: Everywhere you would find
| predictions that Netflix would suffer as a result, people
| would start cancelling their accounts, and they'd regret
| the decision. Yet the opposite happened and they had more
| users sign up.
|
| > There is a lot of misunderstanding here about who and
| why downloads pirated games.
|
| I agree with this statement, but in the opposite
| direction. The misunderstanding is the mental gymnastics
| that go into painting all pirates as all poor individuals
| who have no money and therefore no choice but to pirate
| games. The reality is that piracy is just a choice of
| convenience and taking something for free because they
| can. People from all tax brackets do it.
| freehorse wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| 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?
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| 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.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > They could sell you everything DRM free. They don't because
| too many people pirate games to make that a viable business.
|
| Depends on the game and DRM. Nowadays I buy all of my games
| (a little bit safer than running who knows what on my PC),
| but when I didn't have a job or money I used to pirate a lot
| - most DRM protected games would eventually be cracked and
| made available regardless. If an uncrackable DRM was in
| place, I wouldn't buy the game - I just wouldn't play it.
| Depending on the mindset, the same logic applies to someone
| with money, they might never be a customer regardless of
| whether it can or cannot be pirated, especially for games
| that never go on big discounts and sales. I say that as
| someone who by now owns about ~1000 games in total legally
| (though mostly smaller indie titles acquired over a lot of
| years and sales).
|
| The good online stores at least make the act of purchasing
| and installing games equally if not more convenient than
| pirating them - something all of those streaming companies
| that crank up their subscription prices and want to introduce
| ads would also do well to remember. I like Steam the best
| because it's a convenient experience, the Workshop mod
| support is nice, as well as Proton on Linux and even being
| able to run some games on my Mac, just download and run. I
| think the last games I pirated were to check if they'd run
| well on my VR headset, because I didn't want to spend a few
| hours tweaking graphics settings and messing around just to
| be denied a refund - in the end they didn't run well, so I
| didn't play or buy them, oh well.
|
| Also, despite me _somewhat_ doubting the efficacy of DRM
| (maybe it 's good to have around the release time to motivate
| legit sales, but it's not like it's gonna solve piracy), it
| better at least be implemented well - otherwise you either
| get performance issues, or crap that also happens with gaming
| on Linux with anti-cheat, where you cannot even give the
| companies money because they can't be bothered to support
| your platform. Even worse when games depend on a server
| component for something that you don't actually need for
| playing the game on your own, fuck that. It's like the big
| corpos sometimes add Denuvo to their games and then are
| surprised why people are review bombing them.
| SXX wrote:
| Valve and Steam dont force DRM on anyone either. Downloader
| client is ofc DRM in itself, but a lot of games run just fine
| without Steamworks.
| sallveburrpi wrote:
| How is GOG a viable business if everything gets pirated?
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| This is a really old question and a really old solution.
|
| It turns out that piracy is actually a service problem.
| Services like Steam and GOG provide a decent enough service
| that piracy becomes less common.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Many games on GOG are at the tail end of their sales cycle
| (i.e. were released on Steam long ago) trying to eke out a
| few more sales, are from small indies for whom any
| attention at all is good attention, or are very
| old^H^H^Hclassic games that garner purchases for
| nostalgia's sake by older gamers that can afford more
| discretionary spending.
| delaminator wrote:
| And many aren't.
|
| I bought Factorio early access on Gog, and Timberborn,
| and Loop-Hero.
| phantasmish wrote:
| 1) Modern games are enormous and as long as services like
| GOG let me re-download my library it frees up literally
| terabytes of space on my disk array for pirated movies and
| other things that benefit far more from piracy than games
| do.
|
| 2) I don't want viruses. I don't want viruses more than I
| want to avoid paying $1-$20 for a game (as if I'm anywhere
| near caught up enough on my backlog of games from the last
| 40ish years for buying games at full launch-week price to
| ever make sense, lol, I do that like... once every several
| years, all the rest are very cheap)
| Hammershaft wrote:
| Steam uses outsized market power to take an enormous %30 cut
| so it also does major damage to the games industry.
| SXX wrote:
| This. As game developer this is a huge problem since
| outside of top 1% industry is shit poor and platforms
| squeeze it badly.
|
| Unfortunely needs of game developers and customers are not
| exactly align. Valve is good steward of their outsized
| market share when it's comes to gamers interests.
|
| Epic Games tried to shake market with "gamers dont matter"
| policy (no reviews, no community, worse services) and low
| fees and failed miserably.
|
| As game developer I'd love to see platform fee of 10%, but
| as gamer I dont want to buy my games and give power to
| Tencent, Microsoft or Google.
|
| I could only dream that customer-first platform not owned
| by VC / PE money like GOG could compete with Steam.
| Unfortunately unlikely to happen.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| The 30% cut is standard, and was so at retail even before
| Steam existed IIRC.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| 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?
| chii wrote:
| > 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).
| esrauch wrote:
| The main claim here is that it is a defacto monopoly, and
| that there are not "plenty of other platforms", since
| none of those platforms actually have any reach. It
| results in most games smaller than Fortnight or Blizzard
| having literally no choice but to use steam regardless of
| policy or cut.
|
| Any time you have no choice it at least makes for a very
| warped market.
| chii wrote:
| > since none of those platforms actually have any reach.
|
| so really, this is about getting reach, and that a 30%
| cut for said reach is too high. I am arguing that this
| price is a market price, for which it is justified by
| mere existence. If this price was too high, then these
| other platforms that you claim have no reach will get
| some reach, since the PC platform is not locked down
| (yet).
|
| Unlike in the model of apple's app store (until recently
| at least?), which has no alternative possible. Even
| android's supposed alternative is somewhat going to get
| locked down by google looking at the trend. Then the
| claim would be that those platforms hold not only a
| defacto monopoly, but an actual one, and their cut is
| therefore not a real market price. That makes it possible
| to claim that they're unfairly pricing their platform.
| Steam doesn't have this issue at all.
| qwytw wrote:
| That's not exactly how markets generally work ("free
| market" is more of a theoretical concept than something
| that has ever existed outside of commodity markets at
| least).
|
| In a way it can be justified in the sense that developers
| would rather get 70% than not make a sale at all if their
| games were only available on less popular platforms. But
| effectively that's what allows Steam to charge charge as
| much. They certainly have a dominant position in the
| market due to very little competition.
|
| It's like retail/supermarket chains in certain countries
| being able to extort better conditions from their
| suppliers because they have very little choice. Or e.g.
| real estate agents being able to charge disproportionally
| high fees due to how the market is structured.
|
| Whether someone considers that fair or not is of course
| rather subjective...
|
| > Steam doesn't have this issue at all.
|
| IMHO it's a matter of degree but fundamentally the same
| thing. The barriers to switching to a different store are
| just much lower than not having an Apple/Google phone but
| they still exist.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| 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
| chii wrote:
| > 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 time, this video outlines the evidence and the
| coming trends:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XigPD8BCkho
| Hammershaft wrote:
| 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.
| qwytw wrote:
| > The natural equilibrium would get reached
|
| Except somehow they managed to get it right from the
| beginning and there was never any real market pressure to
| change it. Had Valve (or Apple of that matter) decided to
| charge e.g. 20% due to whatever reasons or conditions
| that existed in 2007 (but might not anymore) that would
| still somehow be the "natural equilibrium" even today in
| the exactly the same way.
|
| The fee is also very sticky, platforms can't really
| increase without a massive amount if backlash, therefore
| reducing it becomes much riskier since they can never go
| back. Given a competitive market doesn't really exist a
| variable fee based on "market conditions" can't really be
| a thing either.
|
| It's very hard for someone to undercut Valve just because
| of the scale. They might sill be very profitable if they
| charged 15-20% while other smaller stores might not be
| able to afford that. Same mechanics have always applied
| to most other monopolies or oligopolies in other
| industries.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| 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
| krige wrote:
| Ah yes the Tim Sweeney argument. Get a better service
| with a lower cut, sure. Why does nobody do that? They
| must be stupid.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| It's more like the Year Of Linux On The Desktop argument.
| Why doesn't Linux just provide better features and TCO
| and unseat Windows? According to the parent poster, "They
| must be stupid."
| ThatMedicIsASpy wrote:
| The cut lowers to 25% after $10mio and 20% after $50mio
| iirc.
|
| I can defend steam and its (key) features I need/use
| (Controllers, Linux gaming, Linux improvements)
|
| I cannot defend valves gambling casino. I also cannot say
| it's a monopoly.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > The rush to defend Valve's monopoly is so weird since
| HN usually hates fat cat billionaires.
|
| Yes, almost like there's an actual difference between
| Valve and typical other corporations? Ha ha just kidding,
| it must be random internet nonsense, definitely not worth
| applying any brain cells to!
|
| The simple reality is that Valve is just a lot nicer to
| their customers in terms of behavior and utility than the
| overwhelming majority of companies, and that means many
| people cut them more slack for other things. People are
| willing to forgive a large cut if it feels like you're
| actually trying to provide an ever-more-useful service,
| rather than coasting on the bare minimum.
|
| Steam isn't just a little bit better than competing
| stores/platforms, it's MONUMENTALLY better, and the gap
| is probably increasing rather than shrinking over time,
| because other stores don't look like they're even trying
| in comparison.
| Jach wrote:
| 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).
| qwytw wrote:
| Of course compared to retail its a great deal but that's
| because of the huge number of middlemen involved in
| shipping a game/software back then. It's not like
| retailer margins were that great.
|
| The 30% is mostly arbitrary though, IMHO had apple
| decided to charge 20% or 25% when the appstore came out
| that would have become the industry standard.
| user____name wrote:
| On top of their very frequent predatory pricing sales. -90%
| who the hell can or wants to compete with that? But hey the
| gamers love it.
| immibis wrote:
| That's called market segmentation. The people who either
| ignore the game or pirate it when it's full price - well
| they're trying to at least get _some_ money out of those
| people. That 's how sales work in general.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| Piracy is widespread, that's undeniable. The question that
| industry groups and lawmakers love to avoid or lie about
| however is how much of that piracy represents lost sales, and
| how much represents people in the third world finding a way
| to participate with all of the people who can afford it. I
| pirated a lot as a kid because I had no money, there were no
| lost sales there. As an adult I don't pirate at all, because
| I have money, because it's inconvenient now compared to
| legitimate access.
|
| So I'm perfectly prepared to believe that Steam is a good
| option (I personally love it), and frankly if the worst
| happens and the games I pay for go away on Steam... there are
| options. Once I pay for something I no longer feel any guilt
| about seeking a backup for example, and neither should you,
| even if the industry groups count that as a full-sale price
| theft.
| kgwxd wrote:
| Once you pay who? Money going to the wrong people is far
| worse for "creators" in the long run than if you had just
| copied it. Every digital industry has proven the argument
| billions of times over. If you're going to bother feeling
| guilt, aim it at actual injustice.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| You're adding a lot of dimensions to the act of buying
| something than I care about. I'm not trying to fight
| injustice when I buy most things, I'm just following the
| realistic legal requirements to use the thing.
| nutjob2 wrote:
| Pretty much all games with any sort of substantial audience
| are pirated, regardless of DRM.
|
| The fact that DRM negatively affects honest customers more
| than pirates still holds true.
| dannyw wrote:
| I like Steam because they have basically kept the same DRM
| for, like a decade now? It's not intrusive.
| qwm wrote:
| It's worth noting that many, if not most, games on Steam
| don't have DRM. You can often just take the .exe files out of
| them and play. Sometimes you need a polyfill for Steam's
| client API, but that's usually it.
| solatic wrote:
| > They don't because too many people pirate games to make
| that a viable business
|
| Game piracy is fundamentally un-safe for players, since games
| are fundamentally executable code, where setup usually
| requires admin permissions, and pirate distributors are
| financially incentivized to add malware to turn the game
| system into part of someone's botnet. The only "safe" way to
| pirate is to do it on a dedicated machine, on a separate
| VLAN, network controls, etc., which most people will not set
| up. This is not like TV/movie piracy, which would depend on
| zero-day exploits in the video player.
|
| Buying a DRM-free game legally is much safer.
| nottorp wrote:
| Most good quality pirate sites have a comments section and
| remove malware laden torrents.
| pdntspa wrote:
| How silly that you assume pirates are always doing it for
| financial gain, as opposed to cred or the lulz
| swiftcoder wrote:
| This is mostly fear-mongering on the part of the big IP
| holders.
|
| We saw the exact same cycle with mobile distribution of audio
| and video - Amazon even had to fork Android to add kernel-
| level DRM before any of the video rights holders would allow
| Amazon Video on tablets (this is before Google added DRM to
| android in general).
|
| And now? That DRM was circumvented, and you can torrent
| pretty much any Amazon video the day after it goes live. But
| it's inconvenient enough that most people don't, the rights
| holders still feel all warm and cozy, and nobody really
| cares.
| generic92034 wrote:
| > 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?
| georgeecollins wrote:
| 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 gives
| away that are sold on Steam. That's an even better example.
| You are right that people don't just pay for games because
| they can't get them for free, they are also willing to pay
| to get them in a convenient format even when another format
| is free.
|
| My question is, does that really support the model for most
| premium games? Nobody likes DRM, the game industry didn't
| used to have it.
| SpEd3Y wrote:
| > I can't think of a game available on GoG that sells on
| Steam for > $20. I am sure one exists, but in general
| these are older, cheaper games.
|
| Fair point but I think there are quite a few of those:
| Baldur's Gate 3 comes to mind. Expedition 33, Kingdom
| Come: Deliverance II even Cyberpunk, but it's true that
| nowadays Cyberpunk is a ~20$ title.
|
| But not sure these were on GoG day 1. Or they added them
| after ~1 year after they got most of their sales on Steam
| and already the piracy of the games started.
| nottorp wrote:
| >even Cyberpunk, but it's true that nowadays Cyberpunk is
| a ~20$ title
|
| Newsflash: Witcher and Cyberpunk are CD Projekt Red
| titles. CD Projekt Red was the initiator of GoG and owned
| it 100% until 2 days ago.
|
| Every CD Projekt game was available on GoG from day zero.
| freehorse wrote:
| > 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 >$20 (it may change the
| currency depending on your country though).
|
| https://www.gog.com/en/games?priceRange=20%2C152.99&hideD
| LCs...
|
| Far from complete but also a few big titles are there.
| Granted this is the price in gog but most of the times
| ime it is the same price as in steam, or around the same.
|
| > Nobody likes DRM, the game industry didn't used to have
| it.
|
| Aren't DRMs a pretty old thing at this time? I remember
| the days when DRM was basically about having to use the
| cd to launch the game as the game would check for that,
| even if everything needed to run the game was in the hard
| drive. People would use cracks or virtual drives even if
| they actually bought the game to avoid doing that. At
| least now DRMs are far less obstructive to someone who
| owns the game.
| Doxin wrote:
| Because it's easy. Say what you like about steam but it
| sure as hell made acquiring games super easy. On-par or
| easier than pirating.
| serf wrote:
| >OK, but the model that Valve pioneered is the model that
| supports 90% of all commercial PC games made today, a higher
| percentage if you cut out MMOs and free to play games, which
| you certainly don't own.
|
| OK, but this model deployed in other parts of essentially any
| industry is equally scummy and abusive, no matter how much
| <$company> is liked, no matter how well they deployed it, no
| matter how many buckeroos it made someone.
|
| in fact it's scummy _any time_ the concept of sales and
| ownership gets warped aggressively, and even more so when it
| 's done so in such a way that the leasee doesn't realize what
| they are until they get screwed somehow.
|
| also, REMINDER: steam doesn't solve piracy, it helped to
| solve distribution. anti-piracy was sold (and lobbied to devs
| by Valve) far after the fact when it became clear that Valve
| had to have enough benefits to shove devs and customers into
| this style of non-ownership. Same reason why Steam also tries
| to be a half-assed discord/social media outlet.
|
| Yes it's wildly successful. A lot of scummy shit is.
|
| Steering the world that way (by example of business success)
| is sure to end well. Isn't that what FernGully was about?
| scotty79 wrote:
| > They don't because too many people pirate games to make
| that a viable business.
|
| Piracy is what makes games a viable business. Even now
| marketing budget for a game can exceed development costs.
| Each pirated copy is not a lost sale. It's marketing brain
| worm implanted in a person that you didn't have to pay for.
|
| The fact that most pirated games become bestsellers is not an
| accident. And it's not the other way around.
|
| It's the same thing as with Windows. It wouldn't be most used
| and best selling operating system if it wasn't amply pirated.
|
| Apple, to have anyone use a copy of their OS, has to bundle a
| device with it. And Linux has to give it all for free to buy
| its mindshare. Piracy makes Windows business model viable.
| easyThrowaway wrote:
| DRM is not, and it has never been, about piracy.
|
| It is about publishers putting an expiry date to a digital
| product, in order to not having to compete with their own
| products in the future.
|
| It is about making sure that by the time your hypothetical
| FIFA 2026 release comes out, all the available existing
| copies of FIFA 2019-2023, which mostly differ for the squad
| roster, are unusable.
|
| This is exactly the same reason for single player games
| requiring constant online support nowadays. The authorization
| servers for "The Crew", a mainly single player game by
| Ubisoft, went offline coinciding with the close release of
| "The Crew Motorfest". This didn't go unnoticed, and nearly
| ended up with the EU passing some specific legislation on the
| matter[1].
|
| [1]https://citizens-
| initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/20...
| ajuc wrote:
| > They don't because too many people pirate games to make
| that a viable business
|
| I think mostly they don't because people already have steam
| installed, and creating a new account on some other website
| to buy 1 game is too much hassle.
|
| See dwarf fortress that was free for decades, and got much
| more popular when it was released on steam (paid version).
|
| Or see Vintage Story which is great, and should be much more
| popular, but it's only available on its own website.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Except we are at a point now where you almost do have to sell
| on Steam. If you aren't already huge, you aren't going to
| gain much traction, if any at all, for your game outside of
| Steam.
|
| I remember when Steam launched, it was rightfully met with
| hostility. Somehow Valve managed to completely win over
| gamers, and they do good work, but lets not forget that they
| are quickly approaching monopoly status. Just because someone
| could sell on some other store doesn't mean it would be
| profitable to do so because of Steam's userbase.
| SirMaster wrote:
| >GOG is the only major storefront where I feel like I actually
| own the product.
|
| How do we re-sell our GOG games to someone else?
|
| If I own it I should be able to sell it again, right? Like I
| used to sell old console game disks after I was done with them.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Just give them the files and pinky promise to delete them
| yourself?
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| Gog license doesn't allow reselling at all
| ManlyBread wrote:
| It amazes me that people nowadays know so little about
| piracy that this is somehow touted as a solution.
| squigz wrote:
| GP wasn't being serious.
| ManlyBread wrote:
| I've seen this sentiment repeated enough times on reddit
| that I no longer can tell the difference.
| eviks wrote:
| The same way you sell your disks: find a buyer, send them the
| game files, they send you the money
| chii wrote:
| > find a buyer
|
| this buyer would rather buy off GOG than you, unless you
| give a significant discount (and even then, the trust is
| hard to establish).
|
| Therefore, even if you might have a legal right to re-sell
| (which you really don't unfortunately), the actual sale
| won't happen.
| eviks wrote:
| That's not relevant to the issue of "ownership"
| qwm wrote:
| This isn't an ownership problem, it's a medium problem (and
| perhaps a legal problem)
| transcriptase wrote:
| People said the same thing when Steam launched, yet my profile
| sits there with a badge saying 20+ years and I can't recall a
| time I've encountered an issue that was the fault of Valve
| versus a developer or publisher.
|
| At this point the games I "own" on physical media like CDs have
| theoretically started to degrade before the threat of Valve
| revoking my ability to install or play has come to pass.
| buzzerbetrayed wrote:
| Correct. And if steam ever retracts anything, I'll pirate the
| game then with a clean conscience.
| kaoD wrote:
| The problem is what will happen when Gabe Newell passes away.
|
| My GOG installers will never degrade though.
| transcriptase wrote:
| I'll be very surprised if during all the time he spends
| doing nothing and winning, he hasn't planned ahead for his
| company not becoming the very thing he hates and sets it
| apart.
|
| I'd put a controlling interest in a trust with ironclad
| instructions to have Valve do the opposite of Ubisoft/EA.
| That would buy it another half-century at least.
| bayindirh wrote:
| This is because of Gabe and Valve itself, and it's not a
| universal constant. I have quite a few licensed software
| where I have the license, but installing the software is
| impossible.
|
| This is why I still keep a copy of the software I bought, and
| religiously backup that trove. Because someday that S3 bucket
| or SendOwl link or company server will go down.
|
| Sometimes, a company will raise prices, so the publisher will
| have to kill the old links. C64Audio had to switch to
| BandCamp and invalidate SendOwl links because of that price
| hike.
|
| I'm still bitter about not being able to reset my Test Drive
| Unlimited install count online just because I have updated my
| computer and _transferred_ the whole Windows installation to
| the new system back in the day.
|
| There are not many ways to battle the entropy of the
| universe.
| yeputons wrote:
| > I can't recall a time I've encountered an issue that was
| the fault of Valve versus a developer or publisher.
|
| Does it really matter if it's developer/publisher removing
| the game from Steam, not Valve? The end result is the same:
| one can't play.
| rhamzeh wrote:
| AFAIK, even if the developer removes a game from Steam, if
| you bought it (or rather, a license for it), it remains in
| your account.
|
| E.g. I have Lord of the Rings: War in the North that is no
| longer available anywhere, yet I can still download install
| and play it on my devices through Steam (even on Linux,
| which it was not intended for)
|
| That of course doesn't help if the game does not have an
| offline component, e.g. I also still have League of Legends
| in my Steam account, but that is unusable because the Riot
| servers don't allow updating/connecting from it.
| eatsyourtacos wrote:
| Literally the last thing on the internet you can complain about
| is Steam. PC gaming would be the biggest cluster fuck in the
| world- if not fairly dead / super niche.
|
| You would need to install 12 front-ends like Steam that would
| be hot trash and have a handful of games and be the most
| miserable shit ever. You wouldn't have sales, reasonable game
| prices, or family library sharing (this would be absurd to any
| other company).
|
| Steam is a prime example of when a monopoly ends up to be the
| best for the consumer.
| phatfish wrote:
| Well, you don't "stop using Steam" unless you don't care
| about playing most games released in the last 10-15 years.
| But the premise is solid, given that GOG has no DRM. Steam
| did get DRM "right" though.
|
| My problem with Steam are the casino tactics Valve inject
| into their own games and the platform. That is an entire
| gaming industry problem however. At least Valve do some good
| things with the dirty money.
| Hobadee wrote:
| 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.
| utopiah wrote:
| As a (theoretical) archivist, this, 100%
|
| As an actual gamer... why? I mean of course I agree that if I
| buy a game I should play however I want (assuming it doesn't
| degrade the game for others, i.e. no online cheating in
| competitive settings but modding is fine, including online if
| other players agree to it) for whatever long the agreement
| priced was (e.g. I don't think it's OK to get a lower price for
| a 1-day trial then keep it forever but if I do pay full price,
| then I get to keep it)... and yet, when I play a game, I play
| it. I don't store it. Sure I might want to maybe play it again
| in 10 years but the actual likelihood of that is very VERY low.
| I say this owning few dedicated arcade hardware running MAME
| and similar emulators.
|
| TL;DR : I go get the point, my behavior though is not that,
| namely I play, complete (or not) then move on.
| Shacklz wrote:
| As an avid gamer myself, I fully agree with your point. I
| guess in this thread there are a lot of people who, due to
| them being in tech, have a bit of a relationship with games
| but it's not really a big hobby. And as it happens, Steam has
| a few policies that trigger some intellectually motivated
| objections - nice in theory but practically irrelevant for
| gamers who play games on a regular basis.
|
| As a matter of fact, in case the nostalgia itch really does
| hit, Steam actually enables a relatively easy 're-release' of
| old games that many publishers started doing - often with no
| further addition except the promise that it'll run on modern
| hardware/OS hassle-free.
|
| I've re-bought games I've played in the 90s/2000s on Steam
| even though I already owned them and probably still have the
| CD lying around somewhere, but I just can't be arsed to go
| through the troubles of installing from them. Pay a few
| bucks, click a button and I'm up and running.
| ManlyBread wrote:
| GOG is no different, you're still renting licenses and GOG
| still has the right to revoke your license, effectively making
| your "offline installer" no different from a game downloaded
| from myabandonware or a similar website.
| carra wrote:
| Pretty different, actually. You don't have to worry about
| possible malware, and you get to support the developers of
| games you like (aka "vote with your wallet"). Also even if
| you get your license revoked it's not such a big deal as in
| other stores, where in some cases they may even delete the
| game from your devices remotely, without warning. The offline
| installer is a guarantee for you as a consumer.
| ManlyBread wrote:
| Malware is easy to avoid if you know where to download from
| and if you engage in the herculean task of uploading the
| .exe to something like virustotal.com in case of any
| doubts. Not like it matters much anyway seeing how there
| are examples of GOG games using cracks from the internet
| anyway.
|
| Supporting developers is a weak argument considering that
| GOG's claim to fame is that they're selling old games where
| the development studio no longer exists or has been bought
| out by a corporate entity like EA.
|
| Revoking my license isn't a big deal? I paid real money for
| the game.
|
| The offline installer is about as much of a guarantee of
| anything as a pirated ISO is.
| wilg wrote:
| 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 drive
| should be fine for your personal preservation at a platform
| level.
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| 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
| wilg wrote:
| You can just back it up though.
| chrisjj wrote:
| Different, because GOG provides good customer support.
| shevy-java wrote:
| 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 hugely upset at
| the companies constantly trying to milk the customers. It is
| very shameful of them to want to do so.
| rjzzleep wrote:
| As gamers nexus said, the hardware companies are now post
| consumer. They are building stuff with investments
| backstopped by taxpayer money, so if you choose to boycott
| now it will probably make things worse. People spent a lot of
| energy laughing at people that were warning that this would
| happent not too long ago.
| musha68k wrote:
| For people who don't know GN:
|
| https://youtu.be/cUrJVdF2me0?si=tlxLIufz8zah8xG6
| embedding-shape wrote:
| (Human) summary of this almost one hour long video essay?
| Seems like the typical "random tech influencer is trying
| to fuel the fire/drama of today" because of the clickbait
| title of "NVIDIA: WTF?", so unsure if it fits to be
| linked here in the first place.
| throwaway6977 wrote:
| GN is a well established, popular and independent
| consumer hardware reviewer that has only a few peers on
| par with them in the space. Hardly some "random tech
| influencer".
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Yeah, Paris Hilton and others are also established and
| popular, hardly makes them a source of authority. If you
| publish clickbait on YouTube to add fuel to drama, you're
| unfortunately digging your own hole and it shouldn't come
| as a surprise others consider you "random influencers who
| peddle drama".
| mikkupikku wrote:
| I wouldn't listen to Paris Hilton talk about computer
| hardware, and I wouldn't listen to Gamer Nexus talk about
| who has the hottest hair in Hollywood. Flip those around
| though, and that's different.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| I gave it a 20 minutes try, since it seems not just one
| person is convinced this Gamer Nexus isn't just another
| influencer. They seem knowledgeable about hardware, I
| give you that. But then when they start going into
| markets, economies and geopolitics, that's when I start
| roll my eyes, and continuing listening to that is like
| taking hardware advice from Paris Hilton.
|
| Again, don't let influencers give you the idea that just
| because they happen to know topic X well, they suddenly
| know all the areas and subjects that are slightly related
| to those areas well too.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| Gell-Mann Amnesia is a shockingly hard thing to fight
| against I'm afraid.
| ericd wrote:
| Yeah, wasn't impressed with GN's theories about the
| politics/motivations/etc behind these big market shifts.
| It's much simpler, there's limited supply capacity and a
| more lucrative use of the hardware now. The market will
| find a new equilibrium.
| CYR1X wrote:
| GN very much loves to fuel the fire lol. He usually does
| it by being More Correct Than You.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Yeah, that's kind of insufferable, and especially not
| something I'd like to receive dragged out over an hour. I
| prefer "More Correct Than You" HN comments over that, so
| I can read them in 30 seconds instead.
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| But the situation is still getting worse, and he has
| influenced customer service policy at many of those
| places for the better. We don't all have to watch him but
| he's good to have.
| wackget wrote:
| Link without Google tracking parameter (`si`):
| https://youtu.be/cUrJVdF2me0
| sylware wrote:
| As gaming nexus said: AI companies seems to be able to
| _outbid_ the WHOLE consumer market for some hardware
| companies.
|
| Your money does not matter.
|
| Vertigo...
| internetter wrote:
| 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.
| eleveriven wrote:
| Offline installers are the real line in the sand
| nialv7 wrote:
| I think the individual game developers can choose whether they
| sell you the game or just rent you a license, right? Steam
| doesn't enforce DRM, they do provide an API game developers can
| use to add DRM to their games. But the developers don't have to
| use it if they so choose.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| I've spent hundreds of hours on the GOG version of Heroes of
| Might and Magic 3. Every community recommends the GOG version
| over the Steam HD one. I didn't think how important GOG was to
| me, but now I'm going to find that patron program they're talking
| about. It would be great if in 30 years I can still play Master
| of Magic and that won't happen by itself.
| sevensor wrote:
| > Master of Magic
|
| I picked up a bargain bin CD ROM of this game in 1996 and it
| works under dosbox as well as it ever did. Which is to say
| mostly ok but sometimes hilariously crashy. I think what needs
| to happen for us to spend another 30 years crafting overpowered
| plate mail is for there to continue being good emulators for
| the mid 90s DOS environment.
| ByThyGrace wrote:
| Do you ever play online multiplayer HOMM3? Is it a thing
| nowadays?
| rascul wrote:
| You might be interested in VCMI, which is an open source engine
| for HoMM3.
|
| https://vcmi.eu/
| sergiotapia wrote:
| I can't remember but there have been two games where the "it's
| your game, offline installer" promise was broken on Gog. Have
| they since come out to restate that promise?
|
| I always felt a bit sad that before I could just KNOW that it'll
| work that's gog! but since that time I always have to double
| check and by that point why not just use steam?
| dmbche wrote:
| Can't find anything about those broken promises at a glance
| its-summertime wrote:
| Gwent comes to mind as an undownloadable game, which must be
| run from the first-party launcher, it is a free game (not
| counting in-game spending) which is always-online, so
| practically the antithesis of GOG
|
| GOG and CD PROJEKT splitting up should ensure this is not
| going to happen in the future as much.
| SXX wrote:
| 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.
| ..
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Yes that was the one! They ultimately just removed the game
| right? I can't find it. They cannot cede an inch otherwise
| the game store is pointless. I'm glad it's gone.
| dmbche wrote:
| Thank you!
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| 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. It's kinda a idealist vs realist stance for me.
| pitched wrote:
| It doesn't look like GOG can afford to pay for that work. I
| think we all got very lucky that the success of the Steam Deck
| has put the incentives in the right place for Steam to be able
| to invest in Linux.
| SXX wrote:
| Valve started to invest in Linux and open source 10 years
| before releasing Steam Deck. They started hiring OSS
| developers back in 2012 and Deck released in 2022:
|
| https://www.phoronix.com/review/valve_linux_dampfnudeln
| pitched wrote:
| The Steam Machine (Steam Deck predecessor) had
| leaks/announcements in 2013 and shipped in 2015 so that
| lines up.
| TechSquidTV wrote:
| The unfortunate or fortunate reality of network effects also
| means Steam is usually best suited to preserve content that
| might otherwise be lost. Both in terms of literally holding the
| data for longer than the general public (including workshop
| files), but also by keeping communities active and alive.
| Gormo wrote:
| There are tons of Linux games distributed on GOG, and _not_
| having to use a proprietary client is one of its great
| advantages. Not to downplay Valve 's contributions (and I may
| well get a Steam Frame when they come out), but they mostly
| amount to porting their _mandatory_ DRM-laden client to Linux,
| and maintaining a fork of Wine that integrates with that
| client.
|
| Ownership, control, and privacy are among the main reasons I
| use Linux, and are likewise huge advantages that GOG has over
| Steam.
| sanskritical wrote:
| Official Linux releases are almost never maintained. I have
| the same game on Steam and GOG, but the GOG version no longer
| works. Neither does the Steam version, except if I switch to
| the Windows version with Proton. Then it works flawlessly
| (usually faster and better than the Linux version ever did.)
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| Sadly I've had the same experience. I've had to rebuy a
| couple games on steam because the older gog version wasn't
| version compatible with my friend's clients. That really
| burned my bottom.
| sanskritical wrote:
| Yes, it is so bad that I will no longer buy a game for
| its Linux release. Almost every single Linux game I have
| outside of actual Valve titles no longer works. I don't
| want to hear that they have a Linux release. I want to
| hear that they have a Windows release that works with
| Proton. Windows is the only ABI that I can expect to
| reliably run on Linux.
| scheeseman486 wrote:
| You're fairly significantly downplaying their contributions.
| They have a substantial amount of FOSS developers under
| contract working on SDL, DXVK, VKD3D and there's over a dozen
| people on working on KDE on Valve's dime alone. Proton isn't
| a fork of Wine, it's a Codeweavers managed project funded by
| Valve that packages Wine, virtually everything useful ends up
| going upstream given Codeweavers are also the main
| contributors to Wine. AMDGPU, NVK, Valve funded. Valve have
| been funding FEX since it's conception.
|
| That isn't even everything, just what I've been able to
| confirm either through interviews or conference talks where
| their involvement has come up. They've quietly been doing a
| _lot_ for Linux.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| I think it's perfectly realistic to think there is a
| substantial risk of losing library content you've bought on
| Valve in the next 20 years. Don't know what the odds are, but
| they're greater than zero.
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| 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.
| RoyalHenOil wrote:
| GOG might disappear, but your games won't.
|
| If Steam disappears, your games will become inaccessible.
| internetter wrote:
| 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!
| BadBadJellyBean wrote:
| I will pirate every game I have in my steam library that I
| want to play if that is ever the case. Without the a moment
| of hesitation. I payed for it.
| its-summertime wrote:
| 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, I can make
| changes to make these clients better (and to a small degree, I
| already have).
|
| [1]: https://sharkwouter.github.io/minigalaxy/
|
| [2]: https://sites.google.com/site/gogdownloader/
|
| [3]: https://heroicgameslauncher.com/
|
| [4]: https://www.hyperplay.xyz/
| dundarious wrote:
| This is true, but there are pros and cons.
|
| Pro 1: reduced lockin
|
| Pro 2: open source options
|
| Con 1: not all options are all that easy to use or feature
| complete, making the "choice" a mandatory QA/research task,
| rather than a way to exercise personal taste/freedom
|
| Con 2: no galaxy-only features like achievements and save
| file cloud sync
|
| (My personal testing led to choosing Heroic)
| jeroenhd wrote:
| 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.
| npodbielski wrote:
| Did you try lutris?
| mordae wrote:
| With Lutris it just worked.
| eleveriven wrote:
| Valve earned a lot of goodwill by actually shipping things that
| made Linux gaming viable day-to-day, not just promising it
| GaryBluto wrote:
| I wish there was a general software equivalent of GOG that
| provided much older software with removed DRM.
| haunter wrote:
| This a hundred time
| its-summertime wrote:
| What old software are you thinking about?
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| They already told you exactly what software they are thinking
| about.
|
| Whatever software you have ever used, or that anyone has ever
| used, that's what they are thinking about.
|
| That's what "general software" means.
| its-summertime wrote:
| I was interested in learning about notable old software.
| GaryBluto wrote:
| Although it would never happen, the old Office suites and
| Adobe products would be nice. Not for any silly "retro" or
| "nostalgia" value, but simply because much software from
| around the time of the millennium is still incredibly useful.
| I use Photoshop 6.0 for all my image manipulation tasks.
| frenzcan wrote:
| GOP
| super256 wrote:
| I bought from GOG once, and downloaded their launcher. Then, I
| started the game, played for maybe an hour, put my PC to sleep
| and went to bed. Then, the next next day, I resumed my PC from
| sleep, closed the game, and because I didn't like it, decided a
| few days later to request a refund.
|
| The game had 26 hours or so logged, because Galaxy has a poor way
| to log hours. Apparently the interval between game start and game
| end is the time you played the game.
|
| The support declined my refund request, I tried to explain that I
| didn't even get the achievements of after the tutorial and that I
| could impossibly have played that many hours because I was simply
| not on my PC.
|
| The gist is: If you buy a game from GOG which you might won't
| like: NEVER download galaxy, only the offline installers! I
| didn't do that because it was too convenient to download their
| launcher, as the offline installer of the game I played (Baldurs
| Gate 3) was split into many, many files, which I would have to
| download one by one and install them all by hand.
|
| Still sour to this day that I have not gotten my 50EUR back.
| Steam never had such issues for me, and even if you can at least
| ask their support to escalate the ticket so someone from L2/L3 or
| even engineering looks at your ticket.
| d-lisp wrote:
| You do put your PC to sleep without closing your programs !?
| super256 wrote:
| Yes! That's exactly what the sleep mode is for.
| 101008 wrote:
| First time I heard about GOG. Is like Steam but you download the
| .exe installer (or wahtever format it is) from the game you
| purchase? Like Kazaa/Ares but paid? I love it to be honest, and I
| think that's how it should be, but how do creators (and GOG)
| fight piracy? What's preventing me from buying, getting the
| offline installer and then sharing it later?
|
| If I am wrong and GOG is something completely different, then
| let's build something like this together! (a marketplace of
| offline installers!)
| skotobaza wrote:
| > What's preventing me from buying, getting the offline
| installer and then sharing it later?
|
| Nothing. People already do that. GOG does not fight against
| this, to my knowledge they believe that people will willingly
| pay for good games. It worked with Witcher 3 10 years ago as an
| example.
| 101008 wrote:
| I love this, to be honest. Glad to learn that this is how the
| operate!
| g-b-r wrote:
| God, that's how today's kids see drm-free software?
|
| As something hard to wrap your mind around?
| kgwxd wrote:
| 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?
| Jach wrote:
| 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.)
| closingreunion wrote:
| For self-hosting nerds, I can recommend looking at Gamevault
| (https://gamevau.lt)
|
| Passionate people working on creating a self-hosted game library.
| They deserve attention and support!
| lossolo wrote:
| Michal Kicinski (the co-founder mentioned in the article) also
| funded a Vipassana retreat in Poland. You can go there to
| meditate for around 10-21 days, it's completely free, and people
| from all over the EU attend. I know because someone I know goes
| there regularly.
| amelius wrote:
| For anyone else wondering what GOG is:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOG.com
| nirv wrote:
| > he believes GOG's approach is more relevant than ever: no lock-
| in, no forced platforms, sense of ownership
|
| I really hope that we'll be freed from the forced Windows
| platform. Sure, you can download and install GOG games today
| using a third-party client, but it'll never be as good as
| official support. There's also the issue of syncing saved games
| and achievements, not to mention the additional friction for less
| tech-savvy users.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| TBH Heroic Launcher isn't particularly hard to get. Just
| download and run the AppImage file from their site, login to
| your GOG account and it'll download any dependencies
| automatically.
|
| It isn't any harder to use Heroic Launcher than it is to use
| Steam and some distros have both in their repositories.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| it's really hard to say. the games industry is huge. it is
| significantly more diverse than video, where people have been
| making the same arguments and have gotten absolutely zero
| traction, so it's hard to say there is a lot of demand for what
| he is saying.
|
| there is space for the specific thesis he is talking about, but
| it isn't necessarily the biggest opportunity in, whatever
| niche, which is to say, the line is probably going to keep
| trending down.
| Telaneo wrote:
| The more things change, the more they stay the same?
|
| I rarely use GOG, but they're doing good work, so it's nice to
| know they'll be sticking around. I wouldn't have it any other
| way.
| pipes wrote:
| Gog is great and I've been a member since probably 2010.
|
| The one feature that would encourage me to buy more of their
| games is a "install into steam" script with each game. It's a
| massive pain in the ass making my gog games run on my steam deck.
|
| I keep meaning to write a script to do this to ease that pain.
| citrusybread wrote:
| 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.
| jpetso wrote:
| 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.
| pipes wrote:
| 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"
| citrusybread wrote:
| That's interesting, I'll keep it mind. I also got sucked
| into steam defaultism, because they do so many things
| right.
| pipes wrote:
| 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.
| gamesieve wrote:
| I suspect this has been in a vague planning stage for the last
| few years, as various integrations between GOG and CD PROJEKT RED
| were slowly dismantled over that time (I particularly recall a
| GWENT account migration away from GOG).
|
| Also, I guess this is as good a place as any to plug my GOG game
| discovery service and price tracker: https://gamesieve.com/ -
| basically a more full-featured way to explore GOG's catalog.
| Ekaros wrote:
| https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/investors/regulatory-announceme...
|
| >Pursuant to the Purchase Agreement, on 31 December 2025 Michal
| Kicinski will acquire from the Company 2715 shares in GOG, i.e.
| 100% of the shares in GOG representing 100% of the votes at the
| shareholders' meeting of GOG, for a price of PLN 90,695,440.00
|
| >In accordance with the arrangements of the parties to the
| Transaction, prior to the execution of the Purchase Agreement, an
| amount of PLN 44,200,000.00 (forty-four million two hundred
| thousand zlotys 00/100) was paid out to the Company as
| distribution of due - as the Company was thus the sole
| shareholder of GOG - profits of GOG from previous years.
|
| 90 million PLN being ~21,5 million euros. Seems like some money
| was also held there.
| stego-tech wrote:
| I am wary of the long-term prospects of GOG, but then again, I've
| _always_ been wary of that since they launched - and they
| consistently prove me wrong.
|
| GOG remains my first choice when I go looking for PC titles. I
| think it should be everyone's first choice, if I'm honest, even
| if Steam currently operates in a relatively consumer-friendly
| way. Having those offline patches and installers is a freedom you
| just cannot match on Steam or any other platform, and they're
| highly relevant to households like mine where game sharing is
| being cracked down upon by major publishers (looking at you,
| Nintendo).
|
| Keep on keepin' on, GOG. I'm rootin' for ya.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| At least it's not another Chinese firm
| sngz wrote:
| does this mean we will finally get more games on it instead of
| sitting on the dreamlist for years with no change?
| trvz wrote:
| I started building up my digital game library on Steam.
|
| I then gradually switched to GOG, sometimes buying things again
| (it's not that bad with the identical deep discounts for most
| games on all platforms), because of the better DRM situation and
| because I like to be in relationships with public companies, so
| that I can buy their shares.
|
| When GOG messed up their cloud saves functionality (reduced the
| granted storage to the point where I had to delete old saves -
| sure, I'll never need them, but I still want [someone else] to
| keep them), I switched back to Steam.
|
| When I got tired of sitting at a desk to play I ended up
| switching to the Switch.
|
| Switch 1 games running on the Switch 2 have bad resolution, the
| Steam Machine is interesting, and hopefully there'll be a lighter
| Steam Deck - I might end up at Steam again.
| hamonrye wrote:
| Preliminary research suggests that old DOS libraries contain
| graphics engines for GOG.
|
| DRM libraries, whether DMCA or copyright law protects it, is an
| anomaly to include the part about the Projekt.
| Hobadee wrote:
| 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.)
| codethief wrote:
| Never heard of gog.com before (not much of a gamer anymore these
| days) but it looks really cool! I wonder, though, how exactly do
| they handle the copyright and licensing topic? Do they negotiate
| terms separately with every copyright holder? Do they get access
| to the source code in order to preserve the games and make them
| fully offline-compatible?
| Macha wrote:
| > Do they negotiate terms separately with every copyright
| holder?
|
| Yes
|
| > Do they get access to the source code in order to preserve
| the games and make them fully offline-compatible?
|
| Sometimes, sometimes their role is just packaging the game with
| a dosbox config too, or a developer provided drm free build
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Some games get packaged with other emulators beyond dosbox as
| well. GOG includes and configures ScummVM for some applicable
| games, for instance.
| rasyidi wrote:
| Even google I hacked
| rasyidi wrote:
| GOG is getting acquired by it's original co-funder
| shevy-java wrote:
| Hope for the best, fear for the worst.
| sylware wrote:
| If they can manage to deliver a client which is less technically
| amok than the steam client... But steam is a worldwide payment
| system, I can use wallet codes nearly everywhere without inputing
| my credit card info and that require a lot of international work
| to match.
|
| The steam client requires linux "user" containers(jez...), the
| launcher is a 32bits binary hardcoded on x11 and GL, all that
| because they are unwilling to engage in the significant amount of
| work (because of their technical debt and poor technical choices)
| of generating 'correct' ELF64 binaries for broad elf/linux distro
| support.
| eleveriven wrote:
| GOG talking about preservation and ownership has always sounded
| sincere, but backing that up with independence from a public
| company structure makes it much more credible
| BirAdam wrote:
| 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 articles are significantly more difficult to write (I
| usually write entirely in chronological order). Original sources
| are impossible to find, many news stories simply no longer exist,
| and I often find that I can only really rely on the company's own
| quarterly or annual reports. This has only become worse over the
| few years I've been engaged in this hobby.
|
| As my publication has grown, I've had the privilege of
| communicating directly with people present at the companies I
| cover, and this has been valuable. The problem is, many of these
| people are elderly and they won't be around forever. For example,
| I wrote about PARC but was too late to interview Lynn Conway
| whose work is partially responsible for the entire world of
| processors we enjoy today.
|
| Efforts like the archive and GOG are absolutely essential to the
| preservation of our history. I hope they manage to continue.
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| I love the genre, if you can call it a genre.
|
| Share please!
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