Comment by Fiveplus
1 day ago
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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I grew up playing pirated games on the Apple II 35 years ago. The fact that many people pirate is not an opinion.
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> 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.
Also, many such games are on gog DRM free, and certainly pirates don't care where they get their games.
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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.
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.
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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?
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No, paying nothing is very compelling for a lot of consumers, you can see this in many other areas of content as well.
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>> 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?
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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
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> 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.
> 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.
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.
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> 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.
Most good quality pirate sites have a comments section and remove malware laden torrents.
How silly that you assume pirates are always doing it for financial gain, as opposed to cred or the lulz
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...
Steam uses outsized market power to take an enormous %30 cut so it also does major damage to the games industry.
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.
The 30% cut is standard, and was so at retail even before Steam existed IIRC.
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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.
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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.
How is GOG a viable business if everything gets pirated?
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.
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)
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.
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> 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.
> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business.
So, how does it work for Valve to sell games which are also available at GOG without DRM? If too many people are pirating, why would anyone buy the Steam version?
That's actually honestly a really good point. Things are changing. In real dollar terms games are getting cheaper and the size of the market has grown so I don't know if maybe a DRM free store will soon support premium games.
I can't think of a game available on GoG that sells on Steam for > $20. I am sure one exists, but in general these are older, cheaper games.
You could also point to games that the Epic store gives away that are sold on Steam. That's an even better example. You are right that people don't just pay for games because they can't get them for free, they are also willing to pay to get them in a convenient format even when another format is free.
My question is, does that really support the model for most premium games? Nobody likes DRM, the game industry didn't used to have it.
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Because it's easy. Say what you like about steam but it sure as hell made acquiring games super easy. On-par or easier than pirating.
> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business.
You're saying this about Steam, the 'Piracy is a service problem' company.
This is mostly fear-mongering on the part of the big IP holders.
We saw the exact same cycle with mobile distribution of audio and video - Amazon even had to fork Android to add kernel-level DRM before any of the video rights holders would allow Amazon Video on tablets (this is before Google added DRM to android in general).
And now? That DRM was circumvented, and you can torrent pretty much any Amazon video the day after it goes live. But it's inconvenient enough that most people don't, the rights holders still feel all warm and cozy, and nobody really cares.
I like Steam because they have basically kept the same DRM for, like a decade now? It’s not intrusive.
>OK, but the model that Valve pioneered is the model that supports 90% of all commercial PC games made today, a higher percentage if you cut out MMOs and free to play games, which you certainly don't own.
OK, but this model deployed in other parts of essentially any industry is equally scummy and abusive, no matter how much <$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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
For people who don't know GN:
https://youtu.be/cUrJVdF2me0?si=tlxLIufz8zah8xG6
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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.
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...
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.
The problem is what will happen when Gabe Newell passes away.
My GOG installers will never degrade though.
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.
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.
Correct. And if steam ever retracts anything, I’ll pirate the game then with a clean conscience.
> 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.
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.
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.
>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.
Just give them the files and pinky promise to delete them yourself?
It amazes me that people nowadays know so little about piracy that this is somehow touted as a solution.
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Gog license doesn't allow reselling at all
The same way you sell your disks: find a buyer, send them the game files, they send you the money
> 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.
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This isn't an ownership problem, it's a medium problem (and perhaps a legal problem)
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.
>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.
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.
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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
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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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
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.
I also refuse to install their shop, Web powered "native" apps only the unavoidable ones.
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.
> 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.
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I have it easier having Windows as main OS.
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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.
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.
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.
Different, because GOG provides good customer support.
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.
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
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Offline installers are the real line in the sand
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.
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.