> 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Overall CD Projekt is doing well, but cut associated to GOG.COM is paltry as shown above.
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?
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
CD PROJEKT RED GOG.COM
Sales revenue 658,575 143,285
Cost of sales 61,307 103,075
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.
Maybe they are just heavily reinvesting?
You mean they're not charging from some Luxembourg subsidiary any more?
No company with an ounce of brain and a good accountant reports profit in eastern Europe :)
Haha, we all Slavs keep telling that to ourselves, don't we? :P
Is this taken from some LLM?
The first two numbers perhaps make sense, the 4,3022 looks like EUR/ PLN exghange rate..
I had the same takeaway -- in fact, I think it's CD Projekt who hopes to distance themselves from GOG.
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.
Exactly, if you say that your company's financial performance has been "encouraging", that's not good.
This goes for publicly traded companies much more than privately owned ones.
GOG is now becoming private like Valve rather than publicly traded.
I am happy that deal with Amazon didn't hurt them. Doing business with such big corp is probably not good for anyone.
There's clearly a real segment of players who value ownership and longevity enough to vote with their wallets
>>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).
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.
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/
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.
Did you try lutris?
Yes. One recipe at the time was broken, the other didn't work. At some point the game got updated and the existing tricks and workarounds to get the game running were no longer enough.
With Lutris it just worked.
Not when I tried it the first couple of times. At some point Proton (and then probably Wine?) got updated to fix the bug triggered by one of the game updates months before that and it has worked since.
I'm no stranger to messing with Wine to get Windows executables to work. Whatever the GOG release did different, it just didn't work once the intro logos were gone, even with the same Proton version that worked with the Steam version.
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)
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.
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.
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.)
Can you give me an example of what you're referring to? I've got a lot of Linux games from GOG and have never encountered any situation in which the Linux build stopped working, nor any situation in which the Windows build was being updated with new versions without the Linux build also being updated at the same time.
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.
I've been gaming primarily on Linux for almost 15 years, and buying from GOG as my first choice, and have never encountered a single instance of what you're describing. I don't have a single Linux game on my GOG account that "no longer works", and I have dozens of Linux games there.
In fact the only time I recall a Linux-native game not working out of the box was when I got the game 'The Raven: Legacy of a Master Thief' on Steam, and that was due to some wonky configuration implemented by the game devs.
Do you have any specific examples of this problem?
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.
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:
The Steam Machine (Steam Deck predecessor) had leaks/announcements in 2013 and shipped in 2015 so that lines up.
Saying "we're lucky" makes it sound like Valve's investment in Linux is a happy accident, but as you point out, the Steam Machine was announced in 2013, and back them gaming on Linux was seen as a pie in the sky dream.
Headlines at the time said things like "Valve’s Steam Machines look dead in the water", there was barely any market demand, and they probably lost a lot on the initial release.
The fact that they still doubled down and spent ten years funding the Linux ecosystem before it made them any money speaks of both a strategic incentive (they don't want Microsoft to hold a sword over their neck) and ideological vision (they want gaming to stay relatively open).
Saying "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" is getting the causality backwards at the very least. Valve investing in Linux is what made the Steam Deck's success remotely possible, and it wasn't a sure shot.
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.
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.
[dead]
I personally think that, between the two, gog is far more likely to disappear than steam.
I'm happy both exist. I've nothing against gog (except maybe for their broken promises around Linux support, but I do understand changing market forces) and like I said, I hope they succeed. They've got a good mission.
GOG might disappear, but your games won't.
If Steam disappears, your games will become inaccessible.
It's actually mostly the same in both cases. If steam or GOG goes down, you can no longer download the games you bought. But what about the games you have downloaded? Well GOG games will work out of the box, however the steam "DRM" is really just basic protection to stop you from copying the files to your friend's computer, and can easily be removed by already existing tools like Steamless and Goldberg Emulator. So I'm not really that worried about the vast majority of my steam library. The only thing I'd worry about is spiking storage costs when steam's demise seems imminent!
Valve earned a lot of goodwill by actually shipping things that made Linux gaming viable day-to-day, not just promising it
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.
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.
> 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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
This.
And if it doesn't wanna work on Proton, GEProton might work. I've had a few games like that. (I usually default to the latter and use the former as a fallback.)
> 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?
Same but I strangely miss the social aspect of achievements on Steam. I prefer GOG but wish the achievements synced.
You are the first person I hear that seems to care about that.
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.
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).
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.
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.
I care about it a little, not comparing with friends, but I do like the "X% of players" stats.
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.
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%20GalaxyC...
> 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.
Steam does an amazing job at convenience, but GOG scratches a completely different itch
> you’re leasing them
For the duration of your life, to be fair.
No, for the duration of whenever Steam decides to say "fuck you".
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
> 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.
> "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
Censorship. Like GOG?
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.
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.
There have been several earlier generation game consoles that have had their online stores closed already.
Pressed optical media are fairly durable when stored at reasonable conditions (i.e. indoors in non-maritime climates).
This in not an equivalence.
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?
> 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.
Not all steam games have DRM
For the duration of gaben’s life, to be fair. Beyond that there be dragons.
For the duration of the businesses’ life.
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
> 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?
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)
Normal store: fanatical.com
Key reseller: https://www.loaded.com
You really don't need to be so combatative.
Humble Bundle usually gives you Steam keys
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!
I love ITAD! If you use a search engine like kagi or duck duck go supporting bangs, you can use !itad to search there.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Correct, but GOG provides games without _any_ DRM, both in the installer and in the game itself.
> What does the installer matter for DRM-free software?
Requiring a network-connected proprietary client to install the software is itself a form of DRM.
> For software with other forms of DRM built-in anyway, who cares if the installer has it?
Again, GOG does not distribute games that include DRM, whether in the installer or in the game itself.
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.
I love the genre, if you can call it a genre.
Share please!
In case I'm not the only one who didn't know what GOG stood for:
“GOG stands for freedom, independence, and genuine control.”
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.
GOG marketing team at the time: "Now we do a little trolling".
That was after they had new releases for a while.
I stand agog as I breathlessly await the next exciting element of this discussion.
I'm waiting for MAGOG so the Biblical End Times can begin.
The End Times went legacy mode :
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/magog_a_search_engine_for_...
Denoting a translation is not the only thing that "stands for" stands for.
No, it literally doesn't stand for good old games. Not for a very long time.
https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/investors/regulatory-announceme...
>Pursuant to the Purchase Agreement, on 31 December 2025 Michał Kiciński 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 ).
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. Michał Kiciński 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.
Apologies, I accept FAQ exists, but I am simply asking if there is more to the story than corporate release.
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.
GOG isn’t as good of a business as CDPR’s development studios so it is getting spun off.
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.)
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.
> 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.
You might be interested in VCMI, which is an open source engine for HoMM3.
Do you ever play online multiplayer HOMM3? Is it a thing nowadays?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Not gonna protect EA the company here, but lots and lots of other games also flop on release because money.
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.
The fact that sales exist is a thing for every game just about
Sure, might make some difference. Probably not that helpful given we’re just doing back of the napkin stuff anyway
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.
I also started playing it this year and the experience at least now has been fantastic
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.
>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.
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.
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.
I don’t know what you’re talking about and if I did I probably wouldn’t care, the game is great.
>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.
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.
Have you tried using Heroic? I don't use it on the Steam Deck so maybe I'm missing something, but I use it on desktop linux all the time and it's been seamless for me.
Lutris and when that fails, manually doing it myself.
One big annoyance is that to browse community controller configs you need to change the name of the game to it's steam numeric id (which can be found in the URL for the equivalent game on steam website).
I'll try heroic.
I try to buy gog versions but sometimes I just think "when will I get time to configure this, I could just buy the steam version"
That's interesting, I'll keep it mind. I also got sucked into steam defaultism, because they do so many things right.
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.
The Steam client has to restart in order to pick up the newly added external titles, at least last time I tried. In gaming mode, restarting the client means restarting the system, which is ever so slightly annoying.
Apart from that though, it works just fine on the Steam Deck.
I just tried it today actually - I just had to exit the steam deck UI mode, enter desktop mode, add them with Heroic, and then restart the deck UI mode from the desktop shortcut and it worked!
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.
Michał Kiciński (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.
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.
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!
I wish there was a general software equivalent of GOG that provided much older software with removed DRM.
What old software are you thinking about?
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.
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.
I was interested in learning about notable old software.
This a hundred time
GOP
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.
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.
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.
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!)
> 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.
I love this, to be honest. Glad to learn that this is how the operate!
God, that's how today's kids see drm-free software?
As something hard to wrap your mind around?
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.
GOG is like, hope for the universe. It’s such a great purpose and goal, to keep these games playable, and it .. is just great.
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.
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.
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.
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 :/
So it supports both for a year and a half, what are you nitpicking now exactly?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
The OSS alternatives do download and install the Linux builds.
But again, the whole point of GOG is that you don't need a special client in the first place. You just get ordinary installers, and don't have to deal with the game requiring a third party's proprietary launcher.
That and/or proper remote desktop implementation.
I bought a lot of stuff from GOG a long time ago, but the only thing I've use them for in the past 5 years is claiming Prime Gaming rewards on Twitch. I don't think I've even downloaded a single one of them. I'm curious if that agreement with Amazon might have hurt GOG. Did it cost them some money when people like me to claim all those games without ever converting to a paying customer?
I also have wondered about the Amazon/Twitch deal. I suspect it's all net-positive income for GOG but much like Google funding Firefox, if Amazon ever decides to take it away I wonder how much damage that would do to GOG. Certainly some damage of awareness. I think the only thing I've bought on GOG was the Yakuza 0-6 collection, the other hundred+ games were free. I've at least downloaded and played some of them, Lutris on Linux works fairly well. (Many were ones I already bought and played on steam, which is kind of annoying, but some of them were ones I was planning to buy if they went on sale, so whatever. I'm more mixed about how it, plus Epic's game giveaways, can damage the entire concept of paying for games. Gamepass factors in too, but Steam's routine sales also ruined me from the idea of paying "full price". I can't look at Switch or Oculus/Meta pricing and think it's worth it.)
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?
> 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
Some games get packaged with other emulators beyond dosbox as well. GOG includes and configures ScummVM for some applicable games, for instance.
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.
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.
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
For anyone else wondering what GOG is:
Not sure how to read this. But what I do notice is big publishers often put less effort and attention into GOG releases (fewer platforms, older releases, incomplete offerings), with the net effect of sabotaging the platform. It seems intentional in many cases rather than omission.
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.
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.
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.
does this mean we will finally get more games on it instead of sitting on the dreamlist for years with no change?
GOG is getting acquired by it's original co-funder
It's nice that it should be a non-event for users.
Hope for the best, fear for the worst.
Even google I hacked
At least it’s not another Chinese firm
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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?
Can't find anything about those broken promises at a glance
It was HITMAN released on GOG with always online DRM and removed after backlash. They obviously refunded to everyone.
https://www.gog.com/en/news/release_hitman_game_of_the_year_...
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/release_hitman_game_of_the...
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.
Thank you!
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.
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 50€ 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.
You do put your PC to sleep without closing your programs !?
Yes! That's exactly what the sleep mode is for.
I am not an anxious person. But that thing, "waking up sleeping computer with programs freezed in it", makes me anxious.
I just can't...
You're right, I
sudo shutdown now
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.
> 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.
What makes you think the situation is any different with Steam-exclusive games (with or without additional DRM)?
And those indies shouldn't equate a non-customer player with a lost sale either.
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.
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.
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
can we have another battlezone, please?
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.
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.
I grew up playing pirated games on the Apple II 35 years ago. The fact that many people pirate is not an opinion.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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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
>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?
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.
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".
>> 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?
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.
Yeah, because rather than pirating from cracxxxed.warez I can buy the game on Steam/GoG sale for $1.4.
> 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.
Yeah I usually trust anything a girl who is particularly fit repacks
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.
> 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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, paying nothing is very compelling for a lot of consumers, you can see this in many other areas of content as well.
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.
Netflix did not kill piracy
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.
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
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
>> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
It's a good question. My only response is that it's genuinely fun.
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
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.
>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.
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.
They might spend $600 on 10 of those games, though. It's not all-or-nothing.
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.
> 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.
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.
I’m interested, please link!
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.
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.
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).
> 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).
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.
Ah yes the Tim Sweeney argument. Get a better service with a lower cut, sure. Why does nobody do that? They must be stupid.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
And many aren’t.
I bought Factorio early access on Gog, and Timberborn, and Loop-Hero.
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)
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...
> 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.
> I can't think of a game available on GoG that sells on Steam for > $20.
It is easy to check such claims. This shows what kind of games are in gog since 2024 at >$20 (it may change the currency depending on your country though).
https://www.gog.com/en/games?priceRange=20%2C152.99&hideDLCs...
Far from complete but also a few big titles are there. Granted this is the price in gog but most of the times ime it is the same price as in steam, or around the same.
> Nobody likes DRM, the game industry didn't used to have it.
Aren't DRMs a pretty old thing at this time? I remember the days when DRM was basically about having to use the cd to launch the game as the game would check for that, even if everything needed to run the game was in the hard drive. People would use cracks or virtual drives even if they actually bought the game to avoid doing that. At least now DRMs are far less obstructive to someone who owns the game.
>even Cyberpunk, but it's true that nowadays Cyberpunk is a ~20$ 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.
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 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
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.
You're saying this about Steam, the 'Piracy is a service problem' company.
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.
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.
Oh, well then, depending on the content, you're almost certainly still "guilty" violating the license you purchased. Smoking my friends prescribed medical marijuana is still illegal in e.g. Florida.
I like Steam because they have basically kept the same DRM for, like a decade now? It’s not intrusive.
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.
>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.
[dead]
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
Link without Google tracking parameter (`si`): https://youtu.be/cUrJVdF2me0
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".
GN very much loves to fuel the fire lol. He usually does it by being More Correct Than You.
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...
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.
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.
Huh, great to know, thank you. For some reason, I thought the game gets de-listed completely and no downloads are possible anymore.
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.
I've seen this sentiment repeated enough times on reddit that I no longer can tell the difference.
Gog license doesn't allow reselling at all
I agree. It allows you yo backup your games, which to be fair you can do with Steam too and just play offline forever.
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.
Same for disks. That the second hand market is cheaper is expected and a feature and a major reason why game publishers do everything they can so it doesn't exist.
That's not relevant to the issue of "ownership"
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.
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
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
It was much harder to sell things online back then too
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.
That's how all sales of digital products work with copyright, whether on a physical medium or not, and the only way they can work. The question is if that perpetual license is also transferable or not.
> 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 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.
> 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.
I was not aware of that launcher, thanks.
I have it easier having Windows as main OS.
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.
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.
The flip side of this is that the only games whose owners allow them to be fully sold in this way are those whose commercial value is >90% expired.
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.
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.
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
The main difference is that the license you get when you buy a CD is transferable, that is you can sell it to someone else when you are done with it, while Steam explicitly disallows this.
Transferable licenses create a second hand market which keeps prices in check, which of course publishers don't like at all.
You can just back it up though.
Different, because GOG provides good customer support.
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.