I mean, we are… Gabe became a billionaire that owns a yacht collection, his money came from somewhere, there’s no reason to defend any billionaires or their companies unless you are a billionaire yourself.
Gabe heads a company which is successful because it respects its employees, customers, and suppliers instead of constantly trying to marginalize and abuse them. They are not perfect by any means, but they do fit into the definition of ethical capitalism, which should not be understated. They don’t employ anticompetitive tactics like bribing/coercing developers into exclusivity contracts. They don’t operate with a bunch of 1099 contractors so they can avoid providing benefits. Etc.
And they could do all of these good things while charging less than 30% and Gabe would be the only one feeling a negative impact on his finances.
As for contractors, they do hire them, court documents came out and their profits per actually employees are way higher than most companies, why? Contractors aren’t employees.
I mean I’ve always had an issue that digital goods could always be revoked/taken back. That’s why I didn’t buy things on steam until it became basically the only way (as consoles have less physical media). This is just a great reminder for the public that we’re consistently loosing control over our digital lives.
I’ve been an advocate for forcing companies to change the wording for digital goofs to “lease” rather than “buy”. Cause at the end of the day, no one owns their steam library.
Okay steam, if its just a digital license and not ownership… Then surely you’ll be significantly lowering prices, Since you charge full ownership prices for games, not license prices… Right?
Their 30% cuts allowed Gabe to start collecting yachts, they could charge a lot less while still offering the same services and only Gabe would see his finances take the hit, no one else in the world would be poorer if they charged 20% instead.
Should be cheaper, emphasis on should, but at the same time if they sell directly and take the same cut, that’s one less intermediary in the chain so more money going to the devs.
None of the managerial class are good people, wake up, all billionaires are taking advantage of us.
People seem to forget that just moderately decent games sell magnitudes more today than they did 20 years ago, too, thus continuing to bring in insane cash (as long as you arent sony or other companies that are obscenely wasteful…) despite inflation, this stable pricing making them a good entertainment investment for people whose minimum wage hasnt changed in like 15 years
regular reminder that digital distribution was sold to us under the false promise that games would be cheaper, because they wouldnt have to pay for printing boxes, CDs, manuals, greebles, Wouldnt have to pay for shipping or storage, or any other burden addition of physical media.
That we’d be able to buy games for 30 dollars, and that that the developers and everyone involved would make more money than they would have paying 50 for a physical game.
and now, they are wanting to sell games for 70-80 bucks for AAA titles.
Its not cause the games are 50 dollars that they arent making enough hundreds of millions. The only reason these AAA games arent making bank is because they’re shit
Can anyone honestly remember the last AAA title that wasnt an absolute dog pile?
Ugh, I hate that the actual ethical issues in games journalism got swallowed up by all the other hateful bullshit.
Like, sponsored articles weren’t being disclosed, and some games journalists were being fired for refusing to give favorable reviews to games that were advertising on their site. There were private mailing lists where behind the scenes coordination was happening to push kinder reviews of one member of the list’s friend’s indie game. White jounalists were claiming themselves as mouthpieces for minority gamers who never asked for someone else to speak for them.
Which gave cover for explicit mysogyny and hate… then further got twisted by far-right idealogues like Milo Yannopolous and Breitbart.
Offline installer. So a game gets removed from your library for any reason. Now you get a new PC and can’t play the game anymore. At GoG you get an installer that doesn’t check servers and can work with no internet connection etc. So even if they were forced to remove a game from your library, you still have the installer and can install it whenever you want. So if you keep a hard drive of installers, you will forever own the game as long as you don’t lose that data.
To install a game you have bought on steam you need the steam client, the steam servers, internet and your steam account. If any of those stops being available you can no longer install the games you have bought. So while you can play the games once installed without most of the above, you can lose access to your not currently installed games.
Also, on steam you purchase licenses to the games which they can revoke. I.e. if steam turned evil they could take away games from your library and you couldn’t do anything about it really.
Comparatively on GOG, you get a binary installer you can download and can keep forever without DRM so you don’t need anything else to install the game in the future, even if it disappeared from your GOG account for some reason, you could still install and play the game.
If Steam stops working, you could replace the Steam API with the Goldberg emulator, and an already installed game should work, if there is no other DRM.
Lutris is awesome.
Open source games, games with their own launcher, games on steam, gog, etc are all in it. Can pick to run things natively on Linux, use proton (pick your version or just use latest), wine, or choose from others, and it does it seamlessly. For games you already have installed on steam, you don’t need to reinstall them, it finds them and makes them runnable from within lutris once you connect your steam account, you can also install games that you own on any of your connected launchers, and browse/download your undownloaded games from them
Examples for some of the stuff I have all in it now:
Catacyslm: DDA catapult launcher (free and open source game - highly recommend you try it out. Takes some getting used to, but there isn’t much you can’t do. Also, make sure you get cataclysm-tiles or use a launcher. ASCII is pure, but hard to get used to. Also, DO NOT buy it on steam.)
All of my installed steam games
Cyberpunk 2077 and the witcher 3 via gog
FFXIV (the official launcher, not steam)
Vintage story (open source but not free - highly recommend if you like open world survival crafting games with a big emphasis on survival)
Unpopular opinion: if I have to fudge with Wine instead of Proton, I simply will not bother. It’s 2024. I’m not going to fiddle with configs, or get a setup together just to play a single game. That’s ridiculous. A game should 100% be one click to run, whether it’s native or not. and if that’s not what is expected in 2024, Linux get it together. sincerely: a full time Linux gamer that is a single parent and doesn’t have time to fiddle just to play a game. Wine and most of its front ends need a major overhaul.
Then just use Proton? You don’t need Steam for it. And sitting there and demanding “Linux” to get it “together” because it is 2024 is rather ignorant due to the fact that it is not Linux’ fault that the software in question needs additional workarounds in order to make it run. People out there are using their freetime to come up with solutions for problems caused by corporations using proprietary libraries and software. I don’t think that your opinion is unpopular. I get what you want, I do wish the same, and a lot of peoole would agree with it as well, but the context in which we operate here matters a lot.
I’m not aware of how things are now, but at least previously you couldn’t really use Proton outside of Steam.
So I assume OC defends Steam as the only platform that can smoothly run games with Proton instead of regular Wine, which does not work as well for certain games and/or requires tedious configuration.
You are right about proton. But the tedious configuration part is not true. Proton and ge-wine(now UMU) do the same thing, i.e applying custom patches. Wine base package is not expected to do this.
Many of their games do have native linux versions, and a lot do work under wine or proton, which can be used as a Non-steam game in Steam or even without Steam.
Their launcher doesn’t yet have a native linux version but it’s completely optional, and does still run under wine if you really want it.
If I’m not going to use their game manager, then why would I buy the game from them instead of just buying it directly from the game studio? I guess because game studios rarely distribute their own games anymore?
Exactly, the game publishers and distributors are often not the developers themselves. Only one to distribute direct in recent memory was World Of Goo 2, and even that was sold primarily through the Epic store.
Nowadays the Heroic Games Launcher is the preferred solution for downloading and running GOG games. It’s a community-run project, but officially affiliated with GOG.
No clue if it’s heroic exclusive but it’s more than just affiliate linking. Heroic embeds the actual gog store page in the launcher and gets a percentage of anything you buy per their agreement with gog
Plus, unless the installers have the full package, it’ll still require an internet connection. Usually installers download the files and then install them.
What’s the difference? In practical terms, what does this mean for me as the consumer? We don’t own the intellectual property, but may use the software as-is? From a practical, consumer standpoint that feels the same as the days of owning your software on a disc, unable to be taken as long as you have physical control over the device. I’m fine with calling this “owning” personally.
I’m absolutely willing to be wrong on this. I’m by no means an expert. Please, if I have missed something, let me know.
There really is no difference. For almost all intents and purposes, GOG’s offline installers can be treated the same way as physical CDs of way back then, with one of the only exceptions being that you cannot resell them.
Depending on your perspective, the sell/trade/loan aspect of physical can be a huge deal. I outlined in another comment, selling/trading games was never my thing, but it was my cousins. From my perspective, there’s marginal difference, but there IS a difference.
I don’t want to advocate for shoveling money into any company, but if you could sell your steam games it would screw over indie devs in a big way. Many games made by small studies or one person don’t have as much content as AAA studies and would be far more prone to a small handful of copies being distributed back and forth on the used market instead of each being a sale that goes to the developer.
Some devs would see a drop in sales as much as 90% and I just don’t think it’s worth it to shoot the gaming industry in the foot like that.
Just to be clear: my main point was that you don’t own any more the game bought on GOG than on Steam.
And there are definitely upsides to this type of market.
Although nowadays I wouldn’t buy a just released triple A 70€ game knowing I can’t sell or give it (not that I play those much anymore). The games I actually want to keep a few and far between.
I buy second hand Switch games for my nephews. It’s cheap, I’m actually giving them something, and they can trade them with their friends or sell them to buy fortnite skins the little shits
Again, not hating on GOG, I’ve been a customer for a long time. Mainly because I don’t want any kind of launcher. I play 99% solo games, don’t need no updates or multiple clicks to launch a game.
I would ABSOLUTELY argue that you more own a game purchased on gog, with an offline installer, than one purchased on steam. I now see the functional difference between owning a drm-free installer vs owning a physical game, but there’s also a gulf of difference between steam and gog
Just to be entirely fair. The rest of what you said is absolutely spot on.
I can see the functional difference there, with regards to sell/trade/loan. You could of course emulate the functionality, or rely on the honor system for abandon ware stuff, but that’s clunky, inefficient, not worth the energy.
I hadn’t considered the second hand aspect. Even as a kid, I was always more a “build a library” kind of person versus a “cycle my catalog” kind of person. I was considering things from an availability to play the game perspective alone. Thanks for the different perspective!
Steam does not provide installers for games, this means that whatever game you want, needs to be 100% functional and already be parsed/deployed/installed by steam on your hard drive.
That game needs to be DRM free, meaning that it has an executable available that can be launched without steam running or requiring any sort of authentication or input from the steam servers/services before being able to launch, play or even interact with the menus
So only the DRM free games will remain, and only the installed ones at that. Anything that wasn’t will be lost to the wind the moment the distribution service or storage (yours or theirs) bits the dust…
installers for games are usually just a script that unzips the game and makes some shortcuts. Steam installs all your games in a standard way in a folder of your choice. You can straight up copy that folder to another computer. You can use another launcher and just play your games, there are already many that can read steam’s standardized format. I’ve done it multiple times to avoid redownloading my library
It depends how steam sunsets their DRM, but yes - obviously if a game has 3rd party DRM, that third party is in control. Steam could choose a user hostile way to sunset their own DRM, but they could release ways to deactivate it
DRM is bad, steam provides an easy way for developers to use steam DRM, and it’s generally less user hostile than most DRM. To me, this seems like harm reduction
Ultimately, it’s not up to steam what, if any, DRM a game uses. They manage their in house offering, but the developer doesn’t have to use it if they don’t want to
I don’t know if it’s a clause but Gabe said it at one point. Is that legally binding though? It wouldn’t surprise me one bit that whatever VC eventually buys steam and then runs it into the ground would have no problem changing the user agreement to whatever suited them…
I think I read in the steam agreement itself - I could be wrong, but I generally have a source tagged to my knowledge, and the knowledge is tagged as a direct quote from the document
And yes, if a VC buys out steam I’d be horrified, but it’s structurally resistant to that. It’s largely employee owned and heavily employee managed, their handbook helped me understand the concept of how employee owned businesses could be the answer to many of society’s problems
I like GOG and I like steam too. While it is true that GOG can’t take the offline installer from me, this does not make it true I can play the game forever since many games are dynamically linked to libraries that may not be available in the future. This happened to me with games I just had bought. Steam also dynamically links to libraries but what I like about the way they are doing it is that these are part of the base installation so as long as you keep these files, the games should keep working. Nothing being perfect, I think they both try to do things in their own way and try to convince us that it is the best one.
2.1 We give you and other GOG users the personal right (known legally as a ‘license’) to use GOG services and to download, access and/or stream (depending on the content) and use GOG content. This license is for your personal use. We can stop or suspend this license in some situations, which are explained later on.
GOG has the same drawbacks as Steam without any of the useful features. They should cut down on their “owning games” lies and spend time improving their platform instead.
It does not. You can download and backup all your GOG installers, making the games functionally equal to games you purchased on CD ROMs back in the day. They can revoke your license all they want, they wouldn’t be able to keep you from using the software you acquired this way. That makes all the difference.
and to download, access and/or stream (depending on the content) and use GOG content.
Which they define as:
1.3 Also, when we’re talking about games, in-game content, virtual items or currency or GOG videos or other content or services which you can purchase or access via GOG services, we’ll just call them “GOG games” or “GOG videos” respectively and when we talk about them all together they are “GOG content”.
The license is with regards to “GOG Service”, not “GOG Contents”. You need the former to get access to the latter, sure. But what isn’t clear about this?
You still own the contents (though, as mentioned, individual titles may have additional blablabla). If you don’t think this distinction makes sense when it comes to GoG vs Steam, then maybe you’re just discussing something entirely different?
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