In what way? I know it’s great but I don’t know if I’d call it the last hope for all of gaming. It’s a good store front. Their application has better FOSS alternatives and there are other pretty okay ways to buy games too. I don’t follow them closely. Are they doing anything particular that warrants that description?
Yeah I was aware of that. I don’t know if that constitutes the last hope for all gaming, but it’s definitely a positive. Other stores have a much better user experience, and until they rival stores like Steam in functionality and ease of use, actually owning your own game is just a very nice to have feature and nothing more. Of course, I wish all stores did that. I don’t want to have to resort to piracy if my steam library goes poof, but so far I haven’t had to, and piracy is still an ethical choice in that scenario.
My point isn’t that steam is better, but that GOG has a couple nice features and several downsides, and it is by no means changing or saving the industry. They have a long way to go, and I don’t think saving the industry is the end goal for them.
No, but saving the industry is their “hook”, if not explicitly stated as such. I know that every game I buy from them will be impossible to take away from me if I backed up the installers first.
Are you sure? I haven’t played any of Sony’s games on GOG. From reviews, it looks like Horizon still sends telemetry if you’re connected to the internet, but I don’t believe it’s gotten the remaster update that mandates PSN. I could be out of the loop though. I do know that GOG caught flak for allowing Hitman 2016 on the store, which is technically playable from start to finish without an internet connection, but the connection to their server gates all sorts of extras, so the customers rebelled and got it removed.
But you don’t need to download it again. Keep good backup practices and it’s eternal. If you lose it, that’s the same as losing a physical object you bought at a store. Or if you don’t maintain your backup like you would clean and maintain a physical object you bought, it’s your fault you lose it. I can buy a game from GOG right now and keep it and use it until the day I die, then my grandchildren can use it after that.
when the servers are down, you’re fucked regardless.
As long as you keep the files you don’t have to access their servers to play it again. That’s exactly the same as even physical media. It’s not like a company will send you a new DVD for free if you throw out the one you bought.
And why does that matter? When they go out of business you can’t download even if you do or don’t have a license.
That’s why it matters.
Because you now have a game that you don’t need a license that you still won’t be able to access or play? So how does that make a single fucking difference lmfao.
They don’t, they make furniture. You clearly don’t understand metaphors.
When they go out of business you can’t download even if you do or don’t have a license.
If Ikea goes out of business, you can’t buy their products anymore and the ones you do have you need to protect and make sure they don’t degrade. Your argument is true for every single product, digital or physical.
The games from GOG don’t have any DRM so you can very easily make copies of the game and safely store them elsewhere, even on new computers.
Games that do have DRM lock you down to verify that you’re allowed to play their game, which severely limits how you can use your own product. If that game publisher or developer goes out if business than you can’t play the game that you already have, even if it’s kept “pristine”.
People who bought The Sims 4 couldn’t play their offline game because the DRM stopped them, meanwhile people didn’t buy the game were free to play it when they wanted. The legitimate buyers of the game were punished simply because of DRM.
Ummm… That’s the case for disc games too of only being able to retain possession once it’s shipped to you and you properly store it. Or any tangible good for that matter. I don’t what point you are trying to make.
That GOG downloaded installers can’t be forcibly deactivated or taken away? Your phrasing is confusing so I don’t think people are able to tell whether you think GOG installers are a good or bad thing, or acting like it is useless and provides no further benefit than DRM alternatives.
You are just ignoring that the installers can be downloaded and saved. Or even just the game directory can continue to work.
For people who value that it is a difference. Even how the game works is different with how some don’t work offline or lose ability to function offline once verification expires compared to non DRM counterparts.
You are an idiot acting as if DRM and DRM free is the same as though some license terms is the only determining factor.
You are just ignoring that the installers can be downloaded and saved. Or even just the game directory can continue to work.
Dude, no I am not, my very first comment in this chain talked about the needing to download and store it in a non-degrading way…. Fucking hell dude lmfao.
The offline installers literally are the files to install the game.
It’s as close as we can get in this day to having the disc and installing from disc long after the publisher was bought out and absorbed so many times nobody truly knows exactly who owns the rights to the game anymore. As long as your disc (in this case, offline installer) was stored safely and is still readable you can install it on a compatible computer (and that’s often the harder part is finding a compatible computer!)
I’ve read through your various comments, and I’m not sure you see the difference here.
With other platforms such as Steam, you download the Steam program that acts as a single installer for every game on the platform. You have to be logged into a valid Steam account to download a game from their single installer. If you use a new computer, you have to log into Steam and download from Steam. On GoG, you download an installer per game. Those installers can be transferred to any device and download the games even if the computer has never logged into GoG or even connected to the internet. You can store all the installers on an external drive, which you can’t do for Steam.
If Steam eventually dies or your account is banned, you can never install those games again. If GoG eventually dies or your account is banned, you are correct that you can’t download new installers, but you can use any installer you have already downloaded.
If Steam dies or your account is banned, the game you already have downloaded may not even work anymore due to DRM (this is on a game-by-game basis). If GoG dies or your account is banned, your games are guaranteed to still run since they are not dependant on GoG DRM (with a small list of exceptions people aren’t happy about).
You may not care about any of this, but there’s a decent chunk of people who want to keep their games regardless of anything the purchasing company does.
You really need to look at what you’re buying. Whether it’s a download, a DVD, or damn floppy disk, you’re still just buying a license. A very revokable license. If it’s online, the publisher can cut you off.
And how does that work when they close down and servers that host the games can no longer be accessed to download your license free game?
Wheter you have a revokabke license or not, you still won’t ever be able to access the game…… how do people need this explained to them? And yet use this single reason like it matters lmfao.
When I buy a game from GOG, it comes with the presumption that I will download the installer in a timely manner and store a copy on my local storage device. Assuming I have good backup practices, that’s really the end of the story. I can build a 100 new computers and install the game I bought on each one. GOG went bankrupt ten years ago? That’s a shame, but my installer works just as well as when they were kicking.
When I “buy a game” on Steam, I technically get an installer, but Steam isn’t going to help me keep it. Those 100 new computers are going to download that installer a 100 times. And if the 51st install comes around and Steam isn’t around anymore? Or Steam decides not enough people play this game anymore and it no longer makes financial sense to host the installer? Well, at that point I guess I’ll just regret not buying the game on GOG.
When you buy a game on a CD or Cartidge, it’s up to you to make sure you continue to own it from then on. That is the same model as GoGs digital downloads. You own it, you make sure you still have it on hand for as long as you want to still have it on hand for.
GoG isn’t the publisher. Y’all don’t read the shit you agree to, and know fuck all about media distribution. You’ve never owned a video game, a movie, or even a book that isn’t in the public domain. You’ve only ever owned licenses for personal use, and those licenses have always been provisional and revokable. Always. Your ignorance is not change that.
Enhance your calm. I was merely pointing out that the game installers are offline for GOG, meaning there’s not a physical mechanism to cut you off. As you mentioned, if it’s online, then they can cut you off, which is true for Steam but not GOG.
Those are terminologies corporations care about. But, for real life use there is a difference between a product that can be remotely taken away and products that can’t. Otherwise could be argued there is no difference between a pirated copy of Red Dead Redemption 2 and a legit one, which there is once you try to play offline.
GOG Seels DRM free games that you can download the installers and all necessary files. No matter what they do, once you’ve downloaded it, they can’t stop you from playing it.
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.
How do you disprove that this “GOG content” are offline installer files that, as long as you keep them backed up, work indefinitely even if GOG revokes your license to download them again?
the reality of the situation is that these 2 things look exactly the same in 99% of circumstance and 100% of circumstances that consumers actually care about
How do you use a Steam game after its license was revoked?
By default Steam is a mere download manager without any DRM. You can zip the game folder and back it up anywhere. Whether or not publishers go through the additional steps to enable one or more DRM solution is a different matter. My favorite Steam games have no DRM at all.
They can’t, actually, because they don’t hold the rights to that content, only to GOG and the installer. Once it’s installed their distribution and license rights end.
If the game you install has its own license from the rights holder that gets revoked then you’ll be in breach of that license, if anything.
That’s just wrong. They just sell you a license and provide a DRM free game. You are not supposed to continue playing the game if the publisher terminates your license. They just give you the ability to do it, but it has no legal value
Fucked over Unreal fans by dropping the new Unreal Tournament the moment Fortnite took off (this one is personal, I was looking forward to that)
Fucked over people who bought Fortnite Save the World (the original paid PvE mode of the game) by dropping that the moment the Battle Royale mode took off (this is objectively worse than UT because people paid for this)
Edit: Also want to mention Timmy’s frequent trash talking of Linux on Twitter
Not nearly the same degree. GOG sells actual Linux games with no 3rd party software necessary to play them. The same cannot be said about EGS, one simply cannot launch an EGS game in an officially supported way.
For a very limited subset of games, they provide linux binaries. For the rest? You are up a creek and in the realm of “Figure it out”. Which… is generally the Heroic Launcher (or Lutris for a subset) which puts you in the same boat as Epic.
If you insist upon saying one store is more virtuous than the other… okay? I personally don’t like defending companies but you do you.
But for the vast majority of games? Epic and GoG are in the same category as basically everything but Steam. And both are in the exact same category regarding launchers and download services since they both heavily rely on the Heroic Launcher (which is awesome).
And, to be clear, neither should be applauded for Linux support.
Well, to be clearer. The folk behind the Heroic Launcher (and Lutris) SHOULD be applauded. And I think there is actually a very strong argument that store fronts should not be expected to build out entire social media ecosystems with attached updaters (what launchers basically are). But both Epic and GoG have decided to half ass that so they should be called out for not doing it “right”.
If you insist upon saying one store is more virtuous than the other… okay? I personally don’t like defending companies but you do you.
Could you please not put words into my mouth? Neither is “virtuous” and I am not defending them. Let’s stick to the facts instead. It’s clear that EGS is being actively hostile towards Linux, while GOG is merely negligent. EGS actively removed Linux support from previously supported games on at least one occasion (Rocket League).
As a publisher: Yes, Epic stopped the Rocket League devs from continuing to build Linux binaries. To my knowledge, they have not disabled “support” for Proton in any of the anti-cheat solutions.
Similarly, the development branch of CD Projekt (the parent company of GoG), apparently had Linux binaries for The Witcher 2. They do not for The Witcher 3 or Cyberpunk.
Both companies decided it was not worth internally supporting Linux and instead rely on Proton/Wine to do it for them. Whether that is good for gaming is debatable, but both are “actively hostile towards Linux” in that regard.
If you do want to criticize the handling of Linux then I would suggest looking into the Unreal Engine marketplace (or whatever they call it now) being a complete shitshow for Linux developers. Which is ironic since the UE documentation is actually great for Linux devs. I cannot speak to the CDPR efforts with their modding SDKs since I haven’t opened one since The Witcher 1 (when it was either a hacked version of the NWN toolkit or an officially hacked version of the NWN toolkit).
GOG sells actual Linux games with no 3rd party software necessary to play them.
Ah yes, stand-alone binary installers that work only on a very tiny set of Linux versions because they rely on specific version of system libraries, sometimes contain distribution-specific hardcoded paths, and so on. I especially like those older Linux ports that exclusively target Nvidia drivers because why would anyone just have coded to the OpenGL standard back then…
We have Flatpak Runtimes and Steam Linux Runtimes since years. CD Project / GOG can’t even be bothered to pick these existing open source solutions.
Steam, for all of the good it did still normalized digital distribution of games. Its normal now that we dont own the games we play they exist on corporate servers, and can be rescinded at the drop of a corporate whim.
The approved competitor to a monopoly is… checks notes a wannabe monopoly that’s trying to buy their way into the position by providing less for the customer and instead bribing the publishers for exclusivity?
No, thanks. I would rather stick with the existing monopoly than reward Epic’s anticompetitive and anti-consumer bullshit.
I guess, yeah. I will say, though: it feels morally wrong to acknowledge their existence as anything other than a anti-consumer cashgrab, and thus give them legitimacy as a competitor to Steam, GOG, and Itch.
At the same time, GOG hasn’t been able to pull many, and Itch has much better indie coverage, including for the higher-end indies, due to its much smaller royalty fee. I’d say they’re pretty even overall, with Itch catering to Indies and GOG to old games.
GOG has been closer to offering the more mainstream indies and big studio titles that interest me. I guess itch library doesn’t really appeal as often to my tastes.
That’s completely fair. I personally really like the site because it feels like being part of a creative community, but that also makes the selection of games that are available more eclectic.
Shit I really like GOG as it’s the only competition to steam
There are plenty of competing PC game online stores, it’s just that they all suck monkey balls when you’re not using Windows. Microsoft is currently using their old monopolist playbook and release Blizzard games to the fucking Microsoft Store and Game Pass and not a single 3rd party store.
And don’t forget that the other publisher-owned storefronts like EA’s and Ubisoft’s are also still alive. They suck hard but they exist and apparently they do well enough to continue to be around.
Steam is the only PC games store that fights Microsoft’s Windows monopoly. GOG Galaxy has been written using the Qt framework. Making a Linux version of an existing Qt application is relatively easy (at least compared to a full port). Do that, integrate umu-Launcher for Windows games, bundle everything up and release GOG Galaxy on Flathub. Boom, done. But they don’t do that despite their massive pile of Witcher and Cyberpunk money.
So plenty of competition exists but if you happen to not be Windows-exclusive, everyone but Steam is bad.
“GOG regularly adapts its structure to its strategy and ongoing projects, sometimes this means eliminating certain roles — as was the case recently.”
Yeah, but firing 30% of your entire contract workforce reveals that you don’t give a flying fuck about sustaining the lifespan of the storefront and prefer to pad the executives golden parachutes from the stock valuation.
perhaps - i didn’t read the article, but going by your comment: if it’s your contract workforce rather than full time then sometimes you just want to transition from expensive “temporary” employees to permanent positions
No permanent positions were created or filled, if you read the article. The article also says you need to PM me your credit card info. Don’t worry about reading shit for yourself anywhere, just believe what we say about anything in the comments without question so that you dont need to formulate an independent opinion.
Especially competition that actually delivers something unique a segment of the population wants as opposed to simply existing. Their DRM free stance and standalone installers are a pro consumer move giving control back to the consumer once they download the files.
I’m really happy with my experience with GOG, but they put a lot of effort into their Windows app and i ws pretty blunt with my feedback, it is pretty useless to me and I find it unhelpful. Heroic game launcher on Linux great and cost GOG $0.00. My thought is that they have been focusing on the wrong things, fundamentally I love their strong DRM stance and when I am travelling internationally,the games I bought off GOG work, unlike Steam😡😡😡😡. So if they have come to this realization, then nothing about these changes are disturbing as a customer, but sad to hear their employees taking the hit. 😢
If I understand this correctly, you value Steam’s honesty over a few instances in which GOG hypocritically violated their own DRM policy. That sucks, for sure, and GOG should be called out for it – but at the end of the day, the vast majority of games in my GOG library can be downloaded as offline installers that don’t need to contact a server, while the vast majority of the games I own on Steam can’t (barring, of course, circumventing Steam’s fairly weak DRM scheme, which is illegal).
the vast majority of the games I own on Steam can’t
People keep making this claim, but I don’t think this is true, I’ve made backups of lots of games, even played some in lan with some friends from just a single copy to convince them to buy the game. DRM has to be enabled by the developer, so the majority of games don’t do it, but also lots of games are badly coded and assume steam will be present so they fail to start without the steam library, but any game that’s released somewhere else besides steam probably will just work (and any game that’s only released on steam can’t be found anywhere else so they’re irrelevant).
I don’t follow the logic here. You said it yourself – GoG has only allowed DRM onto their platform four times. This is a violation of their anti-DRM policy but it still means like 99% of games on GoG have no DRM. It’s good to be principled about these things but I don’t see how this merits a knee-jerk response to run to Steam (a platform where 99% of games do have DRM and no guarantee other than an informal promise that they’ll do “something” to make their games available if Steam were to shut down).
Not the person you’re replying to but there’s a big difference between: “We allow DRM, but don’t force it” to “We strongly oppose DRM, but allow it and even put it into our own games”. One is just business, the other makes you a hypocrite. And the issue with GOG is that they’re the latter.
See my other reply, they have allowed this much more than 4 times, and their own games have some form of DRM. Plus the amount of games with DRM on steam is much less than 99%, as a general rule if the game is on both platforms it has the same or equivalent DRM. So it’s essentially up to the publisher whether a game will have DRM or not, and because the vast majority of games have the same stance on DRM regardless of platform of purchase citing GOG stance against DRM becomes a moot point.
In short, games on GOG can have DRM and games on Steam can be DRM free. And as a general rule a game’s DRM stance will be the same regardless of store. So if you want to play game X and it’s available on both GOG and Steam, chances are pretty high that it is DRM-free on both, and if it has DRM on steam chances are pretty high it also has DRM on GOG.
Which games from steam don’t work? I’ve never had any issues at all and I have traveled internationally for years while playing my whole library. I think that might be something specific to some game and that game wouldn’t be available on GOG anyways so it’s a moot point. In other words games work or don’t by their own stance on DRM, and I’m sorry to tell you but
I love their strong DRM stance
That’s a myth. They do allow DRM on their store, there’s a huge thread discussing which games have DRM: www.gog.com/forum/general/…/page1
And that’s just focusing on SP, any MP game has DRM. So I’ll ask again, which game didn’t work on steam when traveling?
Not the person you asked, but one game I had problems with on Steam that I did not on GOG was the OG Riven. It was still playable, but the various animations associated with pressing buttons and suchlike were completely broken. Very rare experience though and I have played many retro games on Steam.
Yeah a lot of retro games on GOG were fixed up with patches and stuff like that (often by GOG themselves) and sometimes regardless of any fixes applied, there are version disparities between the two platforms where usually the Steam versions is a slightly older release of an old no longer updated game compared to the GOG version though I’ve seen it happen the other way around, too.
Never heard of that game, but I can definitely believe it, old games are where GOG really shines. But that doesn’t seem like a DRM thing, more like the game is abandoned on Steam but not on GOG, sometimes GOG patches some old games with their own runtime, curiously if that is the problem running the steam version on linux using proton (and especially proton-GE) is also very likely to work.
Note, if you actually look at that list you’ll see it’s a very loose interpretation of DRM. All of the games on that list work without any kind of phone-home security check, or unlock code, or anything like that. The list is stuff like “getting the DLC requires a third party account”. It’s definitely a list of things people don’t like, but whether it is or isn’t ‘DRM’ is not so clear cut.
GOG’s official position is that the store doesn’t allow DRM at all. They describe what they mean by DRM on that same page, and it sounds fairly reasonable; but its certainly understandable that some people would prefer a stricter set of rules.
All of the games on that list work without any kind of phone-home security check, or unlock code, or anything like that.
You didn’t scroll down the linked forum post, did you?
DEFCON - Linux: Game contacts a key verification server as described here. Win and Mac have offline executables that skip the verification. But under Linux there is no DRM-free offline executable.
F.E.A.R. - arguably a bug that stays unfixed. Securom remnants weren’t removed and can cause the single player game not to start.
Well, that’s not true either. I hate this trend of developers only relying on the platform-provided servers for multiplayer, but you have to find a game with LAN. That limits your selection a lot, but I for sure played Star Wars: Episode I - Racer from GOG in LAN without talking to their servers at all.
I can’t say conclusively that every LAN game on GOG is DRM-free on Steam, but there are times where Steam’s DRM has caused annoyances for me when trying to play offline on Steam Deck that I would not run into with side loaded GOG games, which I detailed in another comment here.
You can’t also say conclusively that every LAN game on GOG is DRM-free on GOG either.
I read that other comment, that’s an issue with the specific game. I’ve played dozens of games without connection and not putting it on offline mode, if that specific game tries to phone home on login that game is wrong. I wished Steam would have a DRM-free tag to be able to differentiate them easily.
I’ve traveled domestically and had the Steam Deck randomly decide that the games I preloaded need to be authenticated again because I didn’t explicitly put the device in “offline mode” before traveling. A GOG game sideloaded through Heroic would just work.
This year I was in three foreign countries with my Steam Deck. Once per flight, the other two by car. On the plane I activated airplane mode because duh but outside the plane airplane mode was always off.
By default Steam downloads shader caches off Valve’s servers. So if Steam saw before that an update is available and you didn’t download it, Steam wants to be online to download them. You can disable shader cache downloads in desktop mode but then the games have to compile the shaders by themselves which takes time computing resources, and in turn wastes battery power.
Also, pretty recently there was a bug in Steam that messed up authentication in general. It required me to log in twice (!) on every power on. The bug is now gone. It wasn’t a feature.
Nope, this is something different. I booted up Metaphor: ReFantazio, and it just about made it to the main menu before telling me I needed to be in offline mode, but you can’t explicitly put the device in offline mode if you don’t have an internet connection, funny enough. Fortunately I was on an Amtrak with Wi-Fi, but I shouldn’t have needed to do that. As far as I can tell, the reason I needed to authenticate the game again is because the Deck ran a “validating install” step on boot, but I have no idea when that step is going to happen, and once again, I shouldn’t have to plan ahead for being offline.
I booted up Metaphor: ReFantazio, and it just about made it to the main menu before telling me I needed to be in offline mode
Sounds like a game bug.
but you can’t explicitly put the device in offline mode if you don’t have an internet connection, funny enough
“…” button --> Airplane mode.
the reason I needed to authenticate the game again is because the Deck ran a “validating install” step on boot, but I have no idea when that step is going to happen
When you do something to bork the game data. It’s either user error or a bug but definitively not regular behaviour.
Airplane mode is not offline mode. I found that out explicitly this year due to how Ubisoft’s launcher interacts with playing offline in Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. Offline mode is found from the Internet menu in the Steam Deck interface and is very much not the same thing as just not having an internet connection, as much as that would make sense.
I didn’t break any game data. This is an OS level feature, and it just does it sometimes on boot. I’m glad you’ve never been inconvenienced by these things yourself, but this is the intended functionality.
Funny how you got hit by that on an domestic train trip and I traveled abroad several times and not got that weird behaviour even once. I simply never use offline mode. On the plane I was in airplane mode and when not on the plane I was on hotel wifi, personal phone hotspot, or just not connected to any wifi. Steam also never just out of the blue validated my game data. Must be a problem on your end.
Yeah, this is the gist of the problem. When a PC is connected to airplane WiFi, but it is limited, Steam decides it is online, but some sort of validation fails and then no games will play until I get back to a full internet connection and reboot. I don’t even try anymore, hence my comment about GOG, and yes, I know some games on GOG have DRM, but most don’t and they don’t hide the fact. The Steam DRM bootlicking combined with GOG hatred because they were forced to sell a few games with DRM is so bizarre. Are Steam fan boys a thing? What a weird hill to fight for.
DRM is the heart of most technology pain for paying customers since it’s inception. For pirates, the experience is much better since the DRM is removed.
Navok noted that if a game costs $100 million to make over five years, it has to beat what the company could have returned investing a similar amount in the stock market over the same period. “For the 5 years prior to Feb 2024, the stock market averaged a rate of return of 14.5%. Investing that $100m in the stock market would net you a return of $201m, so this is our ROI baseline,” he explained.
This is why capitalism ruins everything. So it’s not even about making art that is profitable, it’s about beating out other investment opportunities that someone could have chosen, even if it meant the art didn’t get made.
That is so ass-backwards.
Investment should be about wanting to grow a company whose products you believe in, both to see returns when those products perform well, but also to enjoy the future products.
Someone whose attitude is “I don’t care about your products at all, I just care about cash ROI” will turn around and short your stock and disparage you, if they think it’ll net them more money. In other words, they won’t actually look out for the best interests of the company, and will always be looking out for opportunities to plunder the business for more profit.
And this is supposed to create a healthy market for goods? Please.
“The free market makes goods compete to see what customers prefer.” Apparently not.
Apparently it creates a situation where the products can be profitable and amazing and well-loved, but a bunch of wealthy assholes who don’t care about the products at all can decide the company isn’t up to their standards, and punish or kill it.
There was another post here on Beehaw about housing costs, where someone noted that “voting with your wallet” doesn’t work because wealthy people can “out-vote” you, on a level that even collectively you can’t compete with, and this really illustrates their point well.
Late edit:
I think it bears saying that under this model of ROI calculation, depending on how well other industries are doing, it is entirely possible that no video game could feasibly outperform the market for a given timeframe… so should the whole games industry just fucking shut down in that case?
Right?! I freaked on the same paragraph. Most depressing thing ever said about game dev. These suits would rather fire everyone and play stonks all day if it earned a dime more. I’m so mad for the massive creative force being crushed by this broken system.
I feel like corporations are inherently evil. The owners have no actual liability for the harm they do, and their highest calling is profits. I don’t know how to encourage investment without the stock market, but I do know if you play a little game called “what is the end result,” you’ll quickly see a dystopian future where everyone is slaves except in name.
We’d better look into the French solution long before it gets to that point.
I don’t know how to encourage investment without the stock market
I invest in stuff that’s not stocks all the time. When I give money to someone so that they will hopefully create a cool new product in the future (e.g. a video), I’m not paying for an individual product, I’m investing in them as a creator in hopes for future ROI. That’s Patreon.
We treat the addiction to wealth accrual different from any other addiction, in that we laud it, but make no mistake that it is addictive. Watching numbers in your account go up gives you a rush, just as sure as watching numbers in a video game.
When other addictions cause harm, we push people to get treatment, or at very least condemn the addiction. When someone is addicted to the accrual of wealth, even to the detriment of others, we call them, ‘genius’, ‘savvy’, ‘visionary’, or ‘shrewd’.
It’s such a destructive mindset, and it seems to me like indie games are hopefully on the cusp of re-demonstrating to the rest of the industry why it is so.
Art/luxury products depend on catering to subjective tastes to turn a profit. You need to speak to someone’s perspective or interests, and are competing for their disposable income against all other forms of entertainment. Thus the wider the targeted audience, the harder it is to outcompete the rest of the market on “consumer interest” (no idea if that’s the proper use of the term but it sounds correct for the context), the harder it is to even turn a profit.
Simultaneously, these corporations want an ever-greater magnitude of profit (aka growth). So they decide to target the widest audience possible, while investing as much capital as they can.
That’s already an unstable balance of priorities. As soon as you start conceiving yourself as competing with almost every single other market on the basis of shareholder speculation, in terms of ROI, it’s doomed.
You’re not just shooting yourself in the foot, you’re trying to do a Paul Muad’hib Atreides except because this is reality, not sci-fi, instead of drinking the Water of Life you mixed 10 grams of ketamine, 5 tabs of acid, and a fistful of meth into a blue Gatorade and chugged it in one go. All you end up doing is vibrating in place so hard you begin to slough off flesh and erratically disintegrate, like some sort of sad eldritch horror.
God do I hate corpos sick with capitalism.
To continue the Dune analogy, they really could use some ecology-derived thinking: specialize and find your niche (or help it emerge), and give back to the rest of the ecosystem so that it continues to flourish with you. Monoculture has a negative correlation between scale and sustainability, let alone ROI.
I think it highlights how perverse the stock market itself is. It doesn’t really seem like it functions much as a way for riskier ventures to raise capital outside of a bank, but a giant casino that gives the illusion of not being a zero sum game.
It’s hypothetically possible for a company to make more money in the stock market by investing in themselves than by creating anything (see Tesla). And if all companies could behave this way and somehow knew what the stock market would do for 5 years, I’d wager a TON of companies wouldn’t meet it, invest in the stock market, drive up the “value,” more don’t meet it, etc. etc. until no one is making anything, and everyone is happy with their paper fortunes and try to sell.
There is no value considered in providing stable income to the team members. No value considered in artists honing their craft. Even if the games only had marginal profits in and of themselves, considering the cost of big budget games, there is still huge value in creating and maintaining a large IP.
This is basically why the largest studio in my county shut down last year. It was considered “insufficiently profitable” by the parent company. Not unprofitable. It was turning a profit and had produced some highly regarded games, including an award winner. It was also a company that treated its employees well, including offering highly flexible working hours and having a dog-friendly office. I’d been eyeing them up because I’d hoped to work there when I got my degree. But nope, they’re gone now because they weren’t making enough money.
I believe society as a whole should stop idolising the wealthy, and start seeing their inability to be satisfied with having enough money for a comfortable life as the dysfunction it is. Never being satisfied no matter how much money you have should be seen as a problem, not something to aspire to.
Let’s be honest, this was apparent for a long time. Steam, a centralised platform, has been making strides in Linux gaming and has been making innovation after innovation together with its steam deck. Gog, a forefront to freedom in gaming, barely did anything for the Linux gaming scene. No innovation either. Its just the simple (and well needed) premise of no DRM. It’s necessary, but not enough. It didn’t cater to its niche, it just committing to creating one under a premise. That’s not how you go forward. How does this connect to bad management? Well, I think that with good management gog would make different moves. And wouldn’t rest on its laurels so much.
It’s pretty hard for GOG. Many of the things people don’t like about GOG are not really GOG’s fault, they are just a result of small market share. Steam is the bigger platform, and so naturally it gets priority for basically everything.
You game doesn’t work on Steam? Then you’d better fix it immediately, because that’s where the bulk of players are. But if your game doesn’t work on GOG… well… maybe fix it when you get some spare time. (Or maybe don’t have a GOG version, because you don’t want to have to keep multiple platforms up-to-date.)
So publishers and developers are generally less cooperative with GOG. And GOG themselves obviously have much more limited resources to do stuff themselves.
Steam’s recent work with Linux has been great. And I do wish GOG would have something like that. But again, Valve has vast resources for that kind of thing - and they’ve been working on it ever since the Windows 8 appstore threatened to wipe them out. (That threat fizzled out; but nevertheless, that was what got the Linux ball rolling for Valve.) I’m in two minds about whether GOG should try to boost their Linux support. On the one hand, GOG is all about preservation and compatibility… and so it makes sense to have better Linux compatibility. On the other hand, it would be leaning further into a niche; and working on a problem that is kind of solved already. i.e. We can already run GOG games on Linux with or without a native linux version… it just could be nicer… Maybe it’s not a good use of GOG’s resources to go for that.
(That said, when I look at their linux start.sh scripts and see cd “${CURRENT_DIR}/game” chmod +x * it makes me think they could probably put at least a bit more effort into their linux support.)
It adds the executable permission (without which, things can’t be executed) to all the files in the game’s directory. You only need to be able to execute a few of those files, and there’s a dedicated permission to control what can and can’t be executed for a reason. Windows doesn’t have a direct equivalent, so setting it for everything gives the impression that they’re trying to make it behave like Windows rather than working with the OS.
I mean i assume thats just easier to deal with updates where a game has multiple exe files that may or may not change names. Assuming everything in the directory is assumed to be safe, is there any downside to applying it to everything, aside from opening up the possibility of a user accidentally trying to execute like a texture file or something which I assume just wouldnt work? I actually don’t know and im curious.
You’ve pretty much got it. It’s bad, but it’s not horrible. Trying to execute some random file such as a texture basically just doesn’t work… but only by luck. It’s possible, but unlikely that the data might look enough like an actual program to run and do something unpredictable.
I’m not aware of any major reasons why its a problem to make everything as executable (and I know that when I open an NTFS drive from linux, all the files are executable by default - because NTFS doesn’t have that flag). From my point of view I just think its sloppy. I figure it can’t be hard for GOG to just correctly identify which files are meant to be executable. For most games its just a single executable file - the same one that GOG’s script is launching. And presumably the files that developers provided GOG have the correct flags in the first place.
Anyway, not really a big deal. Like I said, I just think it’s a bit low-effort.
Yeah that’s fair, and im not defending the practice, it just made me think of some games that Ive seen that have multiple executables, usually with an inbuilt launcher that i have to bypass. Or when games used to come with a dx11 and dx12 executable. Personally i find that in itself super sloppy and annoying as well, but it makes a kind of lazy sense to just apply it to all the game files, in that its just one less thing to have to change if you make an alteration to the name of the executable file or add a new executable for whatever reason. Just one less possible failure point. But yeah I can see how its definitely not best practice.
Are you seriously asking how a piece of computer software might fail to operate correctly? As much as DRM sucks, it isn’t the only thing that can cause something to not work.
No im saying theres no such thing as a “GOG” version afaik. Its just the game files. What features differentiate a ‘GOG’ version from the same game acquired anywhere else? Their whole business model is offering games without any DRM or storefront added features, you dont even need to use their launcher, you can just download the game files directly. Whereas ‘Steam’ versions have all sorts of code added to be compatible with Steam.
You pretty much said it. The Steam version often has all sorts of stuff for Steam integration… and the Steam version is the default version. So various hooks for achievements and networking and mod installation may be different. Messing with any of that could easily break something. Furthermore, GOG does have its own API that some games use (again, for achievements and cloud saves); so if a game has chosen to use those features they may accidentally break something.
But even aside from possible difference between versions; bugs in the game itself still have to be addressed on every platform. Even if they don’t bother testing the new version, they still have to at least push the update - which is still more work than zero work. This is why it is fairly common to see games that are under active development only have their beta version on Steam (or in some cases only Epic), even when they intend to launch on a bunch of platforms.
So for some games (certainly not all, but definitely some), patches come on Steam first and GOG at some point later. Maybe a day later, or a week later, or in some rare cases not at all. Similarly for DLC. And that definitely isn’t GOG’s fault. There isn’t really anything GOG can do about it. It’s just a side-effect of Steam being the far bigger platform.
experienced this with BG3 on gog while my friends had the steam version, when it launched. Patches on gog were delayed by sometime a week, preventing us to play together.
The conspiracist in me wonders if this is intentional as the result of a deal with other publishers. Maybe its just that ‘the devs didnt get around to it’ but honestly with how simple it should be to release things on GOG i more wonder if it isnt suppression.
Steam can throw 10 GOGs worth of resources at a problem and barely break a sweat. Yeah, of course they are making huge strides, that’s how consolidation of wealth works when that wealth is actually reinvested.
The hell do you mean "barely did anything for the Linux gaming scene"? Listen, I'm up to my neck with Linux gamer crybabies always bitching about how someone doesn't throw them a bone, for years. Valve is doing Linux gamers a great service and since Linux was all about free-this and open source that, DRM-free is at least a thing. Fucking can't please whiny Linux gamers.
You’re missing the point. DRM free is something I respect, both as a Linux gamer and as a gamer overall. But what’s important is that a game runs before I get to bitch about DRM. Valve has done strides to make games work on Linux and I respect that. What I’m saying is GOG could do it too and it would fit their business model more than Valve’s.
There’s nothing wrong with the business model of selling older games at affordable prices. This is about poor management. (Or deliberately bad management by a “CEO” who was hired to destroy GOG to remove a popular choice from us).
The other day I was thinking about the movie Scrooged with Bill Murray, and how during one of the Scenes of Christmas Passed he got his girlfriend a pack of Ginsu knives for Christmas and how that’s on-theme for his character who is obsessed with TV because Ginsu knives were a big As Seen On TV product and how someone on the writing staff must have went to college to think of that.
I’d certainly love to hear that they’re at least turning a profit. It’s my default store now, but given the ambiguity of what I’m buying in the multiplayer space, and the lesser experience I get as a Linux customer, they’re not making it easy.
Paraphrasing : those expectations are not too high, they’re the direct result of the games’ budget.
Yeah, okay, let’s admit that for a second. It’s not like they have no control over the scale and budget of their own games. Seems to me this still counts as unrealistic expectations…
According to the article at least, that is essentially what they did. But their model was based on earlier years when there was higher projected growth, so the budgets were set too high as a result.
Personally, as long as the final installment in the FF7 Remake trilogy is made with the same budget as the first two and ends on a satisfying note, I’ll be happy. A good ending gives the trilogy as a whole have more lifetime sales than it would if part 3 makes the first two less good in retrospect, i.e. the Mass Effect 3 effect.
I will just agree to disagree on that front. Playing casually, I clocked over 100 hours on the 2nd game, which is more time than it took me to complete the original full game on PS1. I enjoyed basically every minute of time played (save for one particular mini-game that I didn’t care for), so I’d say I got a good value out of it for the cost. It is also hard to say that it is a cash grab when it provides a much fuller experience than most AAA games these days seem to have.
Basically, I don’t hate it any more than I hate the fact that The Lord of the Rings is three separate movies; it’s not like The Hobbit.
The problem is that the first is easy, the later is hard, nigh impossible.
Software development is notoriously hard to predict. Specially features against time and cost of development. But video games are even harder to predict. It’s impossible to know how many copies a game will sell, you might as well hire a tarot reader. Specially if the game doesn’t exist yet.
This is not a justification of the AAA practices. Quite the contrary, things are this way because mid and high management refuse to do their job or plainly suck at it. I guess that the adage still rings true: I want smaller games, with worse graphics, made by well paid developers who work less hours. But this games have never sold billions of dollars or sparked billion dollar game as a service IPs. So executives think it can’t be done and keep expending more in a desperate chase of the golden eggs goose.
SQEX did have significant AA-sized development for a long while, although potentially less going forward until their flagship rights itself (or they develop a new one). It’s less risky, and the payoff can still end up highly successful like Life is Strange or Octopath Traveler.
I guess the silver lining for them here is that FF16 had much better management than 13 and 15. It would have been a real disaster if 16 went into the budget overruns those two games did. Being hitched to a low-market-share platform and being released in a crazy year for gaming was also bad luck. Granted, FF16 and Rebirth not being good enough to move PS5 units is its own problem.
Consoles shouldn’t tie their success to a single game. Nintendo, the creators of such model, ditched it almost immediately. After the Famicom. Volume of games + convenience is what move consoles, not a single game. Exclusives have diminishing returns and at the beginning of console sales cycle they’re more likely to hurt the game.
Foamstars was a new IP, so they didn’t count on brand name to carry this one.
Unless they thought “Square Enix” would be enough to hype it, and yeah, for a game that far away from their usual, that would be completely disconnected from reality.
gameworldobserver.com
Ważne