Ironically (or perhaps completely unironically) the bundle requires a very weird workaround to get it to work in Australia.
Anyway, I redeemed it and got all those games added to my account. I doubt I’ll ever even install any of them tbh, but I just felt like saying “screw you” to my compatriot.
I found this solution worked for me in Australia. It involved clicking a link to add the bundle to my cart, and then another link to check out, rather than going through the normal process.
I found this solution worked for me in Australia. It involved clicking a link to add the bundle to my cart, and then another link to check out, rather than going through the normal process.
I’ve never played a NSFW game. I’m also, like, very much Ace, so, like, no chance in hell I’ll ever will. BUT I can’t resist the allure of free games! No matter what they are…
There’s also Postal 2 in there lol, that convinced me to click the Claim button.
I’ve already hidden the games from the library, so I’ll probably never see them again and forget they exist in about 6 months from now…
Man, I really appreciate GOG. They’re not perfect and, as with all corporations, one shouldn’t take them completely at face value but their approach to game preservation, DRM and stuff like this are the reasons why I keep them as my primary choice for purchases whenever possible.
Is it a relatively cheap PR stunt? Maybe. Probably. It’s still more than any other store did or said in regards to the recent events. Might as well grab some free publicity.
I mean, Valve’s silence isn’t really surprising to be honest. They generally tend to keep quiet and let things go away on their own whenever possible. I’d be more surprised if the came out in force on this issue.
They did respond to the recent claim by Mastercard about them not being responsible for this recent mess - that’s something, I guess? Here is a Kotaku article (don’t kill me, that’s the source I have for this) and here is the relevant part:
“Mastercard did not communicate with Valve directly, despite our request to do so,” Valve’s statement sent over email to Kotaku reads. “Mastercard communicated with payment processors and their acquiring banks. Payment processors communicated this with Valve, and we replied by outlining Steam’s policy since 2018 of attempting to distribute games that are legal for distribution. Payment processors rejected this, and specifically cited Mastercard’s Rule 5.12.7 and risk to the Mastercard brand.”
There’s a bit more in the linked article but that’s pretty much the gist of it.
Valve relies on Visa/Mastercard to process billions worth of transactions occur every year. They’re not going to rock the boat unless they want to risk the whole business.
Their (relative?) silence, to me, is indicative of just how bad this duopoly is, and that Valve sees no alternative worth publicly mentioning at this juncture.
Oh absolutely, that’s as much (if not more) of a reason for them keeping quiet. No big company will willingly jump into the pit against payment processors, there’s way too much to lose.
Steam is criminally understaffed and always caves in with no resistance when any actor wants to block access to thousands of games to millions of potential customers. This is just the latest chapter in a long history of them neglecting their users.
For example a large number of affected games in this case have already been blocked in Germany for a while because Steam refused to implement any type of age verification. They didn‘t even want a dialog with authorities and flat out region blocked affected games instead.
Now, I will say that this move by Germany was complete hypocrisy because it only affected unrated games and porn, when other 18+ games are still perfectly available because they „only“ contain massive amounts of violence. Somehow age verification isn‘t necessary here for some reason and gambling with cosmetic items is fine too? Good to know we have our priorities straight. /s
Whatever the case, the point is Steam always choses the path of least resistance. Germany has a system that lets users verify their age anonymously. Sony has implemented it for their store no problem but Steam doesn‘t even bother to have a single German speaker in their support team.
It’s got a controller semi-friendly interface, so it’s better for the Steam Deck, and it isn’t so much running compatibility scripts but just leveraging APIs inherent to each storefront to download and install the same way that GOG Galaxy does, more or less. It’s got achievement compatibility and beta cloud save support.
As a recent refugee from W10, I agree. Not shitting on Lutris since it did kind of worked, so it might have been a matter of playing with some settings, but heroic just worked.
Lutris on a fresh bazzite install: install GOG launcher and sign in. Crappy launcher to install the game (same as windows). Install Witcher 3, start playing. Find out the installer never reported success. Next time it launches it throws an error because the game was not installed. Default is to not cache the installer files. Multi-GB download starts again.
Heroic on the same setup (after the above): sign in to GOG. Get black and white icons for all games in the platform you own. Double click or right click (can’t remember which) to install. Game installs and the icon is in color now. Double click, it starts and works.
… and Amazon games. People who have or had prime accounts often have large amounts of free games on there from claiming them in the past (often via twitch).
I haven’t used heroic, how good is the wine integration? Is it as seamless as proton? I want to know if I should wait for the steam sale or buy some games from gog instead.
You boot up Heroic, you point it at your GOG account, then you go to the clearly labeled Wine Manager in the left panel. Choose the latest Proton-GE (Glorious Eggroll fork) or a version of your choosing. Then go to library and download the game you want. It will prompt you to choose a Wine version that you’ve already got installed, and it seems to detect the ones you have installed via Steam and via their Wine Manager; I recommend sticking to Proton-GE. The installation process for each game works much the same as any other launcher you use.
If you want to try the game on GOG first, they have a 30-day no questions asked refund policy, since they can’t exactly track how many hours you’ve played. It’s just kind of on the honors system that we’re not abusing it as customers, or maybe if you do it too much. Most games just work, but I have found the odd exception. For some games, like The Thaumaturge, I had to run Winetricks to download some VC++ runtimes to get it working (which I was only able to deduce based on the depots visible on steamdb.info). I nearly bought a copy of The Alters today, but early reports on ProtonDB are that it’s got some crashing issues, so between Valve and GloriousEggroll, I figure that problem will be solved in the next couple of months.
The refund policy on GOG is so good that you can just try it first and buy the Steam version instead if it doesn’t work out. The 10% referral code that benefits Heroic shows GOG how much of their customer base are on Linux, and it should enhance the Linux experience via funding at the same time.
Cart persistence and going through the actual checkout is not great. Plus even as a browser there’s no progress bar or sense of stuff still doing something so you’re sat waiting for things to progress
Their platform is really outdated. Can’t even edit or remove a game review without contacting support. It’s dumb. They’re losing precious time because of this
I don’t think it has cloud saving, easy wine/proton, API for achievements and shit… just overall unfit for “bigger games”. It has similar functionality to GOG’s offline downloads. I haven’t really used it so can’t say.
I probably won’t try it if they also take a huge cut from sales like 30% or something EDIT: They seem to let you choose whatever you want, and charge 10% by default (itch.io/docs/creators/payments#open-revenue-shari…). That’s neat! However, payment method fees always apply. You can opt into them collecting the money through their account at seemingly no fee, and won’t be exposed to chargebacks. That’s incredible!
It’s sad, because I’m sure they could fix all of this easily and get a lot of profit from GOG, but they prefer to spend their time elsewhere for some reason
gog.com
Aktywne