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.
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.
It is for sure more complicated, but you have to weigh that against actually owning the thing you buy. Also, I forgot a step in setting up Heroic launcher. You need to also go to the Wine Manager section and download the latest stable version of Wine-GE. It’s pretty straight-forward, but you’ll need a version of Wine to play Windows games.
Download Heroic Launcher from the Discover app in Desktop mode and add it as a non-Steam game. You can log into your GOG account there. In a best-case scenario, which is more often than not, you just hit download, and you can play the game on Steam Deck.
But sometimes it doesn’t work like that. Steam will often bundle dependencies with your download, like DirectX versions or Visual Studio runtimes. To get these working, you’ll need to run “winetricks”, which can be done on a game-by-game basis from within Heroic, and then install the dependencies you need. To find out which dependencies you need, if you had trouble launching the game in the first place, you can check SteamDB and see what other “depots” the game has. This resolves the problem about 99% of the time, if there’s a problem at all. In one case, Phantom Fury, I was unable to get the same compatibility with the GOG version that I was with the Steam version, and I don’t know why. Also, at this point in time, I don’t think you can rely on cloud saves working, and you might need to rely on a solution like SyncThing, but it looks like cloud saves working reliably via Heroic is imminent, if it isn’t already since the last time I checked.
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.
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.
This sounds like it would just end up speedrunning Steam’s refund system. Plus, I don’t think it’s desirable for the seller. If they feel their game is worth some price, but a bunch of people know they can bully other developers into a race to the bottom, that could easily be a negative feedback loop.
It’s Skullgirls by a mile, at over 1600 hours. There’s always some way to push your game to the next level, and there’s always a strategy and combination of characters you can put together that’s effective and no one has tried before. Next is Guilty Gear Strive, at over 700 hours, and the Roman Cancel system is so deep that there’s always room to be clever with it.
Looking at some other games I’ve played a ton, besides fighting games, I could probably sink hundreds more hours into Baldur’s Gate 3 and Mercenary Kings if they ever got expansions or sequels, but I don’t think those things are going to happen.
I’ll champion the death of any live service game, especially one that does it as egregiously bad as Destiny, but there are 20k concurrent players on Steam alone. If a fireteam is only 3 people, and you can’t fill it with that many people online, it’s just their matchmaking algorithm that needs to be adjusted.
Prototyping and design documentation was likely started a decade ago, but they wouldn’t have fully ramped up to a larger team size that’s more expensive to sustain for a full decade. In the interim, they put out Anthem, Mass Effect: Andromeda, and remastered the original Mass Effect trilogy. So there is a world where they didn’t spend $200M on it, but it also wouldn’t surprise me if they hit that number either; and if they did, they’d have to sell about 5M copies to break even (assuming a 70% cut and that not every copy sold is at $70).
It’s all going to be relative to what they spent, which I don’t know. If they only spent $70M, they already made their money back. It’s looking like they’ll probably make their money back regardless, unless they spent an entire GTA6 on this thing, which I doubt. These are also only the Steam numbers that I’m calculating based on how many reviews it has; the PS5 version likely did quite well too.