If you’re just looking for sales numbers, which we haven’t had much of for a long time, the long and short of it is:
4M Steam Decks since launch, 2M of all of its competitors combined; expected that all handheld PCs sharing this AMD tech will sell about 2M more this year.
Oh my god, do you think this is some kind of hypocrisy? If I have internet now and download a GOG game’s installer to my hard drive now, I have it forever, even if I’m in a place without internet access like on a train. Even if GOG goes out of business. Even if Sony goes out of business. Even if the internet ceases to exist. When Blizzard turns the lights off on Diablo 4, that game is gone due to no fault of your own.
They lifted it on four games but omitted some others, which isn’t great, and they’ve shown a willingness to patch this in after the fact, so I still don’t trust them. EA did the same thing with the likes of Jedi: Fallen Order and such, so they’re on the same shit list.
Even if I wanted to cheat in some old God of War games (I don’t), so what? Who does that hurt?
What I don’t trust, for good reason, is that that server will always be there to authenticate my game. Allegedly it requires talking to their server at first install, and that works now in the year 2025, but who’s to say it will be there in 2035?
Splinter Cell: Blacklist came out in 2013. A friend of mine bought it this past winter sale. The UPlay launcher that existed when that game came out has now been renamed and reworked, and the launcher that comes up when he tries to play it asks him for a product key that he was not provided (there is a function for this in the Steam overlay, and we checked, and it was not available for this game). Now I’m sure that he could eventually get it working if he had the patience to wait through Ubisoft support, but A) he shouldn’t have to, and B) what if Ubisoft goes out of business in the next couple of years? That’s not an unlikely scenario at this point, and all the online requirement did was introduce an additional point of failure in the thing that he paid money for. I’m old enough and have been playing games long enough to see these points of failure rear their heads plenty of times now.
The login requirement for the likes of Diablo 3 and 4 are exactly why I’m not buying Diablo 3 and 4. Honestly, even Steam’s DRM, which isn’t present on every game and usually works seamlessly, has still caused some friction for me lately, and every time it annoys me, I get that much closer to only buying games on GOG. The threat of these games getting an online requirement patched in after the fact is enough to make me rather emulate them than deal with that nonsense, if I was so inclined. If they put their games on GOG, I don’t have to trust them, because it’s impossible for them to do that to me.
There are very different goals between these games. This is an action RPG where your whole character sheet is focused on combat, not unlike Dark Souls even in level design. The systems of Bethesda’s games have sounded good to me on paper in the past, but in execution, they’ve always felt like they aspired to be what Larian is doing now and had very few actual benefits. They let you steal anything you want in this game because it was more relevant to this game’s loop.
Will of the Wisps fell through the cracks for me. It came out at a time after I had switched to Linux and before Proton was a thing. I ought to make time to get around to it someday.
We know they sold 1.5M copies in only a few months at an MSRP of $70. We know that very few games cost more than $100M to make, and last I heard, this one barely squeaked over that line. You can do the math there. It won’t take long for this game to become profitable if it isn’t already.