EDIT: Also, I know they motion captured everyone for BG3, and when some of these guys are getting older, maybe it was less about PR and more about who they believed they could get into mocap gear.
No, I get that. But likewise, Denuvo doesn’t have access to a second Earth either, and their pitch meeting will never include data of customers you’ve convinced not to buy the game due to the presence of their product. At some point, I don’t think those pirated copies are moving the needle, and that it’s just a cost of doing business like some units of physical goods breaking during shipping. The games that are most pirated are the ones that also sell the best. The anti-piracy case for the consumer is made pretty well these days by being downloaded faster, getting bug fix patches instantly, and keeping cloud saves.
Yeah, it’s a pretty easy conclusion to come to from the outside looking in, but BG3 can launch on GOG day and date, and KC:D2 can communicate the GOG release ahead of time and still sell multiple millions of copies, so…it’s a practice I’d like to see change regardless.
If anything, purely anecdotally with no data-based analysis, it looks as though GOG is getting more new releases than it used to. So I think as long as we show that DRM-free matters to us by buying there first, the situation will continue to improve.
Yeah, I’ve had this experience, too. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II communicated ahead of launch that the GOG release would come only a few months later (I did get the sense this was a publisher decision). Great! I can wait a few months. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 made no such mention, and despite waiting several months to see how it would shake out, I bought it in the summer, and the GOG version came out right after I finished it. The developer behind Knights in Tight Spaces, when asked directly, said they were only focusing on the Steam release. Likewise, the GOG version came out shortly after I finished the game. From here on out, of the games on my radar, I’m playing the ones on GOG first, and maybe the other ones will get GOG releases in the meantime.
Worth noting that the remastered versions have no multiplayer. There’s no bringing back multiplayer for Crysis 2 and 3, but the original Cryis Warhead is still available on GOG, where you can play old-school Crysis Wars multiplayer via LAN.
I don’t have to troubleshoot anything most of the time, and I’ve bought dozens of games through GOG of late, for what it’s worth. And in the case of The Alters, the Steam version has many of the same problems. Just letting you know it’s an option, anyway. You can even route some of your GOG purchase to go toward development of Heroic by buying through the Heroic client, so that it makes sure it only gets better and so that GOG knows how much of their revenue they’re giving up to people who want this sort of functionality.
I see you’ve got 007: Nightfire in that list, so let me raise you 007: Agent Under Fire. The single player is not as good as Nightfire, but the multiplayer is spectacular, as it lets you turn on fun modifiers like moon gravity and use gadgets like the Q Claw on any surface instead of just preset spots. They probably toned down the multiplayer in Nightfire because Agent Under Fire’s didn’t feel very Bond-esque, but Bond or not, it was a ton of fun. The multiplayer is up to 4 players split-screen on Gamecube, but I can’t tell if it still retains that on PS2; often times, back then, PS2 games only had 2 player support while Gamecube and Xbox had 4. This was because the PS2 was weaker and also required an extra peripheral called a Multi Tap to hook up more than 2 controllers. Find some friends and play some deathmatch, if you find yourself in a situation where you can dock your Steam Deck or otherwise play on another computer.
There’s also Metal Arms: Glitch in the System, a third person shooter where you play a robot who can take over other robots. It’s quite challenging, it’s got a sense of humor, and it’s probably one of the best games of that era to not get remastered in a modern port. Once again, we’ve got the multiplayer issue rearing its head, but I’d strongly recommend the single player for this one, too. I also played this on Gamecube back in the day, so just play whichever version is rated best for compatibility in your emulator of choice.
You might also want a Burnout game in your library. Most people seem to prefer Burnout 3: Takedown, but my Burnout of choice was Burnout Revenge. Both great. I wish we got more racing games like these today. Local multiplayer is a dying breed in this genre.
You’ve got Tony Hawk’s Underground in that list, but for my money, the best game in the series is Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3.
The first three Ratchet & Clank games on PS2 have not been topped by their later entries, as far as I’m concerned. Ever since the fourth game, Deadlocked, the best they’ve been able to do was to remix ideas they’ve already used.
Through Heroic, while there are some exceptions, you get nearly the same out of the box compatibility. And if you don’t get that compatibility and don’t have the patience to troubleshoot, the refund system for GOG is very generous. I just tried The Alters today, which I knew had issues with Proton outside of Steam Deck, and I got it working just before running out of patience and refunding the game.
You follow your own moral compass. My feelings are, if I was short on money, I’ve got a backlog and a stream of games being thrown at me for free (legally) such that I’d never have to pirate and never be bored. I’m willing to pay more for a good product, and I so thoroughly enjoyed Borderlands 1-3 that I bought the deluxe edition of 4 that was a no-go for you; they’re one of the few AAA devs keeping LAN alive, and that is worth me throwing me money at them to tell them they’re doing it right, on top of just making a very fun game. The companies whose games you’re pirating are the ones that need the attention the least, but every game you could be instead funneling time and money into benefits so much more from each individual sale. Plus, the reason we’ve got so much anti-consumer bullshit in games now is because piracy was a boogeyman for the industry for a long time, so I’d rather not give them any additional data points to make things even worse when we’ve already got an entire era of video game history that disappears when their servers go offline. That’s how I see it anyway.
The times I don’t feel gross about pirating, personally, are when the pirated version is supposedly the better version of the game (like emulating an old console game instead of playing a compromised PC port) or when the game is delisted and no longer available through ordinary channels, like Battlefield 2. You do what feels right to you. Pirating Nintendo games is an option to me, but they bother me as a consumer in all sorts of ways, and I instead spend that time and money on games like The Thaumaturge rather than playing through Tears of the Kingdom. Nintendo will be just fine without my sale. The team behind The Thaumaturge may or may not have made enough money to make a second game. If Nintendo was a less shitty company, I’d be buying and playing Metroid Prime 4. Maybe I’ll end up discovering and enjoying something else during that time that needs my dollar more instead.