GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder | Hacker News Reader

GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder

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871 pointshaunter559 comments

> Can I still download offline installers? Yes.

This is the only line I was looking for. I stopped buying on Steam sometime ago because I realized I was just renting licenses. GOG is the only major storefront where I feel like I actually own the product. As long as offline installers remain a core tenet, I don't care who owns the company. That said, it helps that it's someone returning to their roots rather than a private equity firm looking to strip-mine the assets.

I also refuse to install their shop, Web powered "native" apps only the unavoidable ones.

I think the only value it adds is cloud saves. The UI is otherwise the worst way to explore your library or the store, crawls to death performance-wise and isn't even a good UX in principle.

For example, if you're on page X of a search, click on a game, and go back, guess where that takes you? Yup, page 0 baby, going to have to click next X times again (there is also only previous and next; you can't fast-jump.) There are many more examples like that, I have filed survey responses several times on issues like this.

The real goat would be if GOG Galaxy were available for Linux and integrated with Lutris/Proton so that you didn't have to worry about setup. Currently that relationship flows in the other direction, which I always found odd: Lutris integrates GOG (and Steam) games in its UI.

I have it easier having Windows as main OS.

I suffer Windows at work, so I stay clear of it in my personal stuff.

I used to think like that, but doing Linux installs since 1995's Summer eventually gets tiring, especially in gaming and graphics workstation laptops, thus it lives on VMa for me.

Just avoid Nvidia and you're good. Intel/AMD hardware works out of the box with Mesa.

> The real goat would be if GOG Galaxy were available for Linux and integrated with Lutris/Proton so that you didn't have to worry about setup.

Heroic Launcher can download the game files for you and any dependencies, including Wine/Proton/etc. You basically install the launcher (can be available from your distro's repository), use your GOG login in the app and it shows your library. Then click install and it'll download the files locally and after that you play the game. The experience is more or less the same like in Steam, at least as far as downloading and playing games is concerned.

I normally download the offline installers and use them with UMU Launcher (which is Proton without Steam, mainly meant to be used as a backend for projects like Lutris, Heroic, etc but you can use it directly from the command-line) but i just tried Heroic Launcher and all i had to do was run it, enter my GOG login and after it downloaded my library info, i was able to download and play a game the same way as in Steam.

I'm not sure what official GOG Galaxy for Linux would add here TBH.

> I'm not sure what official GOG Galaxy for Linux would add here TBH.

Two major things:

* Backend Galaxy support for Linux builds

* Multiplayer, achievements, cloud saves, etc. i.e. proper integration with optional GOG services for Linux versions.

I was not aware of that launcher, thanks.

Im pretty sure I read in the past GoG still sells you a license to a game in perpetuity, rather than ownership Of corse, practically there is little difference since they provide offline installers, so its much better to use GoG if you care about this.

The reason they also do this is because of copyright, the license allows games to forbid you from redistribution more copies

If Im wrong about this please let me know, I read some articles claiming this is the case but I am not sure if they truly were correct.

>practically there is little difference since they provide offline installers

Well it makes it hard or impossible to sell your copy of the game to someone else after you are done with it like we used to be able to do with console game discs and cartridges?

Seems like a pretty big and practical difference to me.

Yes but if you set up a website to do this they could sue, which I think is reasonable as many if not most people would be happy to both sell and keep a copy

But it was so much simpler when you had the disc. Whoever had the disc had access to the copy and it could be sold and resold as many times as people wanted.

I don't think people are so against DRM, because a disc like that was essentially a form of DRM. They are against an online DRM scheme which could change in the future. I know there were sone disc DRM that could like revoke the disc license, but let's go back before that was a thing to like the Xbox/360 and PS1/2/3 era style.

It was much harder to sell things online back then too

You can also buy boxed things and have the problem. For example FL Studio, you buy the boxed edition 300 USD, and all you get is a serial number. Once it's linked to an account, it's over (and it's actually the only way).

If legislators want to do something good, they could force platforms to allow transfer of games between accounts.

Doesn't this fly in the face of Vernor vs Autodesk and other lwgal precedent? Not that they can't change this, but legislators have a vested interest in protecting software rights

Lots of (most?) Steam games don't have real DRM and you can run them just fine without the Steam client. So if you want to, you can usually download the game and then back up the files yourself.

GOG giving you a standalone installer saves you some effort compared to that, but in neither case do you really "own" the game.

> Im pretty sure I read in the past GoG still sells you a license to a game in perpetuity, rather than ownership

Just about every commercial software license says the software is licensed, not sold.

Of course the practical difference is in whether you can trust you'll be able to keep using the product indefinitely or have to rely on the publisher's goodwill.

(Also, whether the idea that a software product is only licensed and not sold is legally valid of course depends on the jurisdiction and legal interpretation. IIRC back in the day some people tried to argue that you couldn't resell a game or other piece of software you bought on physical media because the software was only licensed to you, not sold. That argument didn't necessarily fly.)

That's how all sales of digital products work with copyright, whether on a physical medium or not, and the only way they can work. The question is if that perpetual license is also transferable or not.

OK, but the model that Valve pioneered is the model that supports 90% of all commercial PC games made today, a higher percentage if you cut out MMOs and free to play games, which you certainly don't own.

I love GoG and I have worked closely with a lot of people there on projects they are great. This announcement seems like good news.

No one has to sell games on Steam. No one has to use a model where they "rent licenses". They could sell you everything DRM free. They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business.

> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business.

This is what we've been told since time eternal but it seems more likely that those pirating are those that wouldn't be inclined to pay at all.

people are commenting in this HN thread like piracy hasn't been thought about, deeply, by many thousands of people for ages in the games industry. i could link to numerous people writing very wise things about it - the CEO of a certain competitor to GOG and Steam comes to mind, he basically wrote the Luther thesis on games piracy - but then i'd be downvoted.

I’m interested, please link!

If it's Epic, they went the predatory free to play route and are financed by gacha money from Tencent.

If it's EA or Ubisoft, they make boring design-by-commitee "AAA"s - lately with IAPs thrown in - and I don't even look at what they release.

> eternal but it seems more likely that those pirating are those that wouldn't be inclined to pay at all.

There are a lot of different reasons people pirate games, and other stuff, not all reasons apply to everyone, and some reasons on apply to a few.

I used to pirate 99% of the games I played when I was young, because my family simply didn't have money to buy me video games. Once I grew older and had more disposable income, I started buying more games on Steam. Now I have more disposable income than I know what to do with, and I'm back to pirating games, but only for the ones that don't have proper demos available. I probably spent $1000 on games I no longer play and cannot refund, because I'm over the 2 hour limit, and nowadays I pirate the game, and if I enjoy it, I buy it as a way of supporting the developer.

I'm probably not alone with this sort of process, but it's probably also not the only reason other's pirate.

> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business.

Given how many games on Steam are sold either DRM free (you can just transfer the files over to another PC and they just work) or functionally DRM free (Steam's DRM is trivially bypassed, so one step removed from DRM free), this doesn't really scan. Other than games with Denuvo and multiplayer games, DRM is a non-issue for actual pirates.

It seems a lot more likely to me that the people in charge will have a fit at the idea of releasing the games DRM free, but don't actually care to know anything about the details. So long as the DRM checkbox is ticked, and they don't know about the fact that Steam's DRM is trivially bypassed, everybody mostly gets what they want.

Also, many such games are on gog DRM free, and certainly pirates don't care where they get their games.

Yes they do. When I used to pirate a lot of games because I was broke I was gleefully happy to see a GOG release.

The scene exists for a reason, it is a very trust based ecosystem.

Yeah I usually trust anything a girl who is particularly fit repacks

good luck sourcing the (supposedly) malware-free release

the source is almost always the same forum, what's your point?

is such a forum always well-ranked on search engines? the point is to evade malware, obviously

I also like an empress although part of the fun comes from her rantings.

she really cracks me up with her rantings

> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business.

You're saying this about Steam, the 'Piracy is a service problem' company.

People only pirate games because the publishers make it too painful to play games legally. I have pirated games that I own simply because it's easier to play. This pattern has been shown time and time again. When people pirate, it's usually due to a problem with the experience. People pay for convenience.

Now a days a lot of people are pirating games because the quality of games has gone down the drain. Publishers are releasing unfinished games and pricing them at record high. Consumers are pissed at the lack of value.

I'm not completely convinced. When I was a teenager I pirated games because I didn't have money (and games were incredibly expensive back in the day). The people who I copied them from did it to show off their collection and connections, or just because they were my friends.

> I'm not completely convinced. When I was a teenager I pirated games because I didn't have money

Yes, but if it was impossible to pirate, you'd still have no money to buy the games, so in the grand scheme of things nothing would change.

For people who have no money to spare for games it really doesn't matter if games come with DRM or not. They wouldn't afford them anyway so "for free" is the only option that matters.

For people who have money for games but don't want to pay, the presence of DRM matters very little. 99% of games are usually trivially cracked, especially if you are willing to wait for some days or weeks after launch (an important sales window for the publishers).

For people who have money for games and are willing to pay, DRM turns out to be maybe an inconvenience, but definitely a guarantee that they don't actually own the game. The game can be taken away or even just modified in a way that invalidates the reason people paid in the first place.

> especially if you are willing to wait for some days or weeks after launch (an important sales window for the publishers).

“Important” is an understatement. Even for long-term success stories, the first three or four months often accounts for half of a game’s revenue.

And, despite so many people theorizing that “pirates don’t have money and wouldn’t pay anyway”, in practice big publishers wait in dread of “Crack Day” because the moment the crackers release the DRMless version, the drop in sales is instant and dramatic.

Do you have a source for sales data when a crack becomes available? If so, that seems like definitive proof that piracy does affect sales.

When the Nintendo Switch became hackable, ie can play any game, Nintendo saw a massive decrease in sales in Spain. Btw people in Spain pirate the most games in Europe. The decrease was at least 40%. The idea that this is a service issue and piracy doesn’t affect sales is just PR speak. If the game is offline, it’ll be pirated a lot.

Both you and GGP make concrete claims but fail to provide evidence. Can anyone cite published sales data or is this all mere conjecture?

We've been exposed to what seems like FUD about piracy killing sales since approximately forever - you wouldn't dOwnLoAd a cAR - but seemingly zero actual evidence to date.

My source is first and second hand reports from management of game companies having worked in the industry for decades. But, they don’t make numbers like that public.

The best public report I can find is https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S18759... which shows a median difference 20% of revenue for games where Denuvo is cracked “quickly” but also no significant difference if Denuvo survives for at least 3 months.

What I’ve observed from internal reports from multiple companies is that, if you don’t assume an outlier blockbuster game, major game studios’ normal plan is to target a 10% annual profit margin with an expected variance of +/-20% each year.

So, assuming you have a solidly on-target game, DRM not just being there, but surviving at least a couple months is the difference between “10% profit moving the whole company forward on schedule” vs “10% loss dragging the whole company down” or “30% profit, great success, bonuses and hiring increases” depending on the situation.

Outside of games, I have seen many personnel reports on Hacker News over the years from small-time ISVs that they find it exhausting they need to regularly ship BS “My Software version N+1” just as an excuse to update their DRM. But, every time they do, sales go back up. And, the day the new crack appears on Pirate Bay, sales drop back down. Over and over forever. Thus why we can’t just buy desktop software anymore. Web apps are primarily DRM and incidentally convenient in other ways.

> My source is first and second hand reports from management of game companies having worked in the industry for decades. But, they don’t make numbers like that public.

As an aside, I find this kind of behavior on the part of companies rather irritating. It's like, if you want people to believe that something affects your sales, you need to publicly release the sales data (and do so in a way that people will trust). Otherwise there's no reason for anyone to believe you're not just making stuff up.

Why would they care if you or I believe them or not?

I didn't say you or me, I said anyone. They need someone to believe them, otherwise no one will care when they complain about lost sales.

That’s my point: they don’t need people to care.

They just need law makers to support IP/DRM laws that allow them to continue to operate. (I made games for a while at a small studio; I understand some of the pressures that studios are under and don’t support piracy of games.)

And they can get that support without publicly releasing detailed time-series sales data.

It doesn't add up though. If they were actually dependent on DRM as described then broad public support would be a massive benefit to them. Yet seemingly none of the many studios out there publicize such data. And this comment section is full of hand waving about "well I can't provide actual data but I talked to someone who said ..." it sure looks like BS to me.

What form would this “massive benefit” take?

What change would their CFO see on their spreadsheets from this massive benefit?

> Web apps are primarily DRM

I've been saying that for decades at this point. Web apps trade post-release support issues with slightly higher development costs upfront (dealing with browser compatibility), but the real kicker is that the company is now in complete control of who gets to use what and when.

It's a vacuous argument. Even in the complete absence of piracy web apps would still have won out over desktop software due to turning a one time sale into a recurring subscription. That's what drove their adoption.

MMOs show the same thing. There are plenty of multiplayer games with centralized servers that are effectively impossible to pirate. But subscription based MMOs score a clear win in terms of revenue.

(It turns out free to play gacha is even more lucrative than subscription, but I digress.)

> which shows a median difference 20% of revenue for games where Denuvo is cracked “quickly” but also no significant difference if Denuvo survives for at least 3 months.

So how did they measure the difference? They released one title with Denuvo then erased everyone's memories about it and released it again without?

Because if you compare different titles I don't know what you base that percentage on.

Clearly they didn't. If such definitive data existed they would publicly release it because it would be in their own best interests to do so.

Notice that GP amounts to "well I can't actually provide any evidence, but if I could then here's what it would look like".

> Btw people in Spain pirate the most games in Europe.

They have very high unemployment among young people, might be related.

when i was younger there were more games i wanted to play than i had money to pay for..and i pirated.

then i had some money and i bought more games than i had time to play.*

now i neither buy or play games.

*the point is that at this point, there is no point wasting time trying to pirate games. every humble bundle. every steam sale. u just click and its yours. you dont even have time to play. why waste time pirating?

The thing is teenagers or poor people or people from third world countries that pirate for financial reasons just would not buy those games regardless. I'm unconvinced that those pirates affect sales in the end to any meaningful degree.

When I was a kid, piracy was the norm. If your friend had a game you liked, you would just grab the tape, go home, insert into the recorder and make a copy. I didn't know about buying games or what I did was bad until well into the 90s.

> I didn't know about buying games or what I did was bad until well into the 90s.

Really? When we were pirating games off each other as teenagers in the early 80s, we absolutely knew we were getting games for free that the publishers wanted us to pay for.

Also teenagers grow up eventually having money to buy the games on their own.

I’m a Diablo and StarCraft fan because of pirated games played during my childhood when I couldn’t convince my parents to let me buy them.

I was exactly the same! But then StarCraft 2 came out, I went out of my way to purchase the retail box, it had nothing more than a slip of paper with a CD key inside, I grudgingly went to download it and Blizzard demanded a bunch of PII from me. I regret the purchase.

Not making that mistake twice. I imagine this is one of the reasons that Steam is so successful. No surprises and near zero friction. Why risk going elsewhere as a consumer?

Steam requires the same bullshit. It's just that you only do it once, and it remembers your PII for your future purchases. In this way, centralised marketplaces have lower friction.

Did Steam change something? I first opened the account to claim a game via license code. It only required a working email at the time.

Later I chose to provide my credit card for convenience. As far as I know I could have instead used gift cards or prepaid cards.

Regardless, there's also an issue of trust. I might choose to provide PII to a large central marketplace that has a good reputation but providing it to each individual producer seems highly questionable.

As a broke ass teenager, yeah I didn't pay for them. Now as big money adult I bought them almost 1.5 times over. Once on GoG and sometimes on Steam.

So basically your sources weren't lost sales because you don't show off your mad sk1llz by buying a game, and you weren't a lost sale because you had no way to buy it. But I'm sure you did talk about how cool the game was, including to some people who could buy it. This sounds fairly typical.

No, paying nothing is very compelling for a lot of consumers, you can see this in many other areas of content as well.

Research from the University of Amsterdam’s IViR “Global Online Piracy Study” (survey of nearly 35,000 respondents across 13 countries) found that for each content type and country, 95% or more of pirates also consume content legally, and their median legal consumption is typically twice that of non‑pirating legal users.

Fun fact, this study was financed by YouTube to create a legal shield.

In 2017/2018, they were in the position where MPAA and RIAA were saying: "Piracy costs us billions; Google must pay" + they had European Parliament on their ass.

Google financed that 'independent' study to support the view "Piracy is not harmful and encourages legal spend".

So the credibility of "independent" studies, is something to consider very carefully.

My real world observations agree with the direction of the study, so I don’t entirely dismiss it as fake based on its funding source.

I am cautious about the conclusion, though. It seems clear there is a spectrum from “unscrupulously pirate everything” to “consume legitimately after pirated discovery”, and quantification is necessary.

Doesn't make it false.

Why do you think this contradicts anything? Heavy users hit a budget limit and continue consuming more via pirating.

You really need something way better than some shoddy survey to counter the obvious fact that price matters

Yeah but if a pirate would have not paid the full price why care? It is by definition not a lost sale, the most likely outcome is just an increase by one the player count

Because the price isn't binary? Also, the total spend isn't fixed either, it depends on how easy it's to pirate. So it's by definition still lost revenue, even if later/at reduced price

Consider the two cases

A: I pirated a game 25 years ago and played it after school

B: I didn't

which cases do you think will make me more likely to buy more versions of that game later?

Consider reality instead, you can make any fantasy case you want:

C. You didn't pirate, but played because your friends were deeply into it, so you skipped buying lunch to save money and pay for the game (pirating was hard for this specific DRM). You bought it at a discount on sale (remember, the price isn't fixed?). That feeling of overcoming hardship and friendship fused into a very positive experience, making it 10 times more likely for you to buy the next version than in A. or B. The overall likelihood still was tiny because now you have a family and don't have time to play, so that and

D. Considering the amount of uncertainty (your game company will go out of business in 25 years) the value of your "more likely" is $0

Not paying full price is not a "lost sale". People unwilling to pay full price wait for a discount or price reduction. Look at how popular the seasonal Steam sales are. Pirating the game very likely means they never purchase it at any price, which _is_ a lost sale.

It's only a lost sale if that person would otherwise have purchased it. At least in my personal experience that was _never_ the case.

I never paid for games as a kid (starting with 8 years and first PC). We didn’t have the money until much later. Other friends and uncles had games, we copied it all. Eight years later (with 16) I bought two game compilations for birthday and Christmas. Around 40 games, no more than 2 or 3 years old. I had fun for years.

And then much later being a university student, I had money of my own and have bought games I liked. Never pirated to save money. And you know, GOG came along, and I was thrilled having the old games from my childhood again as digital legal copy. With manuals and addons. I bought 20+ old DOS games I already knew. Better late than never.

There is more to this RE: perceived value of respective sides.

Edit: missed a word

It contradicts the post it was replying to, which was saying, effectively, that people don't want to spend any money on stuff.

I don't think it's required to be making some universal point when you clearly respond to the argument put forward in the post you reply to, do you?

No, you misunderstood the comment, it said that paying nothing is compelling, not that paying something was inconceivable or something; it was a response to a comment with a common misconception that pirating is only some "service problem"

I agree with your earlier comment (GGP) and feel like you're contradicting yourself here. "Too expensive" is either a service problem or at least directly adjacent to it. It's distinct from "well if I can get away with piracy then I'll do it". To say that free is a compelling price is to imply the latter as opposed to the former (at least imo).

Before it was really expensive and difficult to get access to movies or music. Then came Netflix or Spotify. So money is the primary discriminator now, not access. And users without money would not bring revenue anyway

Consumers will pay for convenience and value. You simply cannot price a game at $80 and hope to sell it in India. You can't expect consumers to have half a dozen monthly streaming subs to enjoy their favorite content.

When a product is providing value, and it's easier and more convenient to buy than pirating it, then people will buy it.

Netflix killed piracy until the platform fragmented and now you need half a dozen subs to watch everything. Expectedly, free streaming sites are now better than ever.

Yeah. Where piracy really hurts is when games get cracked and released before the official release date. That actually devastates sales; unlike a teenager with no money pirating a game (who they can’t afford to buy anyway).

There used to be (maybe still is?) a period where a small number of publishers had DRM for the first few weeks, and removed it once it was cracked.

Netflix did not kill piracy

No they don't. I am tired of this feel good nonsense. I pirated games because it was free and I did not want to pay $60.

Just make your games a donation model if you really believe this. Or lets put up a version of Steam where all the games are free cracked copies of the game and see how it affects sales.

People pay precisely because they dont want to deal with the hassle pf pirating

I can pirate games easily, but I buy them on Steam because it's more convenient. If it's too expensive for me, I just never play it (or wait for a deal). I can't be bothered dealing with the installers and the potential viruses and the hassle.

>because it's more convenient

Yes, now imagine if we just removed the barrier to piracy completely. An easy to use client just like Steam, except all the games are free cracked copies.

There is no way thats not going to drop sales.

What has been proven many times is that people overwhelmingly choose the least effort/risk option.

A free Steam full of certified pirates games with official games updates would obviously drop sales but this is moot as it will never exist.

Isn't that exactly what companies use as justification for DMCA and DRM protection?

Without those, you'd have sites full of pirated game downloads easily found through search engines. DMCA takedowns force those sites into shady corners of the internet, making them harder to find and riskier for the average user. And (effective) DRM makes users have to wait for a crack which may take weeks or months.

The result is that it's easier for the average person to just log into Steam/Epic/PSN/eShop and spend $60 to play immediately.

The point is that legal threats keep any centralized platforms that might do vetting small. That probably accounts for the vast majority of the effect. Beyond that the old fashioned "DRM" of a CD key is generally going to be more than sufficient to prevent "acts of convenience".

I'm sure there are exceptions but the usual claims take the observation about a minor speed bump and add a bunch of made up BS to justify consumer hostile practices.

Notice that there's nothing stopping a centralized darknet platform that vettes torrents from popping up. But as far as I know no one feels like bothering. That should give you some idea just how low the bar is here.

> you'd have sites full of pirated game downloads easily found through search engines.

That's literally the situation today. It is that easy. People still mostly don't pirate games though.

The reason why publishers like DRM is because it allows them to turn anything into a subscription-lite service plus tracking and advertising.

> just log into Steam/Epic/PSN/eShop and spend $60 to play immediately

You spend $60 on games? I just add them to my wish list at launch and buy them when they're 30, 20...

I have more unplayed games than time anyway.

It will never happen precisely because of anti piracy measures

I’m fabulously wealthy and still mostly pirate things just because I can’t be bothered dealing with online credit card payments.

Half the time I try to sign up for any of these services I get blocked for fraud because I’m in one country, my billing address in another and my bank in a third. Oh, and when something does work, it only works for a while until they lock the whole account with a bunch of paid content on it.

That is my experience with Adidas.com.

I've not had issues with Steam, though my Steam journey was early into online purchasing adventures

Which services exactly do that? Because Steam or GOG for sure don't.

Steam has done that to me many times.

You really can't though, not if the games have an online component or you want the game to be patched/updated as frequently as it would be on steam.

Almost all games these days are basically like a work in progress, so if you pirate them then the game doesn't stay up to date.

Pirating games is just really inconvenient compared to tv/movies/music.

> Almost all games these days are basically like a work in progress, so if you pirate them then the game doesn't stay up to date.

Which, as a mod author and consumer, isn't always a bad thing. More than once, I had to drop just enjoying a game, to patch my published mods because some update that is automatically pushed out, and people have to accept in order to even boot a single-player game. Why? I don't know, but it's really annoying sometimes.

Besides, nowadays cracking groups release smaller patches too, so while you might not get the update the same hour it was published on Steam, usually within a week or two the same group that uploaded the original release, has released another patch.

thieves lie to protect their self-image. i pirated because free games let me spend my money on stuff i couldn't steal like food at the mall.

i don't pirate anymore because i have a job now.

Copyright infringement is not stealing, and it's not a given that a sale would have happened at all - even if the llicit copy was unavailable.

If someone pirates 100 60$ games it does not mean that had piracy been impossible they would have spent 6000$ on those games

They might spend $600 on 10 of those games, though. It's not all-or-nothing.

They might still spend $600 on 10 more games though. Or spend it on a subset of the games they pirated because they want to support the developer. Who knows.

If somebody spends $60 on a game but doesn't play it should they get automatic refund?

If the deal is providing entertainment for a price then why the publisher feels entitled to keeping the money if the entertainment didn't happen?

That's the basis of most of the Steam's business.

>> I have pirated games that I own simply because it's easier to play.

Can you share some examples of instances where the legal route is too difficult? I haven't felt this way in a long time. What are the changes necessary for you to purchase?

The main reason that Russia had a fame for pirating a lot of software was that a lot of publishers either skipped it as a market or did shitty localisations and pirates offered a far better service.

They say they own the game so presumably did purchase it.

Not having to deal with Ubisoft/similar game launchers frequently forgetting my login, nagging to update itself, etc. is one reason I might choose to run a cracked copy.

Ubisoft launcher being so bad that people prefer the cracked, launcher-free version should go down in the history as example of some of the worst product-management there is.

I'm totally in the same boat; I've not bought several Ubisoft-games I was interested in playing because their launcher is such a cancer (if anyone from Ubisoft is on HN: What on earth are you guys smoking?).

I'm too lazy to bother with pirating games these days (I have more games than time to play them anyway), but younger me would've certainly went to the high seas to circumvent their ridiculous insult of a game launcher.

One does not have a debit/credit card at all (e.g. they're young, or don't have enough documents, or are an immigrant from a sanctioned country).

Alternatively, the card is rejected because "fraud prevention", see e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46424584

Or the game is not available in my "account's region", which is chosen arbitrarily based on God knows what.

Any game from Ubisoft/Activision/EA. A little while back for example I wanted to fire up my steam copy of Battlefield 4 and couldn't do it, game wouldn't launch.

My copy of Mirror's Edge from EA is unusable due to DRM. It's still listed on my EA account as belonging to me and I can download the game from them, but it can only be installed five times and I have reached that limit.

I think a lot of people pirate for a lot of different reasons. I don't pirate games anymore because I just play PS5. But I definitely did so as a teenager because I was broke, not because the experience of buying games was bad.

Now I'll pirate if providers make it hard to do things right. I know I never "have" to pirate, but my wife once "bought" a movie on Amazon. A few years later, she was no longer able to access it. And she didn't get refunded for her purchase. So guess what? Screw you Amazon, I downloaded that movie and saved it on my home media server.

Another example, I was playing a mobile game that allowed me to watch ads to get a bonus. I'd always say no because they use one of the shittiest ad provider in existence. Then they started showing me ads even if I elected not to get the bonus, with a fun "pay $20 for ad free forever!"

Well screw you game dev, I'm pirating the ad-free version of your game.

> Consumers are pissed at the lack of value.

I think this is true, but I don't think this is necessarily causing piracy. Why would people want to pirate a shitty game?

Or, just don’t play the game. I don’t mean to be flippant, but why waste time on software employing shoddy practices? Wordle and Apple’s mini crossword-minis are sufficiently stimulating and quick.

My tolerance for software like that is very limited. It’s almost an immediate long-press and uninstall.

Why do you people even look at mobile games?

They're all free to play and their design is fundamentally affected by this. You end up either paying with time or with money.

It's a good question. My only response is that it's genuinely fun.

> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business.

This is an opinion, stated as if it’s fact.

There are many factors contributing to the ongoing success of steam. Ease of access, a strong network effect, word of mouth from satisfied customers, a strong ecosystem of tools and a modding platform, willingness to work across many platforms and a variety of vendors including competitors, and more.

Boiling this down to one factor of “too many people pirate” is dramatic oversimplification.

I grew up playing pirated games on the Apple II 35 years ago. The fact that many people pirate is not an opinion.

Piracy is much less endemic nowadays.

Yeah, because rather than pirating from cracxxxed.warez I can buy the game on Steam/GoG sale for $1.4.

Exactly. Games are just software, there's no real unit cost to factor in when setting minimum prices, just market strategy. Running sales with different levels of discounts is as close to optimal as possible $/customer without doing stuff like individualized pricing (which surely requires a vast amount of computing power and human effort to do at scale). Only the truly penniless or retro-game fans need to pirate nowadays.

The real unit cost is worker development cost. Like any other tech company, this cost gets muddied in the platform/framework development costs versus more product focused costs.

“Many people pirate” is a different statement than “too many people pirate games to make that a viable business”.

It's because the poster assume that each pirated copy ought to have been paid for - which if they had been, then a previously failing game would've been viable.

But this doesn't make the statement true - because the assumption that each pirated copy would've been paid for had there been no piracy. This is the same incorrect logic that music/movie copyright holders use to count pirated works' financial "damages".

It doesn't prove that DRM free is not a viable business.

I also grew up pirating, but I haven't been pirating games for more than 10 years now.

A few bucks costs much less to me these days than a headache with finding a cracked version and installing potential malware on my computer. Not even talking about supporting the artists and developers.

Gabe is right that piracy is a service problem. If you have proper easy installers, easy buying, easy refunds and you are from a middle class and higher - it doesn't make sense to download random executables from the internet. And if you have low-income, you won't buy stuff regardless of DRM and just wait someone to crack it.

Yeah this - people who grew up gaming in the 80s and 90s now have significant disposable income and are time poor. A game that offers tens or hundreds of hours of entertainment is seriously cost effective when a movie ticket costs half a videogame or a round of drinks.

Malware is potentially very expensive if you have any capital (tradfi or defi) that is anywhere near your gaming rig. Even a brokerage of 5 figures isn't worth touching something that could have malware.

Most the games young players play are all service oriented games anyway

This is a valuable lesson I learned when I worked with someone, not at Elastic, but who had previously worked at Elastic. Elastic was one of the original companies who made FOSS but with enterprise licensing work well. We were discussing in a meeting at this place we worked how to design license checking into the product.

What the guy said I found very insightful: he said that you don’t really need to spend a bunch of time and effort creating sophisticated license checks, you just need perhaps a single phone call to a server or something else that can be trivially defeated for anyone with a reasonable amount of technical knowledge. Why? Because the people who would defeat it are the kind of people who make horrible enterprise customers anyway. So in a way it’s just like a cheap lock. Won’t defeat anyone determined, because it’s not designed to. It’s designed to keep already honest people honest

Totally understandable and even reasonable position, but the paying customer gets the worse treatment, which does not sit right.

I did something that was almost the same. Used to work for an educational software company that almost solely sold to schools, universities, and government institutions. Sometimes to corporate learning centers. Every sale was on a per-seat basis.

Every single customer we had wanted to be legal. Didn't want to exceed their seats or do anything which would violate their sales agreement. In the case of our government clients, such violations could lead them into legal penalties from their employer.

Despite having an unusually honest customer base, the company insisted on horridly strict and intrusive DRM. Even to the point of using dongles for a time. It frequently broke. Sometimes we had to send techs out to the schools to fix it.

I ended up just ripping all of that out and replacing it with a simple DLL on the Windows client. It talked to an tiny app server side. Used a barely encrypted tiny database which held the two numbers: seats in use & total seats available. If for some reason the DLL couldn't make contact with the server, it would just launch the software anyways. No one would be locked out due to the DRM failing or because the creaky school networks were on the blink again.

This system could have been cracked in five seconds by just about anyone. But it didn't matter since we knew everyone involved was trying to be honest.

Saved a massive amount of time and money. Support calls dropped enormously. Customers were much happier. It's probably my weakest technical accomplishment but it's still one of my proudest accomplishments.

Finally a sane approach. And quite amusing it follows the first IT rule: don't solve the administrative problems with a technical means.

I wish they had a way to transfer licenses. I have a huge steam library and my son is the biggest user. No big deal when he was 7 but now I just want to play my ancient games… and we kick each other out sometimes!

And yeah.. it’s trivial to bypass, but I’d rather have a choice not to.

You can share a Steam library with your family. https://store.steampowered.com/promotion/familysharing

That's what he does, from the comment about accidentally kicking each other out.

No, the new system allows multiple users to play the same game at the same time (unless the publisher explicitely opted out).

Does it? I thought only as many times as there are original licenses in the family. Or is this yet another mechanism?

If you want to play the same exact title, yes. But previous versions would kick you out from playing a shared game if the owner was playing any other title in their library, and they've recently removed that behaviout.

That’s awesome, thank you!

The first game I ever sold had no DRM, it was distributed by cassette tape. I did very well making games for CD-ROM, up until CD burners got cheap.

There's nothing stopping anyone from making a business selling DRM free games. I think you can get original DRM free games on itch.io. There are probably other places. GoG is great, but they don't typically sell new games.

If someone thinks they can make high production value games without DRM I hope they try and succeed. Anyone here who is certain it is possible is welcome to try.

> If someone thinks they can make high production value games without DRM I hope they try and succeed.

CD Projekt RED did exactly that with both Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, which were available on GOG day #1 (and the Steam version did not have any DRM whatsoever) and while the latter had a rough start because of technical issues, they both sold very well and were positively received (after some patches for CP2077 anyway).

GOG also releases many new high production value games on day #1 too, e.g. Expedition 33 (which won a crapton of awards in recent times) was released on it the same day as on Steam. Baldur's Gate 3 was also on GOG on release date as is Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon right now, which also seems to be a high production value game with relatively well reception.

The only games missing are those by companies whose business models rely on sucking out gamers' wallets dry with microtransactions (so they need the "protection" from their own customers that DRM provides) or companies that have people making decisions based on assumptions stuck in past decades.

> GoG is great, but they don't typically sell new games.

Many big studios/publishers avoid gog indeed, but others don't, and definitely a lot of new DRM-free games come out there all the time. Maybe it is because of the types of games I want to play, I usually I have no trouble finding them there, with some notable exceptions of course (souls games, outer wilds).

Both clair obscur and Baldur's Gate 3 (goty 2025 & 2023) were in gog since the beginning (bg3 already since its beta). They both definitely sold very well, despite(?) that. All Larian and Obsidian games get there as they come out, as are quite many CRPGs in general, not even counting CDPR's ones. A lot of great/popular indie titles appear in gog around the same time as they do on steam in the last years.

GOG is not just for old games.

Similar here. When I pirated I did not have the extra money to buy the games anyway, so I would not have bought them. I would also rent a bunch from a video game store, when this was actual a thing back then, which was much cheaper. And a couple that came with pc magazines. Not sure how that worked in the context of the video game industry, but anyway downloading a full game over these internet speeds was a pain.

Once I was more economically stable, I did not download pirated games anymore, and I even bought a bunch that I had played and really liked, even if I barely played them again.

I am not putting any moral stance on this, I was not entitled to play anything without money to pay, but my point is that for me a lack of option to pirate these games would not have implied me paying for them. Probably I would have done something else with my time.

People pirate Steam Games anyway. Stating that people pirate too much to make it viable is purely opinion and not based on numbers. Sure, for AAA games you get 2 to 3 months without a cracked version, but this stops afterward. For non-AAA games, the steam version is usually crackable from day-1.

Seriously, for cracking steam games, all it takes is to drop a single DLL inside the game's folder. It can't get simpler than that.

Yes, that obviously only works for offline games, but yeah, cracking Steaam games is as easy as cracking any other game, maybe even easier

That is cracking, but one still has to download the files from somewhere before they can crack it. Finding legitimate files is still time consuming.

Yeah, but you just need anyone who bought the game on Steam, a friend or co-worker for example, not some shady website.

You want to avoid shady websites for the game download, and shady websites for the crack download. You can do both of this with Steam

Games are cracked at day one, sometimes hours after. Apparently DRM is not a solution here. If pirates know that, people at Valve certainly do.

>The fact that many people pirate is not an opinion.

That's not the opinon part. That pirating is the reason a game business isn't viable is.

Would you have bought every game you pirated? How much money did you spend on gaming because you got hooked because you could play more games than you could afford otherwise?

It's an opinion that "Most" people pirate games and it's also an opinion that pirating games translates directly to lost sales. As Gabe said and I agree with him piracy, if it's anything a service related problem. You don't need DRM to overcome that. You just need to make a good product and respect you audience. The people that pirate for the wrong reasons will do it anyway and you don't gain much from restricting copies.

>> The people that pirate for the wrong reasons will do it anyway and you don't gain much from restricting copies.

That is also an opinion. Also-- as an aside-- I am curious what you think the "right" reason is for piracy. DRM free games is not a new idea. They have always existed and people have tried different models with them like including advertising. Do you remember the Ford driving simulator? The skittles game. there have been other models and there is a huge universe of DRM free games for decades.

If you don't gain much from restricting copies, please explain to me why it is so common in the best games?

Have they actually tried releasing those same games DRM free?

Just because everybody does it is not really a convincing reason

Also many DRM games are cracked quite quickly after release. How does that help sell more copies?

Are you confusing the absence or presence of copy protection with how a game is supposed to make money?

> why it is so common in the best games?

What best games? It's common in design by commitee predatory crap like EA/Ubisoft titles.

Thing is, a pirated copy isn't a lost sale. It's more like free marketing. It's possible that the above assholes would make more profit if they stopped spending on copy protection and advertising and just made and sold games.

In a world where it would be impossible to pirate software, I bet they would have at best 25% more sales. No one can afford to pay for every game, especially at launch price, so they'll just make do with fewer of them.

Linky about marketing costs:

https://www.trueachievements.com/n53671/aaa-game-development...

Juicy quote:

the CMA says that "this publisher also submitted that for one of its major franchise’s development costs reached $660 million and marketing costs peaked at almost $550 million."

> The skittles game.

Oh, Darkened Skye? Funny how it's just a fairly bland fantasy 3rd-person action-adventure game and then you get to spellcasting and it's skittles. Also, when I think of video game advertising, I think Cool Spot.

A 'right' reason for illicitly obtaining a video game would be if the game is unobtainable because of licensing shenanigans. Project Cars 2 has the best single player career mode of any existing circuit racing game and it being unavailable because the licenses to the cars (and maybe also the tracks?) expired is a shame.

If the Apple II had something similar to Steam do you think you would have pirated as much? Ignore the fact that the tech wasn't ready yet and imagine a world where buying Apple II software was as frictionless as buying a Steam game. Also imagine that the software went on deep discounts regularly that allowed you to build up a big backlog of games to play. Do you think you would have been motivated to seek out the seedy underbelly of the software world looking for illicit copies to add to your backlog? Certainly there are some people like that, but they might be a fairly small minority. And then suddenly DRM isn't really helpful because even if it might stop a minority of people who weren't going to buy your game in the first place it always costs you in frustration for paying customers.

True, this is an opinion but I am guessing you don't know my background. And having some expertese doesn't guarantee my opinion is correct. But I guess I can say I am considered enough of an expert to be asked to speak on panels about the game industry or serve on juries for awards. And you are right it is a complicated question.

> I am guessing you don't know my background.

Don't be shy, share it.

Maybe it's this George Collins: https://www.mobygames.com/person/2294/george-collins/credits...

And this being one of the panels mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPSAb1BDHgI

Since I am completely embarrassing myself: - Review of a DRM free game I sold in 1980 https://archive.org/details/BallyArcadeAstrocadeArcadianAltS... - That you tube link is pretty old, I was on a panel at Games Beat this year, I think because a more interesting person got sick.

can we have another battlezone, please?

All the factors you listed are a huge component of Steam’s success but are mainly for the benefit of consumers. Lack of offline installers is something that makes the vast majority of suppliers comfortable with putting their game on Steam. A platform ideally wants to capture as many consumers as possible but also needs to capture as many suppliers as possible to create a rich marketplace. Negotiating the balance of consumer vs supplier demands is what makes Steam successful as a platform.

Indeed — the only reason I personally still use steam is that a few of the games I want to play are not available in any other (legal) way.

I’ve followed a couple indie game developers over the years who started with lofty ideas about selling DRM free games. As soon as they add an online component of any type (e.g. a leaderboard for ranks or high scores) they’re blown away by the number of connections coming in because the number of people playing the game is so much higher than they would have expected from sales alone.

If you’re the kind of person who actually pays for games even when you could pirate them with a few minutes of searching, you probably don’t fully understand how widespread the problem is. Many people will simply not pay for something if there is an option to get it without paying by default.

The only developers who can afford to do DRM-free games are those with such a high volume of users that they’ve passed their target threshold for income and are okay with leaving money on the table. For every 1 person you see claiming they will only spend money on DRM-free games in comments on HN or Reddit, there are probably 100 to 1000 more who don’t care about the DRM status of the game, they just want to buy it and play for a while.

The question is, how many of the people who pirate a game would instead buy it if pirating is not an option? How many of the people who would try a new game by downloading a pirated copy will actually continue playing it, instead of just trying a bunch of different games, in which case they would prob have refunded anyway? The mere fact that X number of pirated copies are downloaded and executed does not mean that X number of sales would have happened.

Moreover, for offline games, there have always been ways to crack DRMs. I do not have data on that, but I have seen pirated versions of all these DRMed games and I doubt that DRM on its own actually inhibits pirating. Let's not forget that DRM precedes steam, and before it was usually about having to put the cd in order to launch the game. I have used cracks for games I actually owned because I did not want to use the cd, and often a damaged cd could mean being unable to play the game otherwise, even if all assets and files were installed on the hard drive. When a new kind of DRM came out, the only question was how long it would take for it to get cracked.

Pirating software comes with its own price/risks. The people who have less to lose are probably the ones that do not have the money to spend on all these games in the first place. In general going from number of pirated downloads to sales lost is far from straightforward. There is a lot of misunderstanding here about who and why downloads pirated games.

> The question is, how many of the people who pirate a game would instead buy it if pirating is not an option?

I don’t think this is as much of a question outside of social media attempts to justify piracy. If only 10% of the pirates would buy the game, that’s still lost sales.

The social media justifications for piracy always assume that the only reason anyone pirates a game or video is because they either couldn’t afford it or wouldn’t buy it anyway. The same arguments were made when Netflix clamped down on account sharing: Everywhere you would find predictions that Netflix would suffer as a result, people would start cancelling their accounts, and they’d regret the decision. Yet the opposite happened and they had more users sign up.

> There is a lot of misunderstanding here about who and why downloads pirated games.

I agree with this statement, but in the opposite direction. The misunderstanding is the mental gymnastics that go into painting all pirates as all poor individuals who have no money and therefore no choice but to pirate games. The reality is that piracy is just a choice of convenience and taking something for free because they can. People from all tax brackets do it.

I do not care about the moral judgements. If somebody cannot afford the game or doesn't want to pay, then they will most probably not buy it, whether they pirate or not. Sure, there is always money to squeeze, but 10% sounds overestimation, esp when the squeezing comes essentially to the expense and inconvenience of the people who actually buy the thing. Which is solely what I care about here. In any case, DRMs never stopped games from being pirated.

Pirating is far from a "choice of convenience" nowadays. Getting a pirated copy is much more complicated than getting it in gog, you do not get updates (I assume you have to search and install it again), and involves serious risk installing malware. Especially with how bug-ridden new games tend to be nowadays, I cannot imagine getting a newly released game without some form of auto-updater.

A lot of successful DRM-free games exist, and games that have DRM are still pirated just fine. Pirating existed in games since ever. It is not for the lack of DRM that a game may fail to sell.

> Sure, there is always money to squeeze, but 10% sounds overestimation,

10% was an example of a low-ball number. I estimate the number is much higher.

> I do not care about the moral judgements.

If you don’t care about moral judgments, why have this conversation at all? Nothing matters, do what you want, pirate everything you can get away with.

The discussion started about DRM/gog. As I said, what I care about is DRM in games. If I buy a game, I want to own it, not rent it. Same as with any software. This is not just moral, it is firstmost practical. If running a game is bound to have steam running, then not getting steam to run means I cannot run the game. This has actually been a real situation where I could install and play games from gog because I could download an offline installer, but not from steam.

I don't care about the morals of pirating in the abstract, because I don't think such an abstract morality makes sense and hence I am not gonna lecture people what they should do (they can decide themselves based on their situation). The argument that without some sort of abstract moral code one will just pirate everything makes no sense. I buy now the games I play because I am fortunate that I have the money to buy them, and because I want to support studios that I consider decent (so that they keep making decent games). Same with any other kind of art.

I've got gamer friends who live in countries / situations where ten dollars is an exorbitant amount of money. Buying a new release at 60+ just isn't a realistic option for most of the population.

So what should they do? Go back and change where they were born? Abstain from participating in modern culture? Or reach out and take the thing which is free?

Your friends can afford the type of gaming PC necessary to play those $60 titles, but they can’t afford to buy any games for said PC?

And they can’t even wait for them to go on sale? They need to buy them right at launch, at their full $60 price?

> Or reach out and take the thing which is free?

It’s not free. It has a price.

You can play most games to some degree on hardware that's 10+ years old, but yes, hardware is usually something they've scrounged and saved for.

And do tell, what is the practical price of pirating a game you couldn't afford anyway? Risk of a virus? Some abstract cost to society itself? Nobody cares.

If they scrounged and saved for the hardware why can't they do that for the software too?

Because if they already struggle to afford a PC then anything on top of that will be even harder.

That's a special pleading argument. I'd love a Ferrari, are you going to say that I should get a special price because it's hard for me to afford? Perhaps given to me for free because I scrimped and saved for a house with a garage, why should I have to scrimp and save for a car, or a car I really want?

What makes you think the situation is any different with Steam-exclusive games (with or without additional DRM)?

And those indies shouldn't equate a non-customer player with a lost sale either.

> They could sell you everything DRM free. They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business.

Depends on the game and DRM. Nowadays I buy all of my games (a little bit safer than running who knows what on my PC), but when I didn't have a job or money I used to pirate a lot - most DRM protected games would eventually be cracked and made available regardless. If an uncrackable DRM was in place, I wouldn't buy the game - I just wouldn't play it. Depending on the mindset, the same logic applies to someone with money, they might never be a customer regardless of whether it can or cannot be pirated, especially for games that never go on big discounts and sales. I say that as someone who by now owns about ~1000 games in total legally (though mostly smaller indie titles acquired over a lot of years and sales).

The good online stores at least make the act of purchasing and installing games equally if not more convenient than pirating them - something all of those streaming companies that crank up their subscription prices and want to introduce ads would also do well to remember. I like Steam the best because it's a convenient experience, the Workshop mod support is nice, as well as Proton on Linux and even being able to run some games on my Mac, just download and run. I think the last games I pirated were to check if they'd run well on my VR headset, because I didn't want to spend a few hours tweaking graphics settings and messing around just to be denied a refund - in the end they didn't run well, so I didn't play or buy them, oh well.

Also, despite me somewhat doubting the efficacy of DRM (maybe it's good to have around the release time to motivate legit sales, but it's not like it's gonna solve piracy), it better at least be implemented well - otherwise you either get performance issues, or crap that also happens with gaming on Linux with anti-cheat, where you cannot even give the companies money because they can't be bothered to support your platform. Even worse when games depend on a server component for something that you don't actually need for playing the game on your own, fuck that. It's like the big corpos sometimes add Denuvo to their games and then are surprised why people are review bombing them.

Valve and Steam dont force DRM on anyone either. Downloader client is ofc DRM in itself, but a lot of games run just fine without Steamworks.

How is GOG a viable business if everything gets pirated?

This is a really old question and a really old solution.

It turns out that piracy is actually a service problem. Services like Steam and GOG provide a decent enough service that piracy becomes less common.

Many games on GOG are at the tail end of their sales cycle (i.e. were released on Steam long ago) trying to eke out a few more sales, are from small indies for whom any attention at all is good attention, or are very old^H^H^Hclassic games that garner purchases for nostalgia's sake by older gamers that can afford more discretionary spending.

And many aren’t.

I bought Factorio early access on Gog, and Timberborn, and Loop-Hero.

1) Modern games are enormous and as long as services like GOG let me re-download my library it frees up literally terabytes of space on my disk array for pirated movies and other things that benefit far more from piracy than games do.

2) I don’t want viruses. I don’t want viruses more than I want to avoid paying $1-$20 for a game (as if I’m anywhere near caught up enough on my backlog of games from the last 40ish years for buying games at full launch-week price to ever make sense, lol, I do that like… once every several years, all the rest are very cheap)

Steam uses outsized market power to take an enormous %30 cut so it also does major damage to the games industry.

This. As game developer this is a huge problem since outside of top 1% industry is shit poor and platforms squeeze it badly.

Unfortunely needs of game developers and customers are not exactly align. Valve is good steward of their outsized market share when it's comes to gamers interests.

Epic Games tried to shake market with "gamers dont matter" policy (no reviews, no community, worse services) and low fees and failed miserably.

As game developer I'd love to see platform fee of 10%, but as gamer I dont want to buy my games and give power to Tencent, Microsoft or Google.

I could only dream that customer-first platform not owned by VC / PE money like GOG could compete with Steam. Unfortunately unlikely to happen.

The 30% cut is standard, and was so at retail even before Steam existed IIRC.

And the cut can't be lower?

The rush to defend Valve's monopoly is so weird since HN usually hates fat cat billionaires. Valve is raking in so much money as a middleman that Gabe Newell has ~$1 billion worth of yachts alone, in addition to the rest of his wealth, yet gamers want Valve to keep on bleeding them and game studios?

> And the cut can't be lower?

why should it be lower (or higher)?

steam's cut should be whatever they set, and the market responds. The natural equilibrium would get reached. The value steam provides, imho, certainly justifies their cut imho. There's plenty of other platforms to release games on - including free ones (such as itch.io, or your own website).

The main claim here is that it is a defacto monopoly, and that there are not "plenty of other platforms", since none of those platforms actually have any reach. It results in most games smaller than Fortnight or Blizzard having literally no choice but to use steam regardless of policy or cut.

Any time you have no choice it at least makes for a very warped market.

> since none of those platforms actually have any reach.

so really, this is about getting reach, and that a 30% cut for said reach is too high. I am arguing that this price is a market price, for which it is justified by mere existence. If this price was too high, then these other platforms that you claim have no reach will get some reach, since the PC platform is not locked down (yet).

Unlike in the model of apple's app store (until recently at least?), which has no alternative possible. Even android's supposed alternative is somewhat going to get locked down by google looking at the trend. Then the claim would be that those platforms hold not only a defacto monopoly, but an actual one, and their cut is therefore not a real market price. That makes it possible to claim that they're unfairly pricing their platform. Steam doesn't have this issue at all.

That's not exactly how markets generally work ("free market" is more of a theoretical concept than something that has ever existed outside of commodity markets at least).

In a way it can be justified in the sense that developers would rather get 70% than not make a sale at all if their games were only available on less popular platforms. But effectively that's what allows Steam to charge charge as much. They certainly have a dominant position in the market due to very little competition.

It's like retail/supermarket chains in certain countries being able to extort better conditions from their suppliers because they have very little choice. Or e.g. real estate agents being able to charge disproportionally high fees due to how the market is structured.

Whether someone considers that fair or not is of course rather subjective...

> Steam doesn't have this issue at all.

IMHO it's a matter of degree but fundamentally the same thing. The barriers to switching to a different store are just much lower than not having an Apple/Google phone but they still exist.

The fact that the fee is the same for Steam and Apple/Play Store seems suggestive to me the market is warped, given the latter ones are cases which are clearly monopolies where no alternative is technically possible.

Steam has a "most favored nation" clause which means people can't charge less on Steam than they do on Epic Store. And Epic Game Store cut is 0% on the first million and only 12% after that, but it can't actually end up charging less to customers if Steam maintains the most favored nation clause.

The equilibrium has been reached and it's more studios going bankrupt, less games getting made, gamers spending more for less, and Gabe owning over $1B in yatches

> more studios going bankrupt

studios that don't make good games correctly should bankrupt - ala, those so called AAA studios.

> gamers spending more for less

gamers buying overpriced games from bad publishers/studios that overspend and under-deliver are learning finally.

There has never been more indie games, and the selection has never been more diverse, and those available games has also been cheaper.

If you got time, this video outlines the evidence and the coming trends: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XigPD8BCkho

You seem to be missing that I'm describing the effects of Valve's massive %30 tax on the game industry. There are studios that would've survived and continued making games people enjoy if Valve had less market power and charged %10-%15. There are dollars gamers would've saved instead of spent if that tax was lower.

> The natural equilibrium would get reached

Except somehow they managed to get it right from the beginning and there was never any real market pressure to change it. Had Valve (or Apple of that matter) decided to charge e.g. 20% due to whatever reasons or conditions that existed in 2007 (but might not anymore) that would still somehow be the "natural equilibrium" even today in the exactly the same way.

The fee is also very sticky, platforms can't really increase without a massive amount if backlash, therefore reducing it becomes much riskier since they can never go back. Given a competitive market doesn't really exist a variable fee based on "market conditions" can't really be a thing either.

It's very hard for someone to undercut Valve just because of the scale. They might sill be very profitable if they charged 15-20% while other smaller stores might not be able to afford that. Same mechanics have always applied to most other monopolies or oligopolies in other industries.

Platform economics create monopsony problems. If you don’t play ball with steam, you don’t get access to most customers. End of story. These things are winner take all.

Imo 30% is disgusting and needs regulation.

Edit: see also, credit cards

Ah yes the Tim Sweeney argument. Get a better service with a lower cut, sure. Why does nobody do that? They must be stupid.

It's more like the Year Of Linux On The Desktop argument. Why doesn't Linux just provide better features and TCO and unseat Windows? According to the parent poster, "They must be stupid."

The cut lowers to 25% after $10mio and 20% after $50mio iirc.

I can defend steam and its (key) features I need/use (Controllers, Linux gaming, Linux improvements)

I cannot defend valves gambling casino. I also cannot say it's a monopoly.

> The rush to defend Valve's monopoly is so weird since HN usually hates fat cat billionaires.

Yes, almost like there's an actual difference between Valve and typical other corporations? Ha ha just kidding, it must be random internet nonsense, definitely not worth applying any brain cells to!

The simple reality is that Valve is just a lot nicer to their customers in terms of behavior and utility than the overwhelming majority of companies, and that means many people cut them more slack for other things. People are willing to forgive a large cut if it feels like you're actually trying to provide an ever-more-useful service, rather than coasting on the bare minimum.

Steam isn't just a little bit better than competing stores/platforms, it's MONUMENTALLY better, and the gap is probably increasing rather than shrinking over time, because other stores don't look like they're even trying in comparison.

Besides being standard, it's also reasonable solely for game developers not having to worry about chargebacks and financial fraud at all. Let alone all the other stuff your game gets, and stuff your game has the option of making use of (like network infrastructure for multiplayer games).

Of course compared to retail its a great deal but that's because of the huge number of middlemen involved in shipping a game/software back then. It's not like retailer margins were that great.

The 30% is mostly arbitrary though, IMHO had apple decided to charge 20% or 25% when the appstore came out that would have become the industry standard.

On top of their very frequent predatory pricing sales. -90% who the hell can or wants to compete with that? But hey the gamers love it.

That's called market segmentation. The people who either ignore the game or pirate it when it's full price - well they're trying to at least get some money out of those people. That's how sales work in general.

Piracy is widespread, that's undeniable. The question that industry groups and lawmakers love to avoid or lie about however is how much of that piracy represents lost sales, and how much represents people in the third world finding a way to participate with all of the people who can afford it. I pirated a lot as a kid because I had no money, there were no lost sales there. As an adult I don't pirate at all, because I have money, because it's inconvenient now compared to legitimate access.

So I'm perfectly prepared to believe that Steam is a good option (I personally love it), and frankly if the worst happens and the games I pay for go away on Steam... there are options. Once I pay for something I no longer feel any guilt about seeking a backup for example, and neither should you, even if the industry groups count that as a full-sale price theft.

Once you pay who? Money going to the wrong people is far worse for "creators" in the long run than if you had just copied it. Every digital industry has proven the argument billions of times over. If you're going to bother feeling guilt, aim it at actual injustice.

You’re adding a lot of dimensions to the act of buying something than I care about. I’m not trying to fight injustice when I buy most things, I’m just following the realistic legal requirements to use the thing.

Oh, well then, depending on the content, you're almost certainly still "guilty" violating the license you purchased. Smoking my friends prescribed medical marijuana is still illegal in e.g. Florida.

Pretty much all games with any sort of substantial audience are pirated, regardless of DRM.

The fact that DRM negatively affects honest customers more than pirates still holds true.

I like Steam because they have basically kept the same DRM for, like a decade now? It’s not intrusive.

It's worth noting that many, if not most, games on Steam don't have DRM. You can often just take the .exe files out of them and play. Sometimes you need a polyfill for Steam's client API, but that's usually it.

> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business

Game piracy is fundamentally un-safe for players, since games are fundamentally executable code, where setup usually requires admin permissions, and pirate distributors are financially incentivized to add malware to turn the game system into part of someone's botnet. The only "safe" way to pirate is to do it on a dedicated machine, on a separate VLAN, network controls, etc., which most people will not set up. This is not like TV/movie piracy, which would depend on zero-day exploits in the video player.

Buying a DRM-free game legally is much safer.

Most good quality pirate sites have a comments section and remove malware laden torrents.

How silly that you assume pirates are always doing it for financial gain, as opposed to cred or the lulz

This is mostly fear-mongering on the part of the big IP holders.

We saw the exact same cycle with mobile distribution of audio and video - Amazon even had to fork Android to add kernel-level DRM before any of the video rights holders would allow Amazon Video on tablets (this is before Google added DRM to android in general).

And now? That DRM was circumvented, and you can torrent pretty much any Amazon video the day after it goes live. But it's inconvenient enough that most people don't, the rights holders still feel all warm and cozy, and nobody really cares.

> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business.

So, how does it work for Valve to sell games which are also available at GOG without DRM? If too many people are pirating, why would anyone buy the Steam version?

That's actually honestly a really good point. Things are changing. In real dollar terms games are getting cheaper and the size of the market has grown so I don't know if maybe a DRM free store will soon support premium games.

I can't think of a game available on GoG that sells on Steam for > $20. I am sure one exists, but in general these are older, cheaper games.

You could also point to games that the Epic store gives away that are sold on Steam. That's an even better example. You are right that people don't just pay for games because they can't get them for free, they are also willing to pay to get them in a convenient format even when another format is free.

My question is, does that really support the model for most premium games? Nobody likes DRM, the game industry didn't used to have it.

> I can't think of a game available on GoG that sells on Steam for > $20. I am sure one exists, but in general these are older, cheaper games.

Fair point but I think there are quite a few of those: Baldur's Gate 3 comes to mind. Expedition 33, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II even Cyberpunk, but it's true that nowadays Cyberpunk is a ~20$ title.

But not sure these were on GoG day 1. Or they added them after ~1 year after they got most of their sales on Steam and already the piracy of the games started.

>even Cyberpunk, but it's true that nowadays Cyberpunk is a ~20$ title

Newsflash: Witcher and Cyberpunk are CD Projekt Red titles. CD Projekt Red was the initiator of GoG and owned it 100% until 2 days ago.

Every CD Projekt game was available on GoG from day zero.

> I can't think of a game available on GoG that sells on Steam for > $20.

It is easy to check such claims. This shows what kind of games are in gog since 2024 at >$20 (it may change the currency depending on your country though).

https://www.gog.com/en/games?priceRange=20%2C152.99&hideDLCs...

Far from complete but also a few big titles are there. Granted this is the price in gog but most of the times ime it is the same price as in steam, or around the same.

> Nobody likes DRM, the game industry didn't used to have it.

Aren't DRMs a pretty old thing at this time? I remember the days when DRM was basically about having to use the cd to launch the game as the game would check for that, even if everything needed to run the game was in the hard drive. People would use cracks or virtual drives even if they actually bought the game to avoid doing that. At least now DRMs are far less obstructive to someone who owns the game.

Because it's easy. Say what you like about steam but it sure as hell made acquiring games super easy. On-par or easier than pirating.

>OK, but the model that Valve pioneered is the model that supports 90% of all commercial PC games made today, a higher percentage if you cut out MMOs and free to play games, which you certainly don't own.

OK, but this model deployed in other parts of essentially any industry is equally scummy and abusive, no matter how much <$company> is liked, no matter how well they deployed it, no matter how many buckeroos it made someone.

in fact it's scummy any time the concept of sales and ownership gets warped aggressively, and even more so when it's done so in such a way that the leasee doesn't realize what they are until they get screwed somehow.

also, REMINDER: steam doesn't solve piracy, it helped to solve distribution. anti-piracy was sold (and lobbied to devs by Valve) far after the fact when it became clear that Valve had to have enough benefits to shove devs and customers into this style of non-ownership. Same reason why Steam also tries to be a half-assed discord/social media outlet.

Yes it's wildly successful. A lot of scummy shit is.

Steering the world that way (by example of business success) is sure to end well. Isn't that what FernGully was about?

> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business.

Piracy is what makes games a viable business. Even now marketing budget for a game can exceed development costs. Each pirated copy is not a lost sale. It's marketing brain worm implanted in a person that you didn't have to pay for.

The fact that most pirated games become bestsellers is not an accident. And it's not the other way around.

It's the same thing as with Windows. It wouldn't be most used and best selling operating system if it wasn't amply pirated.

Apple, to have anyone use a copy of their OS, has to bundle a device with it. And Linux has to give it all for free to buy its mindshare. Piracy makes Windows business model viable.

DRM is not, and it has never been, about piracy.

It is about publishers putting an expiry date to a digital product, in order to not having to compete with their own products in the future.

It is about making sure that by the time your hypothetical FIFA 2026 release comes out, all the available existing copies of FIFA 2019-2023, which mostly differ for the squad roster, are unusable.

This is exactly the same reason for single player games requiring constant online support nowadays. The authorization servers for "The Crew", a mainly single player game by Ubisoft, went offline coinciding with the close release of "The Crew Motorfest". This didn't go unnoticed, and nearly ended up with the EU passing some specific legislation on the matter[1].

[1]https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/20...

> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business

I think mostly they don't because people already have steam installed, and creating a new account on some other website to buy 1 game is too much hassle.

See dwarf fortress that was free for decades, and got much more popular when it was released on steam (paid version).

Or see Vintage Story which is great, and should be much more popular, but it's only available on its own website.

Except we are at a point now where you almost do have to sell on Steam. If you aren't already huge, you aren't going to gain much traction, if any at all, for your game outside of Steam.

I remember when Steam launched, it was rightfully met with hostility. Somehow Valve managed to completely win over gamers, and they do good work, but lets not forget that they are quickly approaching monopoly status. Just because someone could sell on some other store doesn't mean it would be profitable to do so because of Steam's userbase.

>GOG is the only major storefront where I feel like I actually own the product.

How do we re-sell our GOG games to someone else?

If I own it I should be able to sell it again, right? Like I used to sell old console game disks after I was done with them.

Just give them the files and pinky promise to delete them yourself?

Gog license doesn't allow reselling at all

Then you don't really own it IMO.

I agree. It allows you yo backup your games, which to be fair you can do with Steam too and just play offline forever.

It amazes me that people nowadays know so little about piracy that this is somehow touted as a solution.

GP wasn't being serious.

I've seen this sentiment repeated enough times on reddit that I no longer can tell the difference.

The same way you sell your disks: find a buyer, send them the game files, they send you the money

> find a buyer

this buyer would rather buy off GOG than you, unless you give a significant discount (and even then, the trust is hard to establish).

Therefore, even if you might have a legal right to re-sell (which you really don't unfortunately), the actual sale won't happen.

That's not relevant to the issue of "ownership"

Same for disks. That the second hand market is cheaper is expected and a feature and a major reason why game publishers do everything they can so it doesn't exist.

This isn't an ownership problem, it's a medium problem (and perhaps a legal problem)

People said the same thing when Steam launched, yet my profile sits there with a badge saying 20+ years and I can’t recall a time I’ve encountered an issue that was the fault of Valve versus a developer or publisher.

At this point the games I “own” on physical media like CDs have theoretically started to degrade before the threat of Valve revoking my ability to install or play has come to pass.

Correct. And if steam ever retracts anything, I’ll pirate the game then with a clean conscience.

The problem is what will happen when Gabe Newell passes away.

My GOG installers will never degrade though.

I’ll be very surprised if during all the time he spends doing nothing and winning, he hasn’t planned ahead for his company not becoming the very thing he hates and sets it apart.

I’d put a controlling interest in a trust with ironclad instructions to have Valve do the opposite of Ubisoft/EA. That would buy it another half-century at least.

This is because of Gabe and Valve itself, and it's not a universal constant. I have quite a few licensed software where I have the license, but installing the software is impossible.

This is why I still keep a copy of the software I bought, and religiously backup that trove. Because someday that S3 bucket or SendOwl link or company server will go down.

Sometimes, a company will raise prices, so the publisher will have to kill the old links. C64Audio had to switch to BandCamp and invalidate SendOwl links because of that price hike.

I'm still bitter about not being able to reset my Test Drive Unlimited install count online just because I have updated my computer and transferred the whole Windows installation to the new system back in the day.

There are not many ways to battle the entropy of the universe.

> I can’t recall a time I’ve encountered an issue that was the fault of Valve versus a developer or publisher.

Does it really matter if it's developer/publisher removing the game from Steam, not Valve? The end result is the same: one can't play.

AFAIK, even if the developer removes a game from Steam, if you bought it (or rather, a license for it), it remains in your account.

E.g. I have Lord of the Rings: War in the North that is no longer available anywhere, yet I can still download install and play it on my devices through Steam (even on Linux, which it was not intended for)

That of course doesn't help if the game does not have an offline component, e.g. I also still have League of Legends in my Steam account, but that is unusable because the Riot servers don't allow updating/connecting from it.

Huh, great to know, thank you. For some reason, I thought the game gets de-listed completely and no downloads are possible anymore.

Literally the last thing on the internet you can complain about is Steam. PC gaming would be the biggest cluster fuck in the world- if not fairly dead / super niche.

You would need to install 12 front-ends like Steam that would be hot trash and have a handful of games and be the most miserable shit ever. You wouldn't have sales, reasonable game prices, or family library sharing (this would be absurd to any other company).

Steam is a prime example of when a monopoly ends up to be the best for the consumer.

Well, you don't "stop using Steam" unless you don't care about playing most games released in the last 10-15 years. But the premise is solid, given that GOG has no DRM. Steam did get DRM "right" though.

My problem with Steam are the casino tactics Valve inject into their own games and the platform. That is an entire gaming industry problem however. At least Valve do some good things with the dirty money.

Steam games are still great as long as you approach it open-eyed as a long-term rental. You can get really good deals, and as a parent of 3 young boys, their family sharing is an amazing bonus that I didn't even consider when I started getting games ~20 years ago. I have definitely gotten my money's worth. (If you consider it akin to going to the movies or a theme park, rather than buying an object.)

Of course I vastly prefer GOG and try to get all games there, but GOG still only has a tiny fraction of the games I want to play.

As a (theoretical) archivist, this, 100%

As an actual gamer... why? I mean of course I agree that if I buy a game I should play however I want (assuming it doesn't degrade the game for others, i.e. no online cheating in competitive settings but modding is fine, including online if other players agree to it) for whatever long the agreement priced was (e.g. I don't think it's OK to get a lower price for a 1-day trial then keep it forever but if I do pay full price, then I get to keep it)... and yet, when I play a game, I play it. I don't store it. Sure I might want to maybe play it again in 10 years but the actual likelihood of that is very VERY low. I say this owning few dedicated arcade hardware running MAME and similar emulators.

TL;DR : I go get the point, my behavior though is not that, namely I play, complete (or not) then move on.

As an avid gamer myself, I fully agree with your point. I guess in this thread there are a lot of people who, due to them being in tech, have a bit of a relationship with games but it's not really a big hobby. And as it happens, Steam has a few policies that trigger some intellectually motivated objections - nice in theory but practically irrelevant for gamers who play games on a regular basis.

As a matter of fact, in case the nostalgia itch really does hit, Steam actually enables a relatively easy 're-release' of old games that many publishers started doing - often with no further addition except the promise that it'll run on modern hardware/OS hassle-free.

I've re-bought games I've played in the 90s/2000s on Steam even though I already owned them and probably still have the CD lying around somewhere, but I just can't be arsed to go through the troubles of installing from them. Pay a few bucks, click a button and I'm up and running.

GOG is no different, you're still renting licenses and GOG still has the right to revoke your license, effectively making your "offline installer" no different from a game downloaded from myabandonware or a similar website.

Pretty different, actually. You don't have to worry about possible malware, and you get to support the developers of games you like (aka "vote with your wallet"). Also even if you get your license revoked it's not such a big deal as in other stores, where in some cases they may even delete the game from your devices remotely, without warning. The offline installer is a guarantee for you as a consumer.

Malware is easy to avoid if you know where to download from and if you engage in the herculean task of uploading the .exe to something like virustotal.com in case of any doubts. Not like it matters much anyway seeing how there are examples of GOG games using cracks from the internet anyway.

Supporting developers is a weak argument considering that GOG's claim to fame is that they're selling old games where the development studio no longer exists or has been bought out by a corporate entity like EA.

Revoking my license isn't a big deal? I paid real money for the game.

The offline installer is about as much of a guarantee of anything as a pirated ISO is.

I genuinely don't understand what people think "own" means here. Downloading from Steam you "own" it in exactly the same way as if you install it from a CD: you have a license to the game. There's nothing to own in any case, unless you literally own the copyright to the game which of course you don't.

Also Steam doesn't apply any DRM unless developers add it, so backing up your Steam library folder to an external drive should be fine for your personal preservation at a platform level.

That's true, the CD is a license in the same way steam is. But practically it's different, because in many cases there's no mechanical way to revoke the license from that CD; it'll keep working after music rights expire or the game producer gets cancelled on Twitter or whatever. The game won't just evaporate like it can on steam

You can just back it up though.

The main difference is that the license you get when you buy a CD is transferable, that is you can sell it to someone else when you are done with it, while Steam explicitly disallows this.

Transferable licenses create a second hand market which keeps prices in check, which of course publishers don't like at all.

Different, because GOG provides good customer support.

My hardcore gaming days are over, but I feel that the gaming industry has in general been abusing the hell out of gamers in the last some years. That also includes the hardware industry, trying to sell overpriced stuff. Granted, it is the gamer's fault for submitting to that mafia, and I am not directly affected nowadays myself (save for RAM prices going up thanks to the AI mafia milking us all), but I would be hugely upset at the companies constantly trying to milk the customers. It is very shameful of them to want to do so.

As gamers nexus said, the hardware companies are now post consumer. They are building stuff with investments backstopped by taxpayer money, so if you choose to boycott now it will probably make things worse. People spent a lot of energy laughing at people that were warning that this would happent not too long ago.

For people who don't know GN:

https://youtu.be/cUrJVdF2me0?si=tlxLIufz8zah8xG6

(Human) summary of this almost one hour long video essay? Seems like the typical "random tech influencer is trying to fuel the fire/drama of today" because of the clickbait title of "NVIDIA: WTF?", so unsure if it fits to be linked here in the first place.

GN is a well established, popular and independent consumer hardware reviewer that has only a few peers on par with them in the space. Hardly some "random tech influencer".

Yeah, Paris Hilton and others are also established and popular, hardly makes them a source of authority. If you publish clickbait on YouTube to add fuel to drama, you're unfortunately digging your own hole and it shouldn't come as a surprise others consider you "random influencers who peddle drama".

I wouldn't listen to Paris Hilton talk about computer hardware, and I wouldn't listen to Gamer Nexus talk about who has the hottest hair in Hollywood. Flip those around though, and that's different.

I gave it a 20 minutes try, since it seems not just one person is convinced this Gamer Nexus isn't just another influencer. They seem knowledgeable about hardware, I give you that. But then when they start going into markets, economies and geopolitics, that's when I start roll my eyes, and continuing listening to that is like taking hardware advice from Paris Hilton.

Again, don't let influencers give you the idea that just because they happen to know topic X well, they suddenly know all the areas and subjects that are slightly related to those areas well too.

Gell-Mann Amnesia is a shockingly hard thing to fight against I’m afraid.

Yeah, wasn’t impressed with GN’s theories about the politics/motivations/etc behind these big market shifts. It’s much simpler, there’s limited supply capacity and a more lucrative use of the hardware now. The market will find a new equilibrium.

GN very much loves to fuel the fire lol. He usually does it by being More Correct Than You.

Yeah, that's kind of insufferable, and especially not something I'd like to receive dragged out over an hour. I prefer "More Correct Than You" HN comments over that, so I can read them in 30 seconds instead.

But the situation is still getting worse, and he has influenced customer service policy at many of those places for the better. We don't all have to watch him but he's good to have.

Link without Google tracking parameter (`si`): https://youtu.be/cUrJVdF2me0

As gaming nexus said: AI companies seems to be able to _outbid_ the WHOLE consumer market for some hardware companies.

Your money does not matter.

Vertigo...

For what it's worth my laptop with 16gb of DDR4 and a 2070 seems to run every game as well as I could want it to. I'm happy with what I have in this regard. a little less than 10% of steam users are still using 1000 series Nvidia cards.

Offline installers are the real line in the sand

I think the individual game developers can choose whether they sell you the game or just rent you a license, right? Steam doesn't enforce DRM, they do provide an API game developers can use to add DRM to their games. But the developers don't have to use it if they so choose.

The flip side of this is that the only games whose owners allow them to be fully sold in this way are those whose commercial value is >90% expired.

From the FAQ:

> Is GOG financially unstable? No. GOG is stable and has had a really encouraging year. In fact, we’ve seen more enthusiasm from gamers towards our mission than ever before.

I'm really happy to hear this, as I always feared their hard stance on no-DRM would scare off publishers and developers, but seems that fear might have been overstated. This year I personally also started buying more games on GOG than Steam, even when they were available on Stream. Prior to 2025 I almost exclusively used Steam unless it wasn't available there, but now GOG is #1 :)

Glad it's moving in even better directions, thank you Team GOG!

I had the opposite takeaway.

Companies with strong financial performance don't tend to use words like "encouraging". That is the language you get from companies that are in trouble and hoping for recovery.

Talking about people's enthusiasm for their mission is just straight up dodging the question itself.

If I read their income statement from Q3 correctly it is comparatively not doing great.

01.01.2025 to 30.09.2025 net profit 910 thousand PLN I think.

01.01.2024 to 30.09.2024 net profit 32 thousand PLN.

With "from 1 January to 30 September 2025: 4.2365 PLN/EUR and from 1 January to 30 September 2024:4.3022 PLN/EUR."

It is not that much. So splitting it off probably make sense for the CD Projekt.

I'm not sure I understand your figures. What is "32 thousand PLN", surely their entire annual profit for all of 2024 was not literally 32K PLN (approx. 9K USD)? Is this measured in millions? And whatever they're measured in, surely 32K to 910K in the span of a year is considered excellent progress?

No it was actually just circa 9 thousand Euros from GOG.COM. And it seems there was period of having potential loss of million PLN as well in Q3 of 2024 I think. So it looks quite variable based on which products release.

See: https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/wp-content/uploads-en/2025/11/c...

Starting from page 28.

Maybe they are just heavily reinvesting?

I think reality is that being game retailer is harsh market if you are anyone else but Valve with Steam. Selling copies redeemed on Steam is workable, but seeing that pretty much all big publishers are back on Steam should tell a lot of state of the market. And GOG has bigger mind share than actual market share.

Still, making only 32k PLN ($9k) profit on 137M PLN ($38M) revenue seems like a really badly operated business.

Profit is not an appropriate measure of how well a business is operated. I'm sure they have been prioritizing growth because the whole point of the platform is to introduce competition to Steam. Keeping the margins low (or even negative) is smart when the primary goal is not to make profit but to insure the parent company against monopolistic behavior.

A counterpoint is Amazon's profit on revenue until 2017 or so.

Amazon was basically conducting a price war founded by AWS division. Unless GOG is trying to undercut Steam this is a bit apples and oranges.

Reinvested money isn't a cost, so the amount of reinvesting doesn't impact the profit number in their report.

In what country? Of course I do not operate business with milions of income, but investing in Poland is usually a cost. In example buying hardware or paying for servers is an invoice so it is cost of you doing business. Of course it depends on accounting and your taxing method. But yes, your profit in Poland is more or less money you got from clients minus money you paid to someone.

Investment/CAPEX goes to the Balance sheet, not P&L.

Cost of Sales is eating them alive.

They lose ~72% of every PLN/EUR/USD they bring in. Their financial statement is Really confusingly laid out. However, pg 36 has comparison. GOG is actually not THAT tiny of a segment (percentage-wise, absolute EUR / PLN numbers are still small). 49k PLN / 300k PLN for the CD PROJEKT Red and 350k total.

Compared to CD PROJEKT RED, insanely horrible cost of sales ratio.

July 1st, 2025 to Sept. 30th, 2025 (Numbers are in PLN, directly from document)

                 CD PROJEKT RED     GOG.COM
  Sales revenue         303,133      48,982
  Cost of sales          23,310      35,151

January 1st, 2025 to Sept. 30th, 2025 (Numbers are in PLN, directly from document)

                 CD PROJEKT RED     GOG.COM
  Sales revenue         658,575     143,285
  Cost of sales          61,307     103,075

PLN numbers can be verified (GOG quarterly is really on the order of 10,000 EUR) by looking at pages 30-31 with export sales summaries.

For comparison to the 72% ratio, their main video game creation business spends 7-8% on cost of sales.

From page 8 "Selling expenses represents costs of marketing activities relating to the GOG.COM platform and the work on the development and processing of sales executed through that platform."

From some of the rest of the document, it seems like "maybe" some of that is prepayments and costs related to providing the software.

Personal view, while it may be beneficial to not have to deal with GOG from an operational perspective, a significant percentage of sales are on the platform for their own software, and CD PROJEKT's title releases heavily influence sales figures on GOG, so it may end up limiting themselves from an otherwise beneficial distribution channel. Probably provides better negotiating position also if you're trying to barter with Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Valve, ect... However, if the partnership continues with the next owners, may not be an issue.

Does Cost of sales include game developers cut? because that 143/103 fits their 30-70 split.

Suspicion is you're correct, and is it's probably something like payments or money to developers who have games on the GOG platform. However, the definition in the document is kind of self referential.

"Cost of Sales" is 100% "Cost of goods for resale and materials sold"

and "The Cost of goods for resale and materials sold represents mainly the cost of sales of goods for resale and materials sold via the GOG.COM platform"

Kind of self referential. Everything else is in the CD PROJEKT RED group (Cyberpunk 2077 Ultimate Edition on Nintendo Switch 2 cartridges).

If your suspicion is correct then that would also imply that historical games are either almost always the same 70/30, or GOG is not really making that much on "historical" games (ie, most of the money is recent indie releases). And, kind of implied that they're not really selling that much. At maybe 10 EUR average, that's only like 1000 games a quarter.

Notably, its really difficult to find anything other than an online article that actually talks about the 70/30 split situation. Google links to Wikipedia for evidence that then links to a 2013 Engadget article. Nothing appears to actually spell out the financial terms on GOG's actual site.

If you happen to know where that type of legalese is on the GOG site, that would actually a helpful ref.

all the numbers are in thousand units. So more like 1M games a quarter.

Much more reasonable then. Like noted earlier. Really horrible financial layout. Teeny text (btw, thousands)

You mean they're not charging from some Luxembourg subsidiary any more?

https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/investors/result-center/q3-2025... [has a bunch of files at the bottom too, for more data]

> Consolidated net earnings during the reporting period stood at 193 million PLN – 2.5 times more than during the corresponding period of the previous year, which results in a net profitability of 55%.

Maybe I don't understand "profits above all" sufficiently well as some of my peers, but that seems Good Enough to me.

Overall CD Projekt is doing well, but cut associated to GOG.COM is paltry as shown above.

No company with an ounce of brain and a good accountant reports profit in eastern Europe :)

Polska is in Central Europe tho

Haha, we all Slavs keep telling that to ourselves, don't we? :P

Eastern Europe starts at your home country's eastern border. E.g., if you're Russia, it's Japan and Alaska.

And Balkan on the southeastern.

To cite what might be deemed the lowest quality source possible: [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Europe

You'll find as many perspectives on what country belongs to East/West/North/South Europe as there are countries in Europe.

Is this taken from some LLM?

The first two numbers perhaps make sense, the 4,3022 looks like EUR/ PLN exghange rate..

I guess I trust them that if they would be in trouble, they'd say so, not say "GOG is stable". But I've been wrong before, could be in this situation too, I guess I'm more hoping that they wouldn't lie to their users in their face like that.

I had the same takeaway -- in fact, I think it's CD Projekt who hopes to distance themselves from GOG.

This goes for publicly traded companies much more than privately owned ones.

GOG is now becoming private like Valve rather than publicly traded.

Exactly, if you say that your company's financial performance has been "encouraging", that's not good.

>>a really encouraging year

This years DOScember was really huge. Tons of streamers and viewers on Twitch for example, retro gaming is picking up steam (/s).

There's clearly a real segment of players who value ownership and longevity enough to vote with their wallets

I am happy that deal with Amazon didn't hurt them. Doing business with such big corp is probably not good for anyone.

I used to love gog. I purchased a bunch of stuff back when they were talking a big game around supporting Linux with their Galaxy client.

But while gog was talking, Valve was actually doing. Building an actual Linux client. Making multiplayer actually work. Not to mention all the work they've done with Proton and upstreamimg graphics drivers.

I hope gog succeeds. I just value Linux gaming support over not having DRM. It's kinda a idealist vs realist stance for me.

It doesn’t look like GOG can afford to pay for that work. I think we all got very lucky that the success of the Steam Deck has put the incentives in the right place for Steam to be able to invest in Linux.

Valve started to invest in Linux and open source 10 years before releasing Steam Deck. They started hiring OSS developers back in 2012 and Deck released in 2022:

https://www.phoronix.com/review/valve_linux_dampfnudeln

The Steam Machine (Steam Deck predecessor) had leaks/announcements in 2013 and shipped in 2015 so that lines up.

Saying "we're lucky" makes it sound like Valve's investment in Linux is a happy accident, but as you point out, the Steam Machine was announced in 2013, and back them gaming on Linux was seen as a pie in the sky dream.

Headlines at the time said things like "Valve’s Steam Machines look dead in the water", there was barely any market demand, and they probably lost a lot on the initial release.

The fact that they still doubled down and spent ten years funding the Linux ecosystem before it made them any money speaks of both a strategic incentive (they don't want Microsoft to hold a sword over their neck) and ideological vision (they want gaming to stay relatively open).

Saying "we all got very lucky that the success of the Steam Deck has put the incentives in the right place for Steam to be able to invest in Linux" is getting the causality backwards at the very least. Valve investing in Linux is what made the Steam Deck's success remotely possible, and it wasn't a sure shot.

The unfortunate or fortunate reality of network effects also means Steam is usually best suited to preserve content that might otherwise be lost. Both in terms of literally holding the data for longer than the general public (including workshop files), but also by keeping communities active and alive.

There are tons of Linux games distributed on GOG, and not having to use a proprietary client is one of its great advantages. Not to downplay Valve's contributions (and I may well get a Steam Frame when they come out), but they mostly amount to porting their mandatory DRM-laden client to Linux, and maintaining a fork of Wine that integrates with that client.

Ownership, control, and privacy are among the main reasons I use Linux, and are likewise huge advantages that GOG has over Steam.

Official Linux releases are almost never maintained. I have the same game on Steam and GOG, but the GOG version no longer works. Neither does the Steam version, except if I switch to the Windows version with Proton. Then it works flawlessly (usually faster and better than the Linux version ever did.)

Sadly I've had the same experience. I've had to rebuy a couple games on steam because the older gog version wasn't version compatible with my friend's clients. That really burned my bottom.

Yes, it is so bad that I will no longer buy a game for its Linux release. Almost every single Linux game I have outside of actual Valve titles no longer works. I don't want to hear that they have a Linux release. I want to hear that they have a Windows release that works with Proton. Windows is the only ABI that I can expect to reliably run on Linux.

I've been gaming primarily on Linux for almost 15 years, and buying from GOG as my first choice, and have never encountered a single instance of what you're describing. I don't have a single Linux game on my GOG account that "no longer works", and I have dozens of Linux games there.

In fact the only time I recall a Linux-native game not working out of the box was when I got the game 'The Raven: Legacy of a Master Thief' on Steam, and that was due to some wonky configuration implemented by the game devs.

Do you have any specific examples of this problem?

Can you give me an example of what you're referring to? I've got a lot of Linux games from GOG and have never encountered any situation in which the Linux build stopped working, nor any situation in which the Windows build was being updated with new versions without the Linux build also being updated at the same time.

You're fairly significantly downplaying their contributions. They have a substantial amount of FOSS developers under contract working on SDL, DXVK, VKD3D and there's over a dozen people on working on KDE on Valve's dime alone. Proton isn't a fork of Wine, it's a Codeweavers managed project funded by Valve that packages Wine, virtually everything useful ends up going upstream given Codeweavers are also the main contributors to Wine. AMDGPU, NVK, Valve funded. Valve have been funding FEX since it's conception.

That isn't even everything, just what I've been able to confirm either through interviews or conference talks where their involvement has come up. They've quietly been doing a lot for Linux.

I think it's perfectly realistic to think there is a substantial risk of losing library content you've bought on Valve in the next 20 years. Don't know what the odds are, but they're greater than zero.

I personally think that, between the two, gog is far more likely to disappear than steam.

I'm happy both exist. I've nothing against gog (except maybe for their broken promises around Linux support, but I do understand changing market forces) and like I said, I hope they succeed. They've got a good mission.

GOG might disappear, but your games won't.

If Steam disappears, your games will become inaccessible.

It's actually mostly the same in both cases. If steam or GOG goes down, you can no longer download the games you bought. But what about the games you have downloaded? Well GOG games will work out of the box, however the steam "DRM" is really just basic protection to stop you from copying the files to your friend's computer, and can easily be removed by already existing tools like Steamless and Goldberg Emulator. So I'm not really that worried about the vast majority of my steam library. The only thing I'd worry about is spiking storage costs when steam's demise seems imminent!

I will pirate every game I have in my steam library that I want to play if that is ever the case. Without the a moment of hesitation. I payed for it.

There is only 1 Steam client for Linux, and there will only ever be one client, and that client has had basic issues (context menus being a completely new window that steals focus, comes to mind instantly) that have been unresolved year after year.

For GOG, there are plenty of clients for Linux [1][2][3][4], And they are open source, I can go and talk to the people making these clients directly, I can give feedback, I can make changes to make these clients better (and to a small degree, I already have).

[1]: https://sharkwouter.github.io/minigalaxy/

[2]: https://sites.google.com/site/gogdownloader/

[3]: https://heroicgameslauncher.com/

[4]: https://www.hyperplay.xyz/

This is true, but there are pros and cons.

Pro 1: reduced lockin

Pro 2: open source options

Con 1: not all options are all that easy to use or feature complete, making the "choice" a mandatory QA/research task, rather than a way to exercise personal taste/freedom

Con 2: no galaxy-only features like achievements and save file cloud sync

(My personal testing led to choosing Heroic)

It took me seven tries across two years to get Cyberpunk 2077 playing on Linux using either raw install files with or without Lutris/Bottles, GOG Galaxy in a wine env, or whatever Heroic Launcher offers.

I'm glad it mostly works now, but i would've been better off buying it from Valve. The effort Valve put into making games Just Work is unparalleled. The minor UI issues (like context menus getting rendered in place as windows which breaks niche window managers) are nothing compared to the hours required to brute force the right Wine/Proton setup for every game to make it work.

Most of the games that now work in unofficial GOG launchers only work because Valve paid someone to make games run well on Wine, either by directly using Proton or by using one of the many libraries Valve has directly paid for work for.

Did you try lutris?

Yes. One recipe at the time was broken, the other didn't work. At some point the game got updated and the existing tricks and workarounds to get the game running were no longer enough.

With Lutris it just worked.

Not when I tried it the first couple of times. At some point Proton (and then probably Wine?) got updated to fix the bug triggered by one of the game updates months before that and it has worked since.

I'm no stranger to messing with Wine to get Windows executables to work. Whatever the GOG release did different, it just didn't work once the intro logos were gone, even with the same Proton version that worked with the Steam version.

Valve earned a lot of goodwill by actually shipping things that made Linux gaming viable day-to-day, not just promising it

I always search GOG before Steam. It’s slightly less user friendly in the most minor ways and sometimes a bit more expensive. But getting DRM free games is worth every penny and extra few moments. Steam is really great for what it is but you’re not buying games you’re leasing them. Excited to hear GOG might get more focus and investment.

> you’re leasing them

For the duration of your life, to be fair.

For the duration of the businesses’ life.

For the duration of gaben’s life, to be fair. Beyond that there be dragons.

No, for the duration of whenever Steam decides to say "fuck you".

Which is the same as what can happen to GOG if you don't have the files backed up. And if you do happen to have them backed up, is there such a large difference between having the installer vs the full game installation stored?

Yes there is a difference. Steam sells you a license that can be revoked at any time. The games have DRM, and rely on cloud servers to authenticate you. If you turn your internet off they will all stop working after a certain period, even if fully downloaded. And if Steam or the DRM owner goes out of business you will end up with nothing.

If you buy and download something from GOG, it is yours. You can still play it in the next millenium as long as you have suitable hardware or an emulator.

Not all steam games have DRM

This is true but you don't know ahead of time before you buy a game, you have to gamble on it being the case or not (i've found that while some lists exist in places like pcgamingwiki, they tend to be both very incomplete and often wrong).

Usually indie games tend to be DRM-free though, so if an indie game isn't available on GOG or Zoom Platform (another DRM-free store), i end up buying on Steam.

So long as it's easy to find out after buying, this isn't a real barrier, since you can just refund it if it doesn't meet your standards.

> The games have DRM, and rely on cloud servers to authenticate you.

That is not true as a global rule. Game developers can release fully independent versions of their games even on steam.

They can. Do they? Statistically?

If I am a person interested in this specific thing (backing up my games) I would for sure check. Wouldn't you?

I would but since there's no way to know before buying, all games on Steam need to be treated as having DRM and not supporting backups.

There's also no way to know after buying. Games you own and have installed can be automatically updated in the background with new DRM.

Which is basically never. They have no incentive to do that except for extreme circumstances, and they have all the leverage in the world over game publishers.

Delisted games tend to stay in your library for redownload.

I never understood the cynicism for digital media, it’s been multiple decades now and the model clearly works.

Obviously I prefer zero DRM but it’s also not a hard line requirement for me personally.

Ever bought anything from MSN Music? Yahoo Music? Desura? Microsoft eBook Store? Walmart MP3s? Anything using Adobe Content Server? MusicNet? CinemaNow? UltraViolet?

It is laughable to think that digital media "clearly works". Companies shut down and stores shutter all the time. In most cases there is no recourse for customers, because – surprise – you didn't actually own the rights to what you bought, just a revocable license. You have to be pretty young and/or naive to think that this can't eventually happen to Steam as well.

And even if you fully trust Steam to stick around and keep its word, digital licensing means you can still get screwed. For example - if the publisher's license to in-game music expires, the game will automatically be updated to remove all the tracks (e.g. GTA Vice City and San Andreas). For larger issues and conflicts the game might be removed entirely (e.g. Spec Ops: The Line). Or the publisher might decide to just switch off the DRM servers, even for single player games (e.g. The Crew). Outside of gaming there are countless examples of publishers "upgrading" music tracks you own to different versions or censoring/altering content of books you own.

The only recourse to all this is to buy and store DRM-free versions of your media.

> "buy" Hozier's album

> change countries

> oh, you own this album for Bulgaria, but not for the US, so you can no longer play it

Region-locked physical media (and before explicit region locking, PAL vs NTSC vs SECAM vs variants like PAL-M) also have this problem to some extent.

Yes and no. I took my physical media with me along with my player, and all was fine.

I took my digital media with me along with my computer, and all was not fine.

Censorship. Like GOG?

You never know, Gaben is getting older. Who knows what the next CEO of Valve will do?

At least with Valve we can hope its gonna be okay for 4 reasons:

1. Even though Gabe is formally CEO he from his own words was barelly controllibg company for years. He spend more time on his other projects.

2. Flat structure and and a small team. I know few people who has worked at Valve and while there are some downsides company of ~400 employees with a lot of internal power play is just more resilient than normal corporation. Many of people on the team are just rich enough already and they dont need to go and cash out.

3. From what is publicly known Valve is family owned basically since Gabe own major part of company. And while a lot of people would hate example of e.g Ubisoft its good example how family controlled business often sink before selling out.

4. It would be just hard to sell Valve and remove control from the team without destroying both company and gaming community goodwill.

Yet I fully agree that Valve just like other company can be sold off just for userbase and run to the ground.

Valve just have better chance to stay customer friendly than your overall VC/PE/BlackRock owned corporation with 10,000 employees and 50 for-hire top managers / board directors.

> Even though Gabe is formally CEO he from his own words was barelly controllibg company for years. He spend more time on his other projects.

The time he spends on Valve day to day is irrelevant to the question of what would happen if those actually running the company decided to do something stupid like taking games away from people vs. what would happen in the same scenario without Gabe around.

> Many of people on the team are just rich enough already and they dont need to go and cash out.

Rich people are largely the kind that can never have enough money.

> From what is publicly known Valve is family owned basically since Gabe own major part of company.

And there is no reason to believe his heirs will want to keep the company rather than cash out for the right offer just because Gabe wouldn't have.

> It would be just hard to sell Valve and remove control from the team without destroying both company and gaming community goodwill.

That has never been an a showstopper for vulture capitalists.

Physical media rots too. I don't watch my DVD collection anymore because I don't have access to a working DVD player, but I've read that a lot of those discs don't play anymore because the publishers cheaped out on materials when they minted the discs.

This in not an equivalence.

Pressed optical media are fairly durable when stored at reasonable conditions (i.e. indoors in non-maritime climates).

All of this is based on the assumption that the way it was done is the way it will be done.

Who will own and run Steam 30 years from now? Gabe Newell will be long-gone, his nepobaby next-CEO will be closing in on retirement if they don't check-out early to enjoy their vast wealth like Gabe has done.

What does Steam look like 60 years from now? Adults using it today are mostly dead and all of their licenses revoked forever, the games removed from circulation gone forever because nobody can ever have a license to use them again. They might be onto their 4th, 5th or 6th CEO by then, half a century removed from Gabe and any expectations we have around the ways he did things.

There's a lot of room for improvement securing some sort of legacy for Steam.

I can assure you that offline installer you got today from GOG will not work on Windows 20 or whatever OS will be the dominant for PC in 30 or 60 years time.

Most C64, MSX, Apple,Amiga, Atari ST and Dos games can still be played on all majors operating systems.

In fact I used "most" but I can't name one that couldn't be played.

If anything it will be easier than ever to run those games, the platforms you mention can be run in a web browser these days with nothing at all to install or configure or download.

Are you willing to put monies on that?

> I can assure you that offline installer you got today from GOG will not work on Windows 20

Given the lengths the Windows development team has gone to, to preserve backward compatibility, to the point that there was individual-game-specific workarounds codified in Windows, makes this claim the same as the GP’s, that Steam will change 30-60 years from now.

The cynic in me thinks you’re both right, mind.

If it works on WINE today, I would expect it to work on WINE tomorrow. Worst case, you can probably just install an older WINE on a newer OS to ensure it.

It would presumably work in a virtualized environment.

You can literally run 30 year old software on your Windows computer today.

30 year old Windows software is kind of rough. Tried to get some old games working on my Dad's computer this holiday season. DOS based game is easy. Windows 95 based games are hard... First you almost certainly need winevdm for the installer because the installers were almost always 16-bit; then I was getting errors that I can't run on Windows NT, only Windows 95 is supported, and insufficient ram errors because the memory available is too much.

Found some other options (fan remake) for now, but probably I need to shell out the $3 for a modern port or run a whole emulated windows95. Probably wine with options would also work? SSI games, Allied General and Pacific General.

I bet it'll run on Wine.

It will continue to work on the same platforms it does now. Steam on the other hand already dropped support for Windows versions when they were still used by many players.

I mean I don't really give a shit. Im buying a game to play it now, maybe next year.

Besides you only need Steam if the publisher chooses to use Steam DRM. There's clearly an incentive for it, don't think its purely Steam's fault.

If that's the model the publisher offers, that's the model you have. Its your choice to participate in it or not.

> What does Steam look like 60 years from now?

Does it matter? You are treating this like these games are some valuable collector's items, when they really are just toys you play once and then never touch again for the most part.

But let's assume you had physical copies of all of these games you own on Steam. Once you are gone, there is a > 90% chance that whoever inherits it, will throw it away, just like Millenials now are throwing away all this junk they are inheriting that Boomers used to collect.

The point is, Steam is good enough for all practical purposes, which is to acquire and play games in the now.

My library includes games I played with my father and games I played with my own children. Given the option my children would certainly revisit their favourite titles with their own children one day, or for their own nostalgic memories.

One thing you are missing with your logic is that "throw it out" is probably more like "give to charity", the unwanted goods are not necessarily being destroyed and may be redistributed to people who do value them. If my kids didn't want my Steam account I'm sure there's others who would, and preservation groups and museums that would probably take it.

No. At least in some countries (e.g. Germany) they would be forced to reimburse every buyer if they removed access to a game someone bought.

The fact that somewhere deep down in their EULA there might be words that make it clear that you're not really "buying" anything, just renting/leasing/whatever, wouldn't stand in court since the important part is the big shiny "Buy now" button, and "buying" has a specific meaning here.

So yeah, the only way they could "take the games away from you" is if Steam went bancrupt

> So yeah, the only way they could "take the games away from you" is if Steam went bancrupt

Yeah, that's not impossible, and I'd rather keep what I buy even if the seller does go bankrupt.

I don’t care because I’ll be dead.

Data-hoarding archivists don’t like to hear this, but this is how it’s worked for all of human history. It’s not practical to consume and remember all the media every person has ever published.

This is getting totally beside the issue of DRM.

What will happen is that the greatest games will be remembered if they’re lucky and the rest will be discarded by time, even if they are DRM-free and unencumbered by reaching public domain status.

Can you name your favorite silent movie? How about your second favorite? How about your 10th favorite?

What’s your favorite song from 1492?

> It’s not practical to consume and remember all the media every person has ever published.

It's not about you being able to "consume it all", it's about future generations being able to look back and see how gaming and humanity evolved and explore this history. Many people will research the greatest hits, the greatest developers, the greatest accomplishments, just like any other historically-interesting thing.

My favorite song from roughly 1492 is a small ditty I came across some years ago called Branle Englese, amongst many centuries-old pieces of classical music I enjoy playing. I don't know if it's specifically 1492, as the details have been lost to time unfortunately.

Do you recognize the value of other history? Should we 'delete' it all or just games, rather than challenge a fairly recent status quo that emerged and undermines their preservation?

They can't control the licenses rights for some assets like music that can expire and become undistributable. You may not know it until you install them on a new computer n years from now.

I find even just the possibility of this happening frankly insane - if the current licensing or copyright system allows something like this, the we need a new one.

It has already happened and been documented here.

There have been several earlier generation game consoles that have had their online stores closed already.

Compared to Steam directly, yeah, sometimes a bit more expensive. But as soon as you go to sites selling steam keys (proper ones, not resellers), it's "almost always, a lot", as steam itself rarely has good prices. Now that might still be worth it, but it's relevant

I’m just going to go ahead and plug is there any deal dot com.

You can sync up your Steam wishlist (it’s a little weird to setup but once you figured it out it works).

I almost never buy games directly from steam anymore, there’s almost always someone else with a discount on steam keys.

And sometimes GOG has the best deal!

I love ITAD! If you use a search engine like kagi or duck duck go supporting bangs, you can use !itad to search there.

> But as soon as you go to sites selling steam keys (proper ones, not resellers),

What is a company/individual if not a reseller if they're selling Steam keys? You cannot sell Steam keys without being Steam or the developer itself, and not be called a "reseller". Or what sites are you referring to here, stuff like Humble Bundle where you get Steam keys with the bundles?

Resellers sell something they bought. Or that's the idea. The sites are marketplaces, sometimes having people sell keys from different countries, sometimes stolen credit card keys. There are several game devs saying they'd prefer people pirating over using those sites.

Real stores sell steam keys because they are selling directly from the developers. Steam is actually nice (or preempting monopoly talk, depending on your view) in that it allows that (I think there are limits, but IIRC rather generous)

> Real stores sell steam keys because they are selling directly from the developers

And how did these "real stores" get those Steam keys unless they bought them, maybe even directly from the developers? Or are you saying game developers hand out these keys for free to the store, then the store sends the developer money for each key they sell? I'm not sure that makes a lot of sense.

What is an example of one such site selling Steam keys who you wouldn't consider a reseller?

Humble Bundle usually gives you Steam keys

Apart from times when they have run out and continue to sell...

Normal store: fanatical.com

Key reseller: https://www.loaded.com

You really don't need to be so combatative.

I cannot see a difference, what is the difference between a "normal store" and a "key reseller"?

How is GOG functionally different from Steam? They're still just a middle man. For actual DRM-free software, both GOG and Steam are nothing more than a convenience layer. If they're anything more than that, the software simply isn't DRM-free.

Not sure what you're trying to say here. The distinction is pretty clear: GOG distributes standalone installers without any DRM, and Steam does not.

What does the installer matter for DRM-free software? For software with other forms of DRM built-in anyway, who cares if the installer has it?

Correct, but GOG provides games without _any_ DRM, both in the installer and in the game itself.

The whole reason for GOG existing was they strip dead DRM from old games so the work again without "warez scene" cracks; and fix all the OS/driver incompatibilities along the way.

As far as I know all the games you can buy on GOG will be completely DRM free.

> What does the installer matter for DRM-free software?

Requiring a network-connected proprietary client to install the software is itself a form of DRM.

> For software with other forms of DRM built-in anyway, who cares if the installer has it?

Again, GOG does not distribute games that include DRM, whether in the installer or in the game itself.

Same but I strangely miss the social aspect of achievements on Steam. I prefer GOG but wish the achievements synced.

You are the first person I hear that seems to care about that.

I care about it a little, not comparing with friends, but I do like the "X% of players" stats.

Its one of the main reasons why I buy on steam. Makes games much more engaging, especially for me because I prefer hard action games with little to no story.

I typically think of myself (and try to act like) a rather rational person. The amount of hours of my life that I've done silly, mindless and occasionally annoying things because some Steam achievement required it is something I can't quite square with that. There's something oddly satisfying about getting them.

It's certainly not a primary purchase decision factor but I've not bought games because they did not come with steam achievements.

This is yet another reminder for me that the world is full of different people.

I view achievements as one of the most annoying developments in games (and unfortunately some productivity software these days, in the shape of "badges").

They're yet another gamified growth/engagement pattern to contend with in life.

I can take them or leave them, but maybe because I don't care much I feel like I get net enjoyment from them. Especially the funny ones (e.g. dying in an unusual way).

It seems to me (speaking from a non-gamer perspective) that Steam has nailed down the "app store" vibe better than GOG. I haven't looked much at GOG Galaxy, but AFAIK it's not a Steam-like app to search, buy, install and update games and DLC. I think that's a big part (the only part, maybe?) of Steam's value proposition.

Galaxy is a woefully unmaintained product. It's had known and unfixed CVEs for years now.

https://app.opencve.io/cve/?vendor=gog#:~:text=The%20GalaxyC...

> you’re not buying games you’re leasing them

Counterpoint, the cost of "owning" offline games is not zero and their lifetime is not infinite.

I have a stack of old games on CD (or older) and getting them to run on anything is a massive pain in the neck. (In fact, for nearly all that I care about I also have bought a Steam license in addition).

Ultimately, everything comes down to user experience. We can pat ourselves on the back for buying something forever, but experiences and the media they are stored on are both transitory.

Yea 100% it’s not as easy to use. But as far as I’m aware Steam doesn’t provide any guarantee games will keep working and GOG actually has it as a mission statement that, as least those selected as “Good Old Games”, will[0]. Now of course that requires GOG to survive so it’s sorta the same thing like you’re saying.

But I’d argue there is a material difference between “if you try hard you can run an original copy of Doom” and “if business X decided so you can never access those things again”.

0: https://www.gog.com/en/gog-preservation-program

Not to disagree, but proton has made it quite easy to run games I've previously struggled with. The nice thing is that it works with any binary, not just those you've purchased. Yes, it's wine, but valve has done wonders for its performance and compatibility.

This.

And if it doesn't wanna work on Proton, GEProton might work. I've had a few games like that. (I usually default to the latter and use the former as a fallback.)

GOG's mission statement is applied very selectively. For a long time they did not support windows 10, and even now it's really spotty. It's frequently on a per-game basis, and sometimes games that used to work, don't anymore.

Yeah but at least you can get the games. On my old MacBook (my only "modern" Mac), Steam auto-updated itself to a version that no longer runs on that machine. If that was my only computer (luckily it's not), I'd not only be completely locked out of the games I already installed, I'd also be unable to install any others -- despite the fact the games run perfectly on the machine. At least on GOG I can just go to the website and download the installers, no matter what [relatively-recent] computer I'm using.

> I have a stack of old games on CD (or older) and getting them to run on anything is a massive pain in the neck.

Anything? Inc. the recommended spec platform?

Steam does an amazing job at convenience, but GOG scratches a completely different itch

> Steam is really great for what it is but you’re not buying games you’re leasing them.

And you are not paying the large Valve tax (30%), so the publisher gets significantly more money from your purchase.

Completely anecdotal, but…

I spend quite a bit of time reading and writing tech history. I am not academic in this pursuit. I read old newspapers, magazines, websites, books, and interviews. Take some notes along the way, and then write an article. Usually, each article is a short history of a company that made significant contributions to the industry. For companies that still exist today, the end of these are articles are significantly more difficult to write (I usually write entirely in chronological order). Original sources are impossible to find, many news stories simply no longer exist, and I often find that I can only really rely on the company’s own quarterly or annual reports. This has only become worse over the few years I’ve been engaged in this hobby.

As my publication has grown, I’ve had the privilege of communicating directly with people present at the companies I cover, and this has been valuable. The problem is, many of these people are elderly and they won’t be around forever. For example, I wrote about PARC but was too late to interview Lynn Conway whose work is partially responsible for the entire world of processors we enjoy today.

Efforts like the archive and GOG are absolutely essential to the preservation of our history. I hope they manage to continue.

I love the genre, if you can call it a genre.

Share please!

https://www.abortretry.fail

In case I'm not the only one who didn't know what GOG stood for:

   “GOG stands for freedom, independence, and genuine control.”

But actually, it stands (stood?) for Good Old Games. :)

It was "good old games", then they announced that good old games was going away and after everyone panic-downloaded their whole collection they announced that they weren't going anywhere but they were just going to be GOG without it standing for anything.

That was after they had new releases for a while.

GOG marketing team at the time: "Now we do a little trolling".

Denoting a translation is not the only thing that "stands for" stands for.

No, it literally doesn't stand for good old games. Not for a very long time.

I stand agog as I breathlessly await the next exciting element of this discussion.

I'm waiting for MAGOG so the Biblical End Times can begin.

The End Times went legacy mode :

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/magog_a_search_engine_for_...

https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/investors/regulatory-announceme...

>Pursuant to the Purchase Agreement, on 31 December 2025 Michał Kiciński will acquire from the Company 2715 shares in GOG, i.e. 100% of the shares in GOG representing 100% of the votes at the shareholders’ meeting of GOG, for a price of PLN 90,695,440.00

>In accordance with the arrangements of the parties to the Transaction, prior to the execution of the Purchase Agreement, an amount of PLN 44,200,000.00 (forty-four million two hundred thousand zlotys 00/100) was paid out to the Company as distribution of due – as the Company was thus the sole shareholder of GOG – profits of GOG from previous years.

90 million PLN being ~21,5 million euros. Seems like some money was also held there.

It's so nice to have these little oases of ethical businesses in tech. A shame that it feels like the desert is only growing exponentially.

> he believes GOG’s approach is more relevant than ever: no lock-in, no forced platforms, sense of ownership

I really hope that we'll be freed from the forced Windows platform. Sure, you can download and install GOG games today using a third-party client, but it'll never be as good as official support. There's also the issue of syncing saved games and achievements, not to mention the additional friction for less tech-savvy users.

TBH Heroic Launcher isn't particularly hard to get. Just download and run the AppImage file from their site, login to your GOG account and it'll download any dependencies automatically.

It isn't any harder to use Heroic Launcher than it is to use Steam and some distros have both in their repositories.

it's really hard to say. the games industry is huge. it is significantly more diverse than video, where people have been making the same arguments and have gotten absolutely zero traction, so it's hard to say there is a lot of demand for what he is saying.

there is space for the specific thesis he is talking about, but it isn't necessarily the biggest opportunity in, whatever niche, which is to say, the line is probably going to keep trending down.

Does anyone know the backstory here? Is CDprojekt not the right owner anymore? I am clearly not following the ownership closely here ( but maybe I should have ).

It's part of the FAQ at the bottom:

> Why is CD PROJECT doing this?

> Selling GOG fits CD PROJEKT’s long-term strategy. CD PROJEKT wants to focus its full attention on creating top-quality RPGs and providing our fans with other forms of entertainment based on our brands. This deal lets CD PROJEKT keep that focus, while GOG gets stronger backing to pursue its own mission.

> What is GOG's position in this?

> To us at GOG, this feels like the best way to accelerate what is unique about GOG. Michał Kiciński is one of the people who created GOG around a simple idea: bring classic games back, and make sure that once you purchase a game, you have control over it forever. With him acquiring GOG, we keep long-term backing that is aligned with our values: freedom, independence, control, and making games stay playable over time.

Apologies, I accept FAQ exists, but I am simply asking if there is more to the story than corporate release.

GOG isn’t as good of a business as CDPR’s development studios so it is getting spun off.

I wouldn't be surprised if this action was in advance of some kind of acquisition. GOG gets spun off as protection, so they can stick to their mission while somebody like Microsoft, Sony, Tencent or the Saudis add The Witcher and Cyberpunk to their portfolios.

GOGs biggest problem is they don't have enough new titles.

I've gotten all the old titles I want... Now I want new stuff! (There are even plenty of recent games I would pay for again just to have a GOG copy. I don't mind rewarding good developers by purchasing multiple copies.)

I've spent hundreds of hours on the GOG version of Heroes of Might and Magic 3. Every community recommends the GOG version over the Steam HD one. I didn't think how important GOG was to me, but now I'm going to find that patron program they're talking about. It would be great if in 30 years I can still play Master of Magic and that won't happen by itself.

> Master of Magic

I picked up a bargain bin CD ROM of this game in 1996 and it works under dosbox as well as it ever did. Which is to say mostly ok but sometimes hilariously crashy. I think what needs to happen for us to spend another 30 years crafting overpowered plate mail is for there to continue being good emulators for the mid 90s DOS environment.

Do you ever play online multiplayer HOMM3? Is it a thing nowadays?

You might be interested in VCMI, which is an open source engine for HoMM3.

https://vcmi.eu/

It is great because game preservation isn't what game industry shareholders usually interested.

CD Project makes great games, but gaming industry is all-or-nothing. They already had colossal flop at their previous release. If another flop happens shutting down GOG is clearly would be on a table as a cost cutting measure.

I don't think it's fair to call Cyberpunk 2077 a colossal flop. It had an awful release, but the company stood behind it and fixed everything that needed fixing. Five years later it is now an acclaimed game that sold 35 million copies.

Yup, Cyberpunk 2077 has sold more copies in the same time frame than Witcher 3, which is routinely highlighted as one of the best and most successful games of all time.

You have to give kudos to CD PROJEKT for not just abandoning the game after a bad launch (which is what every other major studio would have done in its place) but patiently fixing problems and constantly adding content over 5 years to get to the state it is in today. And the game has no online requirement, no multiplayer, no microtransactions. Just one paid expansion which added a ton of new content. Rare to see this behavior in the industry today.

> which is what every other major studio would have done in its place

Afaik CDPR doesn't make many games. If one flops, that might be the end of them. I don't see abandoning a game as a valid option for them from a financial perspective. Makes much more sense to fix the issues and sell more.

I think it’s more related to their reputation? People will buy the next one if they trust CDPR will fix anything wrong with it even if it flops.

Kinda how you trust paradox strategy titles to get several years of updates and expansions.

Studious dont abandon failed releases because they are evil. Its just releases fail because they run out of money so there just nothing to burn to save them.

CDPR just was lucky enough to make enough money of failed release to fix it. Most companies get no chance to do it.

EA is notorious for throwing games out there and abandoning them as soon as they don't turn out to be massive hits. That is a company that has plenty of resources to support the games and fix the bugs.

Not gonna protect EA the company here, but lots and lots of other games also flop on release because money.

Definite kudos to them for that, though notably it's down to 65% off now, so presumably many of those copies were for not-full-retail price.

And the Switch 2 port likely cost considerable engineering effort and underperformed as well.

The fact that sales exist is a thing for every game just about

Sure, but when you speak of Arc Raiders selling 7M copies by late November, basically all of those were at $70-80 because the game just came out.

Maybe I'm not contributing meaningfully to the dialogue, but talking about total sales across a 5 year lifespan means you're necessarily including all those packrat users who picked it up on deep discount and haven't even booted it up once (or, like me, played two hours and in that initial window wasn't especially grabbed by the story, characters, or progression systems that the game was wanting me to engage with). It's different when something really pops off on release and sells all those copies in the first few months.

Sure, might make some difference. Probably not that helpful given we’re just doing back of the napkin stuff anyway

What game was a colossal flop? Cyberpunk was released too early but they kept on delivering patches and then the players game. It's their highest earning title.

I also started playing it this year and the experience at least now has been fantastic

IIRC they fixed various bugs but they didn't fix the broken promises. The biggest problems with Cyberpunk were architectural, things that would basically require redesigning the game to match what was promised.

Online sentiment has drastically changed about how bad those broken promises were - a near-complete turnaround, similar to what happened with No Man's Sky. Basically from when the DLC was released, most people started feeling that they fulfilled the essence of everything that was promised.

IMO Cyberpunk is fundamentally not the game their marketing promissed. They marketed it as actually non-linear RPG and beyond very beginning of the game they just could't deliver on it.

After tons of patches and DLCs its just became a very very good game. Just not what was promissed.

Those kinds of promises only engage a small niche of nolife who follow news about upcoming games.

Most customers only hear about a game when it is released and reviewed and/or recommended by a friend and will never have heard about them.

Yet those niche nolife hardcore fans is exactly what makes or breaks games. If 10,000 unhappy hardcore fans will go around pouring shit on your game and company then you likely never get 1,000,000 players who could've potentially liked it.

Nolife hardcore fans will also be the the first to buy your game, review it and tell everyone if they did not liked it.

CDPR got huge amount of trust after Witcher 3 and they mostly had to start over after CP2077 release.

EA can survive if 4/10 of their games flops completely, but company like CDPR will likely just end there.

Except it very much didn’t break this game how did it? Best selling game to date.

This was only possible because CDPR still had immense amounts of cash flow from both witcher 3 and from CP2077 pre-orders.

Pre orders are _for that game_ so they count as success for that game, and also may people were still buying it bugs and all. I reckon without Witcher 3 cash flow they’d have survived still anyway, it may not have even been as big a factor as you think.

>CDPR got huge amount of trust after Witcher 3

...which was a complete shitshow on release as well...

I don’t know what you’re talking about and if I did I probably wouldn’t care, the game is great.

>The biggest problems with Cyberpunk were architectural, things that would basically require redesigning the game to match what was promised.

86% of all-time Steam reviews for Cyberpunk 2077 are positive, and if you only look at recent reviews, it's 94% positive.

I don't think the game has architectural problems that prevent it from being a massive success.

>CD Project makes great games, but gaming industry is all-or-nothing. They already had colossal flop at their previous release. If another flop happens shutting down GOG is clearly would be on a table as a cost cutting measure.

Cyberpunk was really successful from $$ standpoint and continues to generate huge revenue even today.

Gog is great and I've been a member since probably 2010.

The one feature that would encourage me to buy more of their games is a "install into steam" script with each game. It's a massive pain in the ass making my gog games run on my steam deck.

I keep meaning to write a script to do this to ease that pain.

Have you tried using Heroic? I don't use it on the Steam Deck so maybe I'm missing something, but I use it on desktop linux all the time and it's been seamless for me.

The Steam client has to restart in order to pick up the newly added external titles, at least last time I tried. In gaming mode, restarting the client means restarting the system, which is ever so slightly annoying.

Apart from that though, it works just fine on the Steam Deck.

I just tried it today actually - I just had to exit the steam deck UI mode, enter desktop mode, add them with Heroic, and then restart the deck UI mode from the desktop shortcut and it worked!

Lutris and when that fails, manually doing it myself.

One big annoyance is that to browse community controller configs you need to change the name of the game to it's steam numeric id (which can be found in the URL for the equivalent game on steam website).

I'll try heroic.

I try to buy gog versions but sometimes I just think "when will I get time to configure this, I could just buy the steam version"

That's interesting, I'll keep it mind. I also got sucked into steam defaultism, because they do so many things right.

Though, I think gog does better versions of some old games. For example I think their doom 3 includes the original not just there bfg edition. They really try to give you a patched "should just work on a windows pc" version.

I started building up my digital game library on Steam.

I then gradually switched to GOG, sometimes buying things again (it's not that bad with the identical deep discounts for most games on all platforms), because of the better DRM situation and because I like to be in relationships with public companies, so that I can buy their shares.

When GOG messed up their cloud saves functionality (reduced the granted storage to the point where I had to delete old saves – sure, I'll never need them, but I still want [someone else] to keep them), I switched back to Steam.

When I got tired of sitting at a desk to play I ended up switching to the Switch.

Switch 1 games running on the Switch 2 have bad resolution, the Steam Machine is interesting, and hopefully there'll be a lighter Steam Deck – I might end up at Steam again.

Michał Kiciński (the co-founder mentioned in the article) also funded a Vipassana retreat in Poland. You can go there to meditate for around 10–21 days, it's completely free, and people from all over the EU attend. I know because someone I know goes there regularly.

I think it's good. CDPR essentially can be increasingly driven by shareholders. If they are making GOG private now, they can pursue their own vision without being pressured.

For self-hosting nerds, I can recommend looking at Gamevault (https://gamevau.lt)

Passionate people working on creating a self-hosted game library. They deserve attention and support!

I wish there was a general software equivalent of GOG that provided much older software with removed DRM.

This a hundred time

What old software are you thinking about?

They already told you exactly what software they are thinking about.

Whatever software you have ever used, or that anyone has ever used, that's what they are thinking about.

That's what "general software" means.

I was interested in learning about notable old software.

Although it would never happen, the old Office suites and Adobe products would be nice. Not for any silly "retro" or "nostalgia" value, but simply because much software from around the time of the millennium is still incredibly useful. I use Photoshop 6.0 for all my image manipulation tasks.

GOP

It seems these days every video game publisher wants its own storefront and game launcher. Weird that CD PROJEKT is instead giving up a very popular one.

I wish you could always go straight to the publisher, I don't want an extra middleman in the transaction. GOG is fine because after the transaction you can download the install media and they're out of the mix, but the Steam/Epic model is terrible, it needlessly turns an open platform into a closed one.

Agreed. I know Steam has done some good things for the industry, and people love them for it, but they are also single handedly responsible for turning PC gaming from "buy and own forever" to a revocable license model. GOG is probably the last place remaining where you can actually buy games.

First time I heard about GOG. Is like Steam but you download the .exe installer (or wahtever format it is) from the game you purchase? Like Kazaa/Ares but paid? I love it to be honest, and I think that's how it should be, but how do creators (and GOG) fight piracy? What's preventing me from buying, getting the offline installer and then sharing it later?

If I am wrong and GOG is something completely different, then let's build something like this together! (a marketplace of offline installers!)

> What's preventing me from buying, getting the offline installer and then sharing it later?

Nothing. People already do that. GOG does not fight against this, to my knowledge they believe that people will willingly pay for good games. It worked with Witcher 3 10 years ago as an example.

I love this, to be honest. Glad to learn that this is how the operate!

God, that's how today's kids see drm-free software?

As something hard to wrap your mind around?

I suspect this has been in a vague planning stage for the last few years, as various integrations between GOG and CD PROJEKT RED were slowly dismantled over that time (I particularly recall a GWENT account migration away from GOG).

Also, I guess this is as good a place as any to plug my GOG game discovery service and price tracker: https://gamesieve.com/ - basically a more full-featured way to explore GOG's catalog.

GOG is like, hope for the universe. It’s such a great purpose and goal, to keep these games playable, and it .. is just great.

Please release a Linux client or, even better, officially support and invest in developing Heroic Games Launcher so we can play our DRM free GOG games on a libre OS.

That and/or proper remote desktop implementation.

Literally sitting with Lutris in front of me downloading a game from GOG right now. Can Heroic Games not handle it themselves like Lutris? Seems easy enough for other FOSS projects to do, I'd rather GOG continue focusing on ensuring the games run on modern hardware, and acquiring licenses to good old games, rather than now expanding the support for their already mediocre launcher.

Exactly, or open the protocol and let the community write it.

Third option is to ensure the downloader runs under proton, which I think it does but haven’t tried.

Protocol is well documented already, GOG aren't really blocking community clients:

https://gogapidocs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

The problem is mostly that their backend isn't wired for Linux builds so you can't use the APIs for native Linux versions.

Heroic works perfectly, in a manner identical to Lutris (from a user perspective). I tested both several years ago and have been a happy Heroic user since.

However, neither support 2 key features of GOG Galaxy:

1. cloud saves

2. achievements

These are 2 of the most significant features of competitors like Steam, IMO, so missing them for GOG on Linux is unfortunate.

That's simply not true at all, Heroic Launcher supports both cloud saves and achievements. I've been using them for a long time on Deck now.

Please don't lie :/

I was mixing up the fact that "Linux native games do not support GOG's Cloud Saves feature" (direct quote from the app itself), with a general lack of support. Given it says "Use the Windows version instead", I am quite wrong, it clearly does support them for Windows games.

If you think that's a "lie", consult a dictionary.

As for whether my general point stands, I think it's a reasonable inference that if GOG Galaxy supported Linux, it would support Linux games and cloud saves for those games, and only then would Heroic and the like be able to implement such a feature. I could be wrong, as it depends on details I don't know, and I'm just making an educated guess.

I just installed a GOG Windows game in Heroic, and the Settings state "This game does not support Cloud Saves" even though my account has cloud saves clearly visible for that same game on the GOG website.

Given I'm using Heroic from AUR on a supported OS, and installed with default settings, I consider this cloud save support to be less than stellar, but that's a separate matter, I'm not trying to turn this thread into a support issue.

And yet somehow you outright opened it with a direct falsehood.

Yeah I was wrong and admitted it and explained the genesis and nuances of it. "And yet somehow"... why say "somehow" as if it's a mystery now? "outright opened" is a very poor construction as well. "direct" in "direct falsehood" is not doing much there either. Please work a little harder at your scolding and condescension, the quality is somewhat low. Better yet, engage thoughtfully and charitably instead.

Heroic's cloud save support is flaky; I've had it upload saves to the wrong path so Galaxy on another machine can't download them.

As for achievements, I wouldn't say it's had support for "a long time"; they were added in August 2024 (v2.15.1).

So it supports both for a year and a half, what are you nitpicking now exactly?

That it’s had either for “a long time”. Maybe once they’ve been there and working correctly for five years I’d feel that’s an accurate adjective.

I use lgogdownloader, but yeah they should improve their Linux support. At the very least the immediate benefit would be Galaxy protocol support for their Linux builds.

> Please release a Linux client

The whole point of GOG is that you don't need a "client" -- it's just a store.

If you want to use something other than a standard web browser to install your games, there are plenty of options, including projects like Lutris and lgogdownloader.

I think the issue with requests to "release the client" isn't as simple as "you can use an open source alternative".

Their Galaxy backend only handles Windows and macOS builds of games. Linux builds aren't included now. There are hacks around it like using access to individual files over HTTP through zip format for Linux installers as pseudo Galaxy (lgogdownloader supports that) but it's still just a hack.

Another piece is multiplayer integration that games can ship. That depends on their support too (authentication, matching and etc).

The OSS alternatives do download and install the Linux builds.

But again, the whole point of GOG is that you don't need a special client in the first place. You just get ordinary installers, and don't have to deal with the game requiring a third party's proprietary launcher.

I bought a lot of stuff from GOG a long time ago, but the only thing I've use them for in the past 5 years is claiming Prime Gaming rewards on Twitch. I don't think I've even downloaded a single one of them. I'm curious if that agreement with Amazon might have hurt GOG. Did it cost them some money when people like me to claim all those games without ever converting to a paying customer?

I also have wondered about the Amazon/Twitch deal. I suspect it's all net-positive income for GOG but much like Google funding Firefox, if Amazon ever decides to take it away I wonder how much damage that would do to GOG. Certainly some damage of awareness. I think the only thing I've bought on GOG was the Yakuza 0-6 collection, the other hundred+ games were free. I've at least downloaded and played some of them, Lutris on Linux works fairly well. (Many were ones I already bought and played on steam, which is kind of annoying, but some of them were ones I was planning to buy if they went on sale, so whatever. I'm more mixed about how it, plus Epic's game giveaways, can damage the entire concept of paying for games. Gamepass factors in too, but Steam's routine sales also ruined me from the idea of paying "full price". I can't look at Switch or Oculus/Meta pricing and think it's worth it.)

Never heard of gog.com before (not much of a gamer anymore these days) but it looks really cool! I wonder, though, how exactly do they handle the copyright and licensing topic? Do they negotiate terms separately with every copyright holder? Do they get access to the source code in order to preserve the games and make them fully offline-compatible?

> Do they negotiate terms separately with every copyright holder?

Yes

> Do they get access to the source code in order to preserve the games and make them fully offline-compatible?

Sometimes, sometimes their role is just packaging the game with a dosbox config too, or a developer provided drm free build

Some games get packaged with other emulators beyond dosbox as well. GOG includes and configures ScummVM for some applicable games, for instance.

If they can manage to deliver a client which is less technically amok than the steam client... But steam is a worldwide payment system, I can use wallet codes nearly everywhere without inputing my credit card info and that require a lot of international work to match.

The steam client requires linux "user" containers(jez...), the launcher is a 32bits binary hardcoded on x11 and GL, all that because they are unwilling to engage in the significant amount of work (because of their technical debt and poor technical choices) of generating 'correct' ELF64 binaries for broad elf/linux distro support.

I am wary of the long-term prospects of GOG, but then again, I've always been wary of that since they launched - and they consistently prove me wrong.

GOG remains my first choice when I go looking for PC titles. I think it should be everyone's first choice, if I'm honest, even if Steam currently operates in a relatively consumer-friendly way. Having those offline patches and installers is a freedom you just cannot match on Steam or any other platform, and they're highly relevant to households like mine where game sharing is being cracked down upon by major publishers (looking at you, Nintendo).

Keep on keepin' on, GOG. I'm rootin' for ya.

GOG talking about preservation and ownership has always sounded sincere, but backing that up with independence from a public company structure makes it much more credible

For anyone else wondering what GOG is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOG.com

Not sure how to read this. But what I do notice is big publishers often put less effort and attention into GOG releases (fewer platforms, older releases, incomplete offerings), with the net effect of sabotaging the platform. It seems intentional in many cases rather than omission.

The more things change, the more they stay the same?

I rarely use GOG, but they're doing good work, so it's nice to know they'll be sticking around. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Preliminary research suggests that old DOS libraries contain graphics engines for GOG.

DRM libraries, whether DMCA or copyright law protects it, is an anomaly to include the part about the Projekt.

Awesome news really, I've bought countless games from GOG (more than Steam I think at this point) and it's a company I'll always support. Great business decision.

does this mean we will finally get more games on it instead of sitting on the dreamlist for years with no change?

GOG is getting acquired by it's original co-funder

It's nice that it should be a non-event for users.

Hope for the best, fear for the worst.

Even google I hacked

At least it’s not another Chinese firm

I can't remember but there have been two games where the "it's your game, offline installer" promise was broken on Gog. Have they since come out to restate that promise?

I always felt a bit sad that before I could just KNOW that it'll work that's gog! but since that time I always have to double check and by that point why not just use steam?

Can't find anything about those broken promises at a glance

Gwent comes to mind as an undownloadable game, which must be run from the first-party launcher, it is a free game (not counting in-game spending) which is always-online, so practically the antithesis of GOG

GOG and CD PROJEKT splitting up should ensure this is not going to happen in the future as much.

It was HITMAN released on GOG with always online DRM and removed after backlash. They obviously refunded to everyone.

https://www.gog.com/en/news/release_hitman_game_of_the_year_...

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/release_hitman_game_of_the...

Yes that was the one! They ultimately just removed the game right? I can't find it. They cannot cede an inch otherwise the game store is pointless. I'm glad it's gone.

Thank you!

I bought from GOG once, and downloaded their launcher. Then, I started the game, played for maybe an hour, put my PC to sleep and went to bed. Then, the next next day, I resumed my PC from sleep, closed the game, and because I didn't like it, decided a few days later to request a refund.

The game had 26 hours or so logged, because Galaxy has a poor way to log hours. Apparently the interval between game start and game end is the time you played the game.

The support declined my refund request, I tried to explain that I didn't even get the achievements of after the tutorial and that I could impossibly have played that many hours because I was simply not on my PC.

The gist is: If you buy a game from GOG which you might won't like: NEVER download galaxy, only the offline installers! I didn't do that because it was too convenient to download their launcher, as the offline installer of the game I played (Baldurs Gate 3) was split into many, many files, which I would have to download one by one and install them all by hand.

Still sour to this day that I have not gotten my 50€ back. Steam never had such issues for me, and even if you can at least ask their support to escalate the ticket so someone from L2/L3 or even engineering looks at your ticket.

You do put your PC to sleep without closing your programs !?

Yes! That's exactly what the sleep mode is for.

I am not an anxious person. But that thing, "waking up sleeping computer with programs freezed in it", makes me anxious.

I just can't...

You better not buy mobile devices a la steam deck or laptops then.

You're right, I

    sudo shutdown now

Every time before closing the lid of my laptop...

Is there a rationale behind it, or do you just feel that way? I have never run into issues with this, and real coding bugs like the one in GOG Galaxy, where play time =time_process_end - time_process_start instead of continously sending heartbeats like steam, are probably a bigger issue.

I think I fear system instability and its consequent (probable) problems.

Sleep does a lot of things, a lot I don't necessarily understand, all the OS layers are stressed at once, and with them a whole lot of other things, bith software and hardware related. Are all the drivers of your system trustworthy, are all the running applications trustworthy ? Are we sure no data loss will occur ? Will you lose audio, wifi, display or excessive battery because of a race condition or an error of some sort in an element of the whole involved stack ?

Most of the time everything is fine, or is it ? Maybe your computer will hit kernel panic after two hours or so, and you will have hard time figuring the real cause and origin.

tldr; I think it scares me because it increase the probability for the system to surprise crash at a very crucial time (while compiling something, in between two saves of a text buffer, during a write to disk...)

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