Now i am someone whos a Huge Fan of DRM Free Gaming (well im in GOG Community go figure :P) and basically what i was always wondering as as to why DRM seems to be so popular still among Gamers considering StarForce and such? >.>
DRM Free Gaming is probably mostly a Thing that probably comes into Old Gamers Minds more than newer ones considering that StarForce and SafeDisc are more or less RetroDRMs that i doubt many Newer Gamers cant phatom really? >.>
But what surprises me the most is that the Voice arent “louder” for even just removing Basic Denuvo after 6 Months off Steam or so >.>
Like for me itd be honestly fine to make a Trade off them just having Denuvo on a New Release for 6 - 12 Months and then removing it honestly as itd love to buy Games such as the Persona Games instead of having to emulate them honestly :P
Where i was wondering as to Why is GOG not the most Popular Gaming Platform?
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EGS strongarms their position by dumping money in more immediate strategies. Steam is one of the earlier to stick around, they’re discreet and they have well-integrated social features. Other big players some years ago I’d say that must think DRM free = piracy, but nowadays it seems more like a case of “you will own nothing and be happy”.
Meanwhile, GOG has the tendency to be stretched thin monetarily, its launcher sucks, they do some big blunder every few months (including a potential geopolitical one with Devotion), their social features are the best they’ve ever been (reads “miserable”, instead of “abysmal”), and only in recent years the worries about ownership and privacy seem to be becoming mainstream. Also GOG’s previous CEO seemed to only appear publicly to do damage control with crocodile tears, and their communications and support depts. felt as empty as the Linux maintenance dept.
However, in this past year, they’ve been doing quite a lot changes hopefully for the better, and that due to culminating with Michał buying the company off CD Projekt, I feel like those were demands of the purchase process that must’ve been in the works at least since the changes began.
So aside from the recent AI blunder (old habits die hard, eh?), I’m curious to see if the changes for the better will keep building up.
i figure it’s a momentum thing.
Valve benefited from being First To Market with this model. They were already well established before anyone else tried to make their own.
epic games store, ubisoft connect, and also whatever used to be origin, all these launchers were HEAVILY marketed and users were shoehorned into them as a mandatory condition of playing a game, and they are all floundering.
GOG, though? No marketing. No coercion. Mostly it’s word of mouth and good will. And they are doing pretty alright. They were also NOT being first to market. They furthermore did NOT waste loads and loads of cash trying to push themselves onto people. Furthermore, you buy a game from GOG and you don’t even NEED to install their launcher! All their game installers function perfectly STAND-ALONE!
I’d say, with all that in mind, GOG is literally doing better than anyone that isn’t Steam.
And in my view, they are ever improving, even now.
I think this is missing one other crucial factor in GOG becoming established: they targeted a niche.
Seems like a lot of people don’t really know this any more, but GOG’s ‘thing’ didn’t used to be a focus on being DRM-free, it was a focus on making old games accessible again.
GOG used to stand for Good Old Games.
Until GOG came along, publishers had next to no interest in making their older games available - things like Doom, Monkey Island, System Shock, Star Wars Dark Forces, etc. Hard to believe now, but none of these games used to be available to buy anywhere - if you wanted to play them you had to either own the original discs, find a torrent, or visit a dodgy abandonware site.
It was GOG who identified that gap in the market and established themselves as the store for legally owning digital copies of these old games for the first time. Steam was actually playing catch up on that front for quite a while, and many old games are still better maintained on GOG than on Steam.
yea thats something i can get behind honestly! :D
Like i said i do really love their Installers but i just wish more People would use them over Steam or similiar launchers :(A while back, Tim Sweeney said the market share of the Epic store was 15%, while GOG’s was around 0.5 to 1%, which isn’t implausible. The players count of the Epic store has been significantly boosted by Fortnite, exclusives, and high-profile game giveaways.
EGS CEO says EGS is better
Where in my comment do I say anything about it being better? The comment I replied to says GOG is doing better than the other stores except Steam, but even if you don’t trust Sweeney, look at any independent data relating to game revenue or Fortnite’s player counts. That alone will show you GOG isn’t even in the ballpark.
Eh, GOG is doing alright. I switched almost completely. If there is a GOG version, I buy it even if it is more expensive - which it very often isn’t or just very slightly. And I’m saying this as someone who is playing all of this on a SteamDeck.
i can get behind this honestly :P
tho i gotta be honest i reallyo nly buy Games nowadays if theyre on Sale (which is also most often the Case XD) due to mebing not the wealtiest and not liking also to buy 60+ Euro Games :P
I’d say GOG’s position only proves the point of Epic and the ongoing class action lawsuits against Valve. Steam is deeply entrenched in the market and uses shady tactics like telling developers not to sell games for less outside Steam. You’d think offering good features and better practices would help, but it has not. Gamers are overwhelmingly positive about GOG, but most feel tied to Steam, and only a handful buy from GOG. It’s no wonder Epic prioritized exclusives.
**Telling developers that they can’t have bigger discounts on other store fronts is an unsubstantiated claim by one developer. The official policy has to do with discounting Steam keys, ie selling a Steam game for less than on the Steam store, while keeping all profits and taking advantage of Steams features.
If general sales were actually being restricted by Steam, it would have been made immediately obvious with sites like isthereanydeal. Such a site would have no reason to exist if the Steam store would always have the best discounts due to forced store policy.
*EDIT: Was gonna strike through this text, can’t get formatting to work. See below comment by [email protected]
“Overwhelmingly positive” please spend at least 5 minutes reading the GOG general discussion forums and get back to me. GOG is constantly being criticized by their main user base for how poorly they run their store and their nonsensical business decisions. I don’t think this is a bad thing tbh; its a better situation than the Steam fanboys being creepy boot lickers. But I would not describe GOGs most adamant supports being universally “positive” about the state of the store and company.
The general customer base of GOG does not care about the Galaxy 2.0 client, or GOGs collaboration with Amazon Luna for streaming owned titles. I don’t know what other “good features” you could be referring to. GOG is barebones, but competent, in the world of digital store fronts/game launchers. But obviously being competent is not enough when dealing with an entrenched monopoly.
Most gamers do not care about DRM. This is the same market that is suffering from enshittification at an abnormal rate. This market has already long normalized things like gambling mechanics advertised towards children, or installing spyware for the sole purpose of stopping cheaters. Outside of the bubble of online discussions, the target audience does not think about these things and will buy whatever slop is put in front of them. Clearly the people who buy Denuvo releases at launch on Steam do not feel any reason to buy games on GOG specifically. And judging by public sales/player data, that’s a lot of people.
One developer? The Wolfire case contains dozens of those messages to various developers, irrespective of Steam key use. See page 160 here. The way Valve goes about it is also not contradicted by you pointing out there are lower prices. For one, they say they expect price parity soon, not immediately. Secondly, they don’t and can’t enforce that rule automatically, so there are always instances they don’t see. As seen in those messages from court, sometimes their response is to restrict the games’ visibility on the store, which is not something a platform like ITAD can track.
I will admit that I foolishly believed someone else’s summation on the situation; that sourced report, assuming the emails are real, is pretty damning. Notably the email correspondence between publishers/developers and Valve does not mention any official policy, but without additional context comes off as threatening… multiple examples of punishment and out right removal from the store, wow.
And incidents as recent as 2022. I would have figured the older examples would be there because Valve was a lot more blatantly corrupt when they were first forcing the Steam client on consumers. People tend not to bring up when Valve was buying exclusivity of already released retail CD games and taking them off shelves to force Steam exclusivity. Wonder why its taken this long to come out in a court case? Its not like there isn’t a long, recent history of indie devs yelling publicly on the internet about the dumb shit Valve puts them through.
A case like this takes money and years of efforts. I don’t think any indie dev would be willing to spend that much, especially knowing Valve can afford incredible lawyers. The evidence would have to be really convincing for this to even be worth risking. Those messages not being accurate could also make the plaintiffs liable for lying under oath.
GOG also has a partnership with Amazon Luna. You can play some games you own on their service (like through a fire tv stick). It’s a smaller library than what all is available on GOG. And it requires an Amazon Prime subscription. (I know some people don’t like Amazon, and for good reasons. Still thought I’d mention.)
For me i never tried Amazon Luna tho i did recieve the Free GOG Games because of my Parents having Amazon Prime :P
Hey that’s a win!
Gamers just don’t care about non-intrusive DRM. The ideological downside of losing access to a game at some unknown point in the future just isn’t real enough for many people to care about. If there were more examples of it happening (e.g. The Crew) I think we’d start seeing a culture shift. I do think there are a fair number of gamers who will skip buying games just because they include worse DRM like Denuvo, but games that ship with Denuvo are typically also just bad games, so the intention of “voting against DRM with your wallet” gets a bit diluted.
One thing that would help, I think, is to always mention the DRM free options first, then Steam. The mainstream user gets what he wants, but not before hearing about DRM-free.
GOG is missing critical convenience features. Like the ability to buy and gift games. Or even just buy a gift card for their games. This would be a yearly buy for my nieces and nephews but there’s no availability. I keep asking. It keeps not being there.
That’s not correct.
I have totally gifted Games via GOG in the past.
E.g. my nephew got KSP from me last birthday.On the Game page it prominently shows a “buy as present” button.
Recipient doesn’t even need his own GOG account.Perhaps some regional block?
Where are you from?Is this a new feature? USA.
My account is Brazilian and for the near 10 years I’ve had it, their purchase options always seemed to be on pair. And Brazil isn’t known to get stuff first in general for technology.
No, has been around for ages for me. Germany.
Looks like this for Games in my library, for other Games there is a checkbox for gifting later in the order process.
“Like the ability to buy and gift games” uh wut? >.>
Now maybe theres a misunderstanding in English but i can gif Games to my Wife and she aslo to me and we never had Issues really even tho were from different Continents :P
But i do agree with the Gift Card Abbility considering that even Steam has such -.-A gift card would let them pick their own games. I’m not sure why a gift card is so difficult here.
Having been a gog account holder for…waayyy longer than i care to admit:
Gog started off with old games in DOS wrappers, that was their niche. Modern games and galaxy are relatively new additions. So they’ve been coming up behind steam, but they’re definitely getting there
I defentely would hope os considering that theyre to me seem like the only Real Steam Competition as EGS is i believe without the Free Games nothing really >.>
I switched to gog, but with the steam deck it’s more convenient to have games on steam so I switched back since I bought it. Also I like indie games and there are many missing titles on gog
On a small tangent, might I suggest the Heroic Launcher? It connects GOG, Prime Gaming, EGS and (in beta) Zoom Platform, and makes things rather seamless while keeping things pretty self-contained on Linux.
Also apparently the Playnite devs are working on a Linux version. It’s more basic than Heroic Launcher, but users can add unofficial plugins for more platforms.
For me i use mostly itch io for Indie Games rather than Steam actually XD
which is for example also how i bought Celeste :P
I prefer GOG too but Steam is simple, no installation needed for the games, has more games at the same price.
Both Steam and GOG requires installing a game to play it.
I would presume 6nk06 means “seamless install”.
Maybe they’re referring to playing remotely from their home computer? That often doesn’t require a local install.
There is that. I can even stream a Steam game on windows to a Linux computer. It’s quite versatile.
eh i mean i can defently see that as i also use Steam of course but i do prefer GOG over Steam anyday really! :P
Just the Fact that i can backup my Games easily without having to first use Goldberg on my Steam Games makes it much more Convenient imo to use over Steam :D
But i can obviously see your Arguments with the Amount of Games just basically being non existent especially with the whole JRPG Gaming Category being basically Steam Only :P
Even tho i pray that changes due to the Final Fantasys now being on GOG XDAdding to your 3rd point…
10k vs 100k games in their catalogues iirc. Though sure, it’s 10:1 in favor of Steam, 10 thousand games on a “small store” is no small feat. If not having the trending AAA games of the season is being a “small store”, then Sony’s consoles should be the absolute kings, and still there seems to be a steady decline in those culminating in all the comments and jokes about the PS5 having no games.
@RetroHax EN : Because it’s “neither here nor there.” They preach ethics but only do things halfway, with old games that have bugs that make them unplayable and missing features (fewer languages) without any rational explanation. But they could go further and attract a certain audience thanks to this:
stop one-off sales and instead offer a steady reduction to a reasonable price that doesn’t change, more Linux games, free games…On Linux versions of games, I remember coming across some news that they’re hiring to work on those.
eh? >.>
I am honestly a bit confused as to where your coming from with this >.>
i personally would not say i have noticed some kind of Game Breaking Bug in a lot of Older Games to be honest >.>
Major Factor is maybe no Controller support in some Old Games but i suppose i just let that Fly really since as long as my Game works and i can get it DRM Free i gladly pay the Price honestly :PBut i also wouldnt mind obviously discussing it more with you :P
Especially considering that i dont understand the “neither here nor there.” Thing of yours >.>It’s not uncommon to see Scumm or DOS games having their wrapper / emulator outdated. In special for ScummVM, that’s problematic as usually that means you’ll have to figure out how to install or compile some outdated dependency, or provide a newer ScummVM yourself, defeating the purpose of having the packaged one included.
yea i gotta be honest i really do not understand why atleast for linux they ship Old DOSBOX or ScummVM considering how easy it is to simply install them on Linux and just have the start.sh file give an Error if it cant find DOSBOX or ScummVM on the System really >.>
Arguably it’s because they can’t ensure the same (or higher) level of compatibility with newer versions of dosbox or scummvm (e.g. because of regressions). It’s still possible to use newer dosbox/scummvm with the games they provide by hacking around the launcher and/or just using the installation elseways, but it would be nice if this was supported at the installation package level.
@RetroHax Do you have an example of a game that won’t support controllers?
Well mostly Old Games like the FlatOut Series (both 1 and 2) wouldnt work but i dont mind that to be fair >.>
considering on what Time they came out and DInput just basically bebing the Standard and XInput iirc not existed yet :P
ah shite! -.-
Yea i can see that but also considering that it just affects Multiplayer from my Readings i do not really see the Issue as long as the SIngle Player Game isnt broken per se >.>
But i can 100% see and understand that being quite a annoying Bitch to work with :(
Atleast it doesnt seem to be common obviously but these outliers obviously hurt to see :(@RetroHax same game, other issue : https://www.gog.com/forum/blood_bowl_series/timer_adjustment_in_game_is_broken_and_not_working
It’s not the only game with issues, sorry I don’t dig further but I’ve encountered this often. (And I refuse to buy on steam)
