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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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."
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".
>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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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-$20 for a game (as if I’m anywhere near caught up enough on my backlog of games from the last 40ish years for buying games at full launch-week price to ever make sense, lol, I do that like… once every several years, all the rest are very cheap)
Many games on GOG are at the tail end of their sales cycle (i.e. were released on Steam long ago) trying to eke out a few more sales, are from small indies for whom any attention at all is good attention, or are very old^H^H^Hclassic games that garner purchases for nostalgia's sake by older gamers that can afford more discretionary spending.
>OK, but the model that Valve pioneered is the model that supports 90% of all commercial PC games made today, a higher percentage if you cut out MMOs and free to play games, which you certainly don't own.
OK, but this model deployed in other parts of essentially any industry is equally scummy and abusive, no matter how much <$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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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 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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.)
>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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
> 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!
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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:
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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?
>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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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 ).
> 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.
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.)
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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"
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Your money does not matter.
Vertigo...
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.
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.
Don't be shy, share it.
And this being one of the panels mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPSAb1BDHgI
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.
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
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
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.
And yeah.. it’s trivial to bypass, but I’d rather have a choice not to.
Yes, that obviously only works for offline games, but yeah, cracking Steaam games is as easy as cracking any other game, maybe even easier
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
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?
> 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."
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?
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".
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?
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.
The scene exists for a reason, it is a very trust based ecosystem.
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.
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.
“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.
They have very high unemployment among young people, might be related.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
My tolerance for software like that is very limited. It’s almost an immediate long-press and uninstall.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You really need something way better than some shoddy survey to counter the obvious fact that price matters
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?
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
Edit: missed a word
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I've not had issues with Steam, though my Steam journey was early into online purchasing adventures
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's literally the situation today. It is that easy. People still mostly don't pirate games though.
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.
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 don't pirate anymore because i have a job now.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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)
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.
I bought Factorio early access on Gog, and Timberborn, and Loop-Hero.
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?
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.
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.
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 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?
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).
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
Any time you have no choice it at least makes for a very warped market.
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.
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.
You're saying this about Steam, the 'Piracy is a service problem' company.
The fact that DRM negatively affects honest customers more than pirates still holds true.
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.
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.
My GOG installers will never degrade though.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
If legislators want to do something good, they could force platforms to allow transfer of games between accounts.
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.
GOG giving you a standalone installer saves you some effort compared to that, but in neither case do you really "own" the game.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
> 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.
See: https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/wp-content/uploads-en/2025/11/c...
Starting from page 28.
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)
January 1st, 2025 to Sept. 30th, 2025 (Numbers are in PLN, directly from document) 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.
"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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Europe
The first two numbers perhaps make sense, the 4,3022 looks like EUR/ PLN exghange rate..
GOG is now becoming private like Valve rather than publicly traded.
This years DOScember was really huge. Tons of streamers and viewers on Twitch for example, retro gaming is picking up steam (/s).
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.
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/
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.
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)
Ownership, control, and privacy are among the main reasons I use Linux, and are likewise huge advantages that GOG has over Steam.
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'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.
If Steam disappears, your games will become inaccessible.
https://www.phoronix.com/review/valve_linux_dampfnudeln
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.
Anything? Inc. the recommended spec platform?
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
https://app.opencve.io/cve/?vendor=gog#:~:text=The%20GalaxyC...
It's certainly not a primary purchase decision factor but I've not bought games because they did not come with steam achievements.
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.
For the duration of your life, to be fair.
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.
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.
In fact I used "most" but I can't name one that couldn't be played.
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.
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.
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
Yeah, that's not impossible, and I'd rather keep what I buy even if the seller does go bankrupt.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> change countries
> oh, you own this album for Bulgaria, but not for the US, so you can no longer play it
I took my digital media with me along with my computer, and all was not fine.
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.
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.
That is not true as a global rule. Game developers can release fully independent versions of their games even on steam.
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.
As far as I know all the games you can buy on GOG will be completely DRM free.
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?
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)
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?
Key reseller: https://www.loaded.com
You really don't need to be so combatative.
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!
>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.
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.
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.
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.
Kinda how you trust paradox strategy titles to get several years of updates and expansions.
CDPR just was lucky enough to make enough money of failed release to fix it. Most companies get no chance to do it.
And the Switch 2 port likely cost considerable engineering effort and underperformed as well.
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.
After tons of patches and DLCs its just became a very very good game. Just not what was promissed.
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.
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.
...which was a complete shitshow on release as well...
Cyberpunk was really successful from $$ standpoint and continues to generate huge revenue even today.
> 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.
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 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.
It isn't any harder to use Heroic Launcher than it is to use Steam and some distros have both in their repositories.
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.
https://vcmi.eu/
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.
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.
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"
Apart from that though, it works just fine on the Steam Deck.
Passionate people working on creating a self-hosted game library. They deserve attention and support!
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.
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.
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.
If I am wrong and GOG is something completely different, then let's build something like this together! (a marketplace of offline installers!)
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.
As something hard to wrap your mind around?
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.
Please don't lie :/
As for achievements, I wouldn't say it's had support for "a long time"; they were added in August 2024 (v2.15.1).
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.
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.
Third option is to ensure the downloader runs under proton, which I think it does but haven’t tried.
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.
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.
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).
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOG.com
DRM libraries, whether DMCA or copyright law protects it, is an anomaly to include the part about the Projekt.
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 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.
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?
https://www.gog.com/en/news/release_hitman_game_of_the_year_...
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/release_hitman_game_of_the...
GOG and CD PROJEKT splitting up should ensure this is not going to happen in the future as much.
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.