Also GOG has DRM games now

Yeah, the only caveat is that you don’t get an installer with steam, so if you copy the installed game onto a pc that doesn’t have all the correct dependencies installed (like the correct DirectX version for example), then the game won’t launch. But it’s not too complicated to install the dependencies manually

Flashbacks from the advertising for The Outer Worlds, and IGN calling it the “Bethesda-killer”

The reason they hold most of the market share is not because of bad business practices it’s because the opposite. People use their service cause it’s the best.

I have physical copies of PC games that require a Steam Account.

Ya well if it’s such a fucking low bar, it’s probably because they aren’t holding it up which is my point.

They do the absolute minimum, yet receive mountains of praise. Call me when he brings down the cut to something reasonable like 5% or just let’s dev choose what price they sell their games for on other platforms ffs.

Indie companies are closing left and right, these mega stores and their soft monopoly is having a net negative impact on the industry.

Stop defending billionaires. If steam was fair, he wouldn’t be able to afford a billion dollars worth of fancy boats.

Indie games came about because of multiple factors, steam only being one of them but they did help a lot. That being said, they are currently having a detrimental effect and I think Gaben has been more than properly rewarded.

It’s not the early 2000s, steam is bringing in massive amounts of cash and I’m tired of seeing an other indie company go under because Gaben wants another boat in the 9 figure range.

The government will never do anything if we aren’t vocal about it and the community is doing the opposite.

They leveraged open source to compete on the console front without actually investing dev time. If he could have created a closed system for the same cost, he wouldn’t have hesitated. It was nothing more than a smart business decision, not a nice favor because he likes you.

Most of the Gaben simps just throw back the same thing, “well, they aren’t as bad as microsoft”.

Mussolini wasn’t as bad as Hitler, can you image defending him though? Stop bootlicking billionaires.

I’m also not saying Microsoft is better, I’m saying they are all in the same club and they all suck.

You know what’s funny, I used to get this same kind of attitude when I’d bash Elon Musk when he was popular a few years ago.

It’s even worst when the billionaire is being defended by his own con victims.

If you buy through Heroic, Heroic gets a cut. So it creates a data point that they can use to see how big that market is, so they know what they have to do to get 100% of my sale in their own pocket.

Lutris has GoG integration and it’s exactly that same 2 step process if you use it (I believe it passes you through 3 screens of options were you invariably do nothing but click “Continue”, so strictly it’s 5 steps were 3 of the are just “Press Continue”)

The difference is that when it does NOT just work, it’s easier to figure out and there are more options to fix it with Lutris + Wine.

I even have some weird weird cases on Steam - like Borderlands 2 were Steam would often and randomly, before actually starting the game spend almost 1h doing shader conversions that if you stopped it the game would fail to start (the solution was to force an older Proton version and now you just get random downloads from the Internet that last a few minutes before the game starts).

IMHO, here too what one sees is the general design philosophy difference between open source software and corporate solutions - the former gives you tons of options and lots of ways to tune it so it looks more complicated to use and has a steeper learning curve but that also means when things go wrong you have a lot more ways to try to fix it, whilst the latter is click & play until things go wrong and then you have very little info and just a few things you can change to try and fix it.

Mind you, Lutris itself seems to be an attempt to also be click & play (hence why you generally get a steam-like experience if you use its GoG integration) but all the “buttons and knobs” are still there (those 3 screens of options that’s usually fine to just press “Continue” on that I mentioned above) just in case you want to muck about with them, making it look daunting to use.

Heroic gets a lot closer in this regard.

Proton too just automates the work that somebody did in the form of install instructions, same as Lutris.

The difference is that those making the install scripts for Proton are paid for and you don’t get the option to fix them or make your own, which means that there are in fact fewer games with Steam install instructions (i.e. Steam Support) than games with Lutris install scripts.

Further, there are fewer things you can tweak in Proton and they’re all either changing the proton version or some badly documented text parameters that get fed to its command line, whilst Lutris actually has most such options in menus: the learning curve for just starting a game is lower in Steam that in Lutris when it works but the learning curve for fixing it when it does not work is lower in Lutris and sometimes you simply don’t have access to change what’s needed to fix it in Steam but you do in Lutris.

If you use Lutris with its GoG integration the experience is generally the same kind of Click & Play as Proton of Steam and whilst the rate of problems seems to still be a bit bigger in Lutris, surprisingly (at least for me) it’s not by much.

For me in Lutris having to go and install Microsoft components using Winetricks is generally only needed for some standalone installer executables, not when using GoG integration.

Steam is great when it works and a massive headache and pretty limited on what you can do when it doesn’t, whilst at least with GoG integration Lutris is great when it works and still a headache when it doesn’t but not as much as Steam and it gives you a lot more options to try and get it to work, plus the coverage of pre-made installer scripts in Lutris (which is what makes games “just work” in it) seems to be broader than in Steam, including covering older and more obscure titles, plus that coverage is probably growing faster because the scripts are user contributed rather than the work that can be done adding support being limited by how many people Valve (who are notorious for having very few employees for a company that size) hired to work on it.

That’s Wine

I have it installed already, but thank you for the guide. I’ll refer to it in case something breaks lol.

And it is a license. I’m just responding to the comment about the law.

No, that isn’t what GOG is doing.

GOG is still only licencing games to you. They do offer you the opportunity to download an offline installer though.

The headline is slimy

Are you referring to the use of the word “killshot”? Otherwise, the headline says exactly the same thing.

Its offline installers ‘cannot be taken away from you’

No implication of outright ownership, just that they can’t take away the offline installers. I mean, I guess it doesn’t outright say “that you’ve already downloaded,” but given the length, I’d say that’s a passable omission.

That’s fair I guess. But you can keep a backup of your GoG games in case the server goes down. With Steam that isn’t possible.

I think OP is saying that, while you can buy a book to read it, you do not own the copyright to that book. They’re saying it’s basically the same idea with GOG.

The illustration does break down, but I think their point still stands.

And they could do all of these good things while charging less than 30% and Gabe would be the only one feeling a negative impact on his finances.

As for contractors, they do hire them, court documents came out and their profits per actually employees are way higher than most companies, why? Contractors aren’t employees.

Ownership in terms distribution of digital software is a bit funky I guess, but from a consumers point of view, there’s really nothing GOG/game companies can do once you got the installer. You’re effectively owning the bits on your hard drive and there’s nothing they can do to control what you do with those bits. I guess from a lawyers perspective it may be different, but in practice there isn’t much.

I’m not sure what you’re getting at with the licenses though? A game licensed under MIT would be free to share, attribution shouldn’t be much of problem.

Exactly, the game publishers and distributors are often not the developers themselves. Only one to distribute direct in recent memory was World Of Goo 2, and even that was sold primarily through the Epic store.

The Heroic Games Launcher can download and run GOG games. It’s a community-run project, but officially affiliated with GOG.