Steam's new disclaimer reminds everyone that you don't actually own your games, GOG moves in for the killshot: Its offline installers 'cannot be taken away from you'
Steam's new disclaimer reminds everyone that you don't actually own your games, GOG moves in for the killshot: Its offline installers 'cannot be taken away from you'
The concept of a "digital license" isn't new, but there's no pretending you didn't know about it anymore.
100% agreed. just wish GOG was more linux friendly.
best of both worlds: piracy.
I like GOG and I like steam too. While it is true that GOG can't take the offline installer from me, this does not make it true I can play the game forever since many games are dynamically linked to libraries that may not be available in the future. This happened to me with games I just had bought. Steam also dynamically links to libraries but what I like about the way they are doing it is that these are part of the base installation so as long as you keep these files, the games should keep working. Nothing being perfect, I think they both try to do things in their own way and try to convince us that it is the best one.
I love how this article takes shots at steam despite valve being THE company holding the bar up in the gaming space.
I could list examples but I honestly don't even think I need to
valve being THE company holding the bar up in the gaming space.
I think you mean holding a monopoly in the gaming space.
Absolutely. I mean, I love the fact that GOG has DRM-free games. It's really incredible how many games are available without DRM because of them.
But I'm not going to make Valve out to be the bad guy here. Valve is like 99% of the reason why gaming on Linux is viable right now.
Valve seems like a great example of how, if you don't sell your company to venture capitalists, you can just be cool nerds that make good products. As much as I want DRM-free to be the norm, I'm also not going to vilify a company that is one of the best examples of not enshittifying right now.
A lot of Steam games are also DRM free. It's up to the individual developers whether they enforce DRM checks or not.
I've copied files from Steam folders directly to a flash drive, plugged them into an offline, Steam-less computer that I don't have rights to install anything on, and ran them perfectly. But it is a game-by-game thing.
Lmao, he is colluding with the rest, not holding up the bar.
There is nothing rhat differentiates Steam from Microsoft or Nintendo. The only difference between Gaben and Bezos is that valve has a really good advertising team that's managed to convince everyone he "isn't your average billionaire".
They charge 30% because they have a soft monopoly, it's basically robbery and it is affecting the indie scene and the quality and amount of games we receive.
Gaben has 6 mega yatchs and a number of submarines. The yatchs alone are worth around 1 billion and cost an estimated 75 to 100 million per year just to maintain.
Now I sit and wait for the Gaben simp squad to come compare him to Jesus and tell me how "he has the only good monopoly". Both of these things literally happened last time.
Downvote me you bootlickers.
No one thinks Gaben is the second coming. His platform just, actually doesn't suck, and genuinely functions as a service to its users. It's a low bar, sure, but it's a good one. Comparing it to Microsoft axeing any studio that produces something worth talking about while they force more datascraping malware and adware into Windows is just dishonest.
Your comment reads more like you get off on being controversial than having actual insightful thoughts and the comparisons in what these three companies you listed are actually doing.
I'm guessing you don't remember what the market was like for indie games before Steam. Valve's platform has done a lot of work to expose small game developers, and made it economically viable to work on and publish games independently. Before this it was very difficult for small titles without the advertising budget of a AAA publisher to get any attention at all, let alone actual sales. There's nothing else like Steam for small studios trying to find buyers for their games, and Valve does deserve credit for that because it's improved the video game market overall to have more people making more games and able to earn a living doing it.
The other major effort that Valve has made is Linux compatibility. Even before their work on Proton, Valve released native Linux versions of their games (they were one of very few publishers to do so at the time). I've been gaming on Linux since 2006, and Wine was great but rarely easy or complete. Proton has made things so straightforward that people have forgotten just how difficult it was before.
Credit where it's due. No other major publisher has contributed to the gaming community the way Valve has, except maybe id Software when they just handed the entire Quake 3 Arena source code to the open source community in 2005 which spawned countless new open source game projects.
Downvote me you bootlickers.
No, you'll enjoy the attention too much.
Preach brother!
Doesn't owning something mean you can sell it? That doesn't apply to GOG, though.
Put the installer on a USB stick and sell it. I assume you've never gone back to the electronics store where you bought your dishwasher and expected to sell your used dishwasher there.
Now can we get proton support for GoG that is as convient and reliable as it is in Steam?
I've been playing more GoG games with Lutris + Wine in Linux than Steam games with Proton and I even have one situation of a game were the copy I bought in Steam doesn't work with Proton, but the pirated copy I downloaded to see if that would work runs absolutely fine with Lutris + Wine.
For me at least it's actually easier to sort problems out with games when using Lutris + Wine than it is with Proton and I can even make sure all games I run from Lutris are wrapped in a "firejail" sandbox, which amongst other things blocks all network access, something I can't do with Proton.
It's a vendor-tied solution meant to keep you in the Steam ecosystem, so for all the great work they did in past getting it to have broad compatibility, the future is not Proton, it's Wine.
Lutris + GE-Proton + umu works. If you use GE-Proton as the runner, Lutris automatically uses umu to launch the game which launches within the Steam Pressure Vessel container.
You can manage GE-Proton downloads using Protonplus. The latest version, last I checked, is GE-Proton9-15.
Remember when they said Galaxy would get linux support? That didn't happen, and that promise got quietly retracted...
That said, Heroic is unofficial but has worked quite well.
Heroic giving GOG an excuse not to get their shit together.
All online storefronts doing business in California will soon be forbidden by law to lie to customers with words like "buy" when they really mean "license". GOG is no exception.
https://digitaldemocracy.calmatters.org/bills/ca_202320240ab2426
Even DRM-free, all digital purchases are still just a license, legally speaking.
Pragmatically speaking, they can't forcibly take the bits off my hard drive. But it also bears pointing out that these days most games on Steam don't bother enabling Steamworks DRM either.
2.1 We give you and other GOG users the personal right (known legally as a 'license') to use GOG services and to download, access and/or stream (depending on the content) and use GOG content. This license is for your personal use. We can stop or suspend this license in some situations, which are explained later on.
https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/212632089-GOG-User-Agreement?product=gog
GOG has the same drawbacks as Steam without any of the useful features. They should cut down on their "owning games" lies and spend time improving their platform instead.
It does not. You can download and backup all your GOG installers, making the games functionally equal to games you purchased on CD ROMs back in the day. They can revoke your license all they want, they wouldn't be able to keep you from using the software you acquired this way. That makes all the difference.
That's for the gog service itself.
No, that's for all content:
and to download, access and/or stream (depending on the content) and use GOG content.
Which they define as:
1.3 Also, when we're talking about games, in-game content, virtual items or currency or GOG videos or other content or services which you can purchase or access via GOG services, we’ll just call them “GOG games” or “GOG videos” respectively and when we talk about them all together they are “GOG content”.
I'll stick with my Steam cloud saves and game notes and community forums and community guides and custom controller configurations and community controller configurations and overlay and workshop and screenshots and steam deck and steam link and ...
Also, the very first game I ever bought on Steam was almost 15 years ago, and it was delisted and jas not been available on Steam for over 10 years. Yet I can still re-download and play it right now.
Steam is not the evil corporation people pretend it is. Take your rage to Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo.
Meanwhile I'm over here thinking about how I greatly prefer to put my saves in my own cloud storage (too many games these days not giving me as many slots as I'd like), the community forums are some of the most toxic places on the Internet right now, it's a coin flip whether Steam's going to give me a problem with my DualShock4, I hate how the Workshop is a walled garden, and I'm so much happier with my streaming now that I've dropped Steam Link and moved to Moonlight.
I guess the guides and Big Picture Mode can be nice?
Steam's still the #2 best option for me on PC storefronts; the battle.net launcher has some aggressive advertising, as an example of hellscape we're avoiding here. But Steam continues to not offer me much added value. I go there only because some of my games aren't available on GOG.
I will say I appreciate what Valve is doing with the Steam Deck, and I'm really hoping it continues to grow an ecosystem that directly competes with Nintendo. They are actively burning up banked goodwill right now, and that segment of the market is getting unhealthy without someone keeping them in check.
Steam is not the evil corporation people pretend it is.
Indeed. They're not saints either but for my personal demands, they offer the best arguments right now. I rank funding improvements to the FOSS Linux stack higher than a DRM-free pile of shame. That may change in the future but for now I prefer Steam over GOG. CD Project is a rich company. They could make a Linux version of Galaxy, put it onto Flathub, make it behave well under Steam Deck Game Mode, and put a tiny fraction of their revenue into Linux improvements.
Steam colludes with Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. It's all one big club meant to extract as much profit as possible.
Steam could charge 2% and Gaben would still be able to afford the 75 to 100 million he spends every year to maintained his fleet of 6 mega yatchs, worth an estimated 1 billion.
Stop defending billionaires.
What the hell happened to Steam's built in offline backup system, anyway? It used to have that when it was brand new.
It technically still exists in the game properties -> installed files tab, but it doesn't really work. The backup files you get require you to be online to meaningfully restore and will trigger a patch to the latest game version.
Practically speaking it's better to just make a copy of the game install directory manually, gives you a better chance of things working (even though most games require some kind of external tooling for that).
It's still there. But I never tried it and it probably won't work with DRMed games.
I don't remember that ever being a thing. It's had an offline mode for decades, but for the longest time it never worked properly.
It had a way of packing a game into a CD/DVD when it launched. I used it all of two times. It was slow as fuck. If it still has it, as another commenter suggests, I don't know how to access it.
Sure, and if you don't uninstall Galaxy, go through some hidden menus and download the installers then your GOG games will be gone regardless.
You don't need to ever interact with Galaxy to play your games, not even to download the offline installer. And the download option is not hidden on the website.
That's a failure to download the installers to begin with, not them being taken away from you after the fact.
Unfortunately the VR game selection in GOG seems pretty slim and they might still need steam VR to run anyways so either way i don't have much choice.
Which neatly sums up why I do not and will not even have a Steam account, but buy many games from GOG.
You realise GOG sells DRM games right?
Like...?
Love gog but fuck them for spamming my email. I found out to claim the new games it'll auto subscribe you to the news letter. So I stopped claiming the games. But still I get emails for promotions and crap. More annoying then freaking scam callers. I've unsubscribed every time I get one and stopped claiming free games. I'm so close to just cut my loses and delete my account but I feel like that still won't stop those parasites