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.
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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 is holding up the bar not because valve is great but because everyone else is so shit. I've had a ton of issues with steam throughout the years and it's just.. nothing else is better. I was actually excited for the epic store launch and it's... Well, not the worst, because being the worst is a challenge some places take seriously, but certainly not a good steam replacement especially for low data people.
Steam may not let me control the updates to steam, but it won't force refresh my library causing ping spikes all the time as an intended feature.
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.
Also GOG has DRM games now
Not in the sense we're discussing it here, they don't.
There's a list of about 20 games said to have DRM in Gog and when you actually read the list rather than just it's title it turns out none of them has what we would call DRM - any sort of phone-home validation or anti-piracy measure.
It's mainly things games with add-on content that requires you use Gog Galaxy or register online, some that send analytics to a server and stuff like that.
You can see the info here,
Whilst it's still nasty and still shouldn't be happening, none of that makes the game unusable in the future after the servers are down if you still have the offline installer.
Which ones? Do they disclose that they contain DRM?
If we're talking about DRM as in a measure to prevent copying, or require online security check, or anything like that, then no GOG game has DRM. One of GOG's core policies is that all of their games are DRM free. However, some people have stretched the definition a little to include other stuff. For example, if an online multiplayer game requires GOG Galaxy to connect to its online servers, some people consider that to be DRM.
There are some posts on GOG's official forums where people try to list all the games that have "DRM" of any kind. So if you're interested, that's where you could look. But if you just want to have confidence that you'll be able to install and run the game in the future, then don't worry about it. No GOG game has anything that would prevent that.
The info is here and none of that "DRM" means you can't in the future, after the servers are down, install the game from your copy of the offline installer and play it.
None of that is DRM in the sense we're talking about here: the kind of mechanism that allows the game to be taken away from you or won't let you install it or play it in single-player anymore when the publisher decides they don't want to pay for servers anymore.
It is, none the less, a deviation from the No-DRM promise, IMHO.
And has had them for many years before now
I was wondering how all those Sony games worked on GOG.
This isn't about what steam currently is. It's about what it will inevitably become.
I fucked up going with Steam. Should have just pirated everything Single player.
You didn't fuck up. You can always still pirate. Wait it out and see what happens, the moment it goes to shit put on your pirate hat and don't give a fuck.
Yeah.. it’s also a new law in California is it not? Kill shot? Hahahaha. Right. Who wrote this headline xD
It's like every clickbait gaming website whenever a new MMO game drops and they call it the WoW-killer for the umpteenth time in the past 15 years.
Flashbacks from the advertising for The Outer Worlds, and IGN calling it the "Bethesda-killer"
Lol that comparison was also going through my head. I remember it being a fun game though, more than any Bethesda games from the past decade or so, but frankly that bar wasn't really high either.
The true Bethesda killer was Bethesda themselves
valve being THE company holding the bar up in the gaming space.
I think you mean holding a monopoly in the gaming space.
I think you don't know what that word means.
Heck, even if you want to blatantly ignore every other platform and site you can buy games from, which there are plenty, Valve gives devs a supply of Steam keys they can sell anywhere they want, they don't even get a cut from those despite providing the bandwidth to distribute the files.
A monopoly on what? PC game storefeonts? Itch.io, gog, epic, gamepass, some are better than others, but steam isn't anti-competition
They aren't really a monopoly. You can purchase games elsewhere. They are simply the gold standard of gaming platforms.
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.
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.
Your argument was that Steam is identical to Microsoft and Nintendo, and that Gabe is colluding with them. Stop moving the goalposts.
Okay, so to be clear, I'm saying they don't have enough difference between them when it comes to being a gross monopolistic company to warrant the praise.
All four of them suck, I'm saying they are all in the same group of shifty companies that take advantage of the gaming industry and it's clients (us).
So just a boring, generic anti-capitalist take that deliberately avoids any nuance for the sake of feeling smug.
Gee, why would anyone downvote that!
There's not enough nuance to justify drinking Gabens sweat.
Why is he the only billionaire that gets his own little simp squad. Can you imagine going into a thread about how Elon Musk is being a dick and 90% of the comments are praising him?
Amazon is super convenient, yet people still can understand the nuance of it and how it's harming small businesses, how the government should probably do something and deal with the dragon at its head that's hoarding all that wealth.
Where's your nuance? Other than "I like steam and I use it, so it can do no wrong".
The nuance is here in this thread, in multiple comments that have clearly demonstrated that you have no idea what you're talking about.
But you're too busy backpedaling and jerking off about how much you hate billionaires to actually engage with any of those points. Or more likely, you know you're too ignorant to respond to them.
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.
This is from my first post, I've repeated myself 4 times now (over two threads because you have answered mutiple different comments). I won't be answering anymore of your comments, all you are spitting in my face is childish rhetoric.
Gaben has the only good monopoly, he's pretty much Jesus.
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.
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.
Who's the indie company going under here?
This is an article that was floating on lemmy a few months ago.
25% more of the profit can go a long way, if Steam were to only take 5% for example. And it's not only about bankruptcy, it's budget for more features, dealing with bugs and potential sequels. The quality is affected as well and Steam, Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony don't deserve all that money instead of the devs, just for being the middle men.
There is nothing rhat differentiates Steam from Microsoft or Nintendo.
How much do Xbox and Nintendo contribute to open-source projects?
How do I use open-source software OOTB on an Xbox or Switch?
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.
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 of hesitated. It was nothing more than a smart business decision, not a nice favor because he likes you.
I asked you a question. Show me contributions to open-source on the same scale by Xbox and Nintendo. If it's so much cheaper, why aren't they doing it too?
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.
No, you said they were exactly the same and that Gabe was colluding with them. Now you're backpedalling because you realized how stupid of a take that was.
Microsoft contributes a lot of stuff to open source but that's really far away from my point. I'm not back peddling, I'm explaining myself because you are being a child and taking my words way to literally. Microsoft being slightly worse does not make steam "good".
Valve can run and offer the same services it does now on a fraction of what they charge.
They could easily properly compete, every store could drastically lower their pricing, but they don't, because they like having a soft monopoly.
"Explain it to me or you lose" is insanely childish behavior, specially when I just explained that's not what I meant and you are being too literal but I mean, here:
Explain to me why you think Gaben deserves a net worth of 4 000 000 000 $.
That is who you are being a mouthpiece for, stop defending billionaires.
Microsoft contributes a lot of stuff to open source but that's really far away from my point.
Microsoft is not a fair comparison to Steam, hence why I refocused to Xbox.
I'm explaining myself because you are being a child and taking my words way to literally. Microsoft being slightly worse does not make steam "good".
"Obviously I didn't mean what I said, don't be a child!" 🙄
Valve can run and offer the same services it does now on a fraction of what they charge.
They could even do it for free, out of the goodness of their hearts!
"Explain it to me or you lose" is insanely childish behavior, specially when I just explained that's not what I meant and you are being too literal but I mean, here
"I was told there would be no fact-checking"
Explain to me why you think Gaben deserves a net worth of 4 000 000 000 $.
Wow, those goalposts are really movin' now!
That is who you are being a mouthpiece for, stop defending billionaires.
See my previous comment about how boring and smug your take is.
I'm not moving the goalposts, I'm making fun of your attitude.
My point is that steam is a piece of shit company like the rest, not that they are exactly the same. Two PoS will still stink even if they aren't exactly a like.
That's what I mean man, sorry if it wasn't clear before and then the next two times I explained it again.
They could even do it for free, out of the goodness of their hearts!
Are you being sarcastic about being robbed? The money's coming out of your pocket, either directly or in terms of the quality and quantity of games. Is their cut justified in your eyes, even after I outlined his networth and how much money he's racking in?
Obviously I didn't mean what I said, or understand any of the details about my claims. I'm just saying capitalism bad!
😪
Yes, yes, we get it.
That kind of behavior really cements the image that I have of you, lol
Cute.
They leveraged open source to compete on the console front without actually investing dev time.
This is just false.
Valve has funded a lot of extra work though to get things like DXVK and VKD3D-Proton for the translation from Direct3D to Vulkan into a state where performance can be really great! Valve also funds work on Linux graphics drivers, Linux kernel work and the list goes on.
The included improvements to Wine have been designed and funded by Valve, in a joint development effort with CodeWeavers. Here are some examples of what we've been working on together since 2016:
- vkd3d, the Direct3D 12 implementation based on Vulkan
- The OpenVR and Steamworks native API bridges
- Many wined3d performance and functionality fixes for Direct3D 9 and Direct3D 11
- Overhauled fullscreen and gamepad support
- The "esync" patchset, for multi-threaded performance improvements
Modifications to Wine are submitted upstream if they're compatible with the goals and requirements of the larger Wine project; as a result, Wine users have been benefiting from parts of this work for over a year now. The rest is available as part of our source code repository for Proton and its modules.
In addition to that, we've been supporting the development of DXVK, the Direct3D 11 implementation based on Vulkan; the nature of this support includes:
- Employing the DXVK developer in our open-source graphics group since February 2018
- Providing direct support from our open-source graphics group to fix Mesa driver issues affecting DXVK, and provide prototype implementations of brand new Vulkan features to improve DXVK functionality
- Working with our partners over at Khronos, NVIDIA, Intel and AMD to coordinate Vulkan feature and driver support
from Valve's original Proton announcement
You should try doing some research before making such claims. Valve has been directly cooperating with, contributing to, and financially supporting several open source projects related to gaming since at least 2016.
Valve had 71 peoples working in their steam division in 2021. 31 where admin so that leaves 40 people for all their hardware. I'm going to take a wild guess and say maybe 3 to 5 were working on things linux related.
Edit: They had 79 in 2021 for Steam, and 41 for hardware
I'd call that leveraging at that amount of people, for a company that brings in an estimated 6.5 billion a year, and the fact that most of the code was already there.
Edit: They brought in 10 billion in 2021 (covid helped)
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad linux got a boost out of it but there's no doubt in my mind he would have built a private OS if it could be done with 5 people. It was a bargain for him, it wasn't a favor.
Note that most people that valve pays to work on open source were preixisting maintainers and not actual employees, or employees of companies like Blue Systems
Just so we're clear here -- you pulled your original numbers out of nowhere, but made them oddly specific (71) to give the impression that you were citing an actual source.
That is hilariously pathetic.
And barely even matters since you're ignoring 90% of the comment you replied to (financing and partnerships).
Just really paints a picture of how boring, basic, and uninformed your opinion is, for all the cockiness you came in here with.
[citations needed]
Get some sources, and stop drawing conclusions from no evidence.
https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=valve+number+of+employees+2021
This isn't hard to find. I don't give sources when it's literally in the first few links on Google.
Edit: The actual quotes are below. I missed the mark on total number of steam employees by 9. They have 79 employees total for Steam. 71 or 79, it is still an insanely low number of employees when you take into account that:
it is estimated that Steam generated more than 10 billion U.S. dollars in revenues in 2021
This is from the statistica article that is the first link on Google. I moved my other links to the other comment so it would reply to the guy that couldn't be bothered to even open them apparently.
Not a single one of those links says Valve had 71 people in their Steam division in 2021.
Can't even back your own claims. What a joke.
Edit: HAHAHA you even provided a quote that contradicts the numbers you made up. This has to be a farce.
Edit 2: BAHAHAHAHA NOW YOU REMOVED YOUR VERGE QUOTE BECAUSE YOU REALIZED IT PROVED YOU WERE MAKING UP NUMBERS.One data point I found interesting: Valve peaked with its “Games” payroll spending in 2017 at $221 million (the company didn’t release any new games that year, but that spending could have gone toward supporting games like Dota 2 and developing new games like Artifact); by 2021, that was down to $192 million. Another: as of 2021, Valve employed just 79 people for Steam, which is one of the most influential gaming storefronts on the planet.
“Hardware,” to my surprise, has been a relatively small part of the company, with just 41 employees paid a gross of more than $17 million in 2021.
From the verge article
Here's the topline from 2021: Of those 336 employees, 79 directly worked on Steam, while a whopping 181 remained in the "Games" department—pretty much the reverse of what I expected, given Steam's importance to company profits and how rarely Valve releases new games. There were just 41 employees working on hardware development at that time
From the PC gamer article right under.
Literally the first two links after the statistica link (which also has it but you have to make an account), at least for me. Are you done being an idiot?
You:
Valve had 71 peoples working in their steam division in 2021.
Verge:
as of 2021, Valve employed just 79 people for Steam
Are you done being an idiot?
Completely ignores financial contributions.
Disingenuous? Dumb? Who knows!?
most of the code was already there
AHAHAHAHAHA every developer in the thread is absolutely cackling at you right now.
I've never actually blocked someone on lemmy before, but you're just following me in the thread and answering every one of my comments with mindless dribble lol. Grow up bro, learn to actually form an argument.
This is hard because you're (imo) very wrong and not being super nice about it, but null is being so rude i almost want to agree with you
You are more than welcome to:
- Educate yourself even a little bit
- Leave your asinine takes in your brain
If you want to keep spouting them off, go right ahead. But I'm going to mock you for it.
Plug your ears if you're incapable of upping your game.
Preach brother!