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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOG.com
Technically it doesn’t stand for anything now, but it was definitely Good Old Games.
GOG is “Good Old Games”, a digital distribution service for PC games run by CD Projekt Red, developers of The Witcher and Cyberpunk. It mostly focuses on old games from the Win95/98 days that have been patched/fixed by their in-house dev team to run on modern Windows releases. However, it also sells all CD Projekt Red titles and seems to be expanding to just be a regular PC game distribution service.
It’s being talked about a lot right now because unlike Steam, EGS, and other stores they sell you a DRM-free download. Because of recent legislation in California, companies are required to use clearer language when they aren’t selling you something that you own forever, they are instead selling you a license to access something.
This has reignited discussion on digital ownership, Steam, and what happens if you die or Steam shuts down/is acquired and you lose your non-transferable access to the games in your library. GOG is the ideal solution right now, because it while it offers a client that is simple to use like Steam (called “GOG Galaxy”) but if they announce a shutdown or acquisition, you can simply download offline installers for all your games and you don’t lose access to anything.
Isn’t this always the case? I get people have a hate-on for Windows 11 lately but every major version of Windows 10 has kept the old version for a month or so, allowing you to revert if needed. You can run disk cleanup and get the space back early if you want.
I guess the notable part here is that the disk cleanup part isn’t working? You can also just wait for the time to elapse and it will delete itself.
The current Slim PS5 also doesn’t have a disc drive, you can just buy it in a bundle and attach the optional one.
Honestly for manufacturing this makes way more sense, to ship one SKU and then make them all upgradable to disc. It’s also kind of nice that if you buy a digital one and want disc in the future you can just buy the drive.
Higher revenue cut for publishers. That’s it. This is just a big anti-consumer pissing contest about who gets a bigger slice of the pie when a sale is made. Everything else is just distracting noise. If Valve charged 5% then none of this other stuff would matter. Valve charges 30% base with some sweetheart deals for devs who sell millions of copies. Same as Sony, Nintendo, Apple, and most other online software marketplaces.
This is a high percentage to pay vs retail margins for a brick & mortar storefront, but a reasonable percentage when you think of it as a customer acquisition cost. So the question is, did I go to Steam to buy the game or did I go to Steam and buy the game? Everyone will have a different opinion on this, but in my opinion Valve revived PC gaming when it was on the brink, and a large percentage of sales that happen on the platform are because of the eyeballs it brings and the value it delivers.
Borderlands 4 coming back to Steam is strong evidence of this, even with Epic essentially paying developers the difference in potential lost sales out of pocket. You can’t pay for the lost conversations, word-of-mouth, and other “free” advertising that those lost sales would have generated. So Borderlands 3 looks great on a balance sheet, but nobody really liked it or cared about it, and Epic won’t pay you to make games nobody plays forever.
It might seem better for the storefront to take less of a cut from a consumer perspective, but in reality it barely matters. This doesn’t go towards reducing game costs for consumers or improving bonuses & wages for developers. The market has already been set. Any behind the scenes change in revenue sharing just goes to the next group in line, which is of course the already wealthy and massive publishers.
So do whatever works for you. Just don’t let them pull the wool over your eyes and act like this fight is about anything other than which already very rich people get slightly richer.
Yeah now that I think about it, that has been my experience with my Series X, I just don’t use it that often. My PS5 however is much more seamless, so maybe it was just Sony who tried to improve this.
I think a network connection is inevitable during initial game setup, but as PC gaming has been like this since 2008 it’s not really bothersome to me. Bigger issue was mandatory updates, slow launches, etc. which I think have mostly been solved on the PS5 side.
Yeah these discussions are hilarious, like watching people arguing about anti-aliasing back in the day. Rerendering the whole scene again? Just to remove some jagged edges? What a waste.
Raytracing is future technology, I’m glad it’s in every game now even if it’s not always well optimized or worth using, because it will make those games age that much better when I want to go back and play them in 10+ years.
It’s clear you haven’t used this generation of consoles. They took this feedback to heart and now after install which is entirely determined by your internet connection/disc speed, you can hop into game insanely quick.
For a game I’m already playing I think from PS5 on to actually moving around in game we’re talking like… 10-15 seconds. It’s essentially just making save states. I’ve never seen a mandatory update stop me from launching a game, and it does most install in the background while it’s on standby. It takes longer to get in game on my Gaming PC than the PS5.
This was brutal in the PS3 & 360 era, better in the PS4/XBONE era, and is essentially solved as it can ever be in the current era.
Because they have a very simple solution: offer their game through their storefront. Why is it Valve’s problem that the World of Goo developers want to forgo their popular storefront because they partnered with a company that forbids it as a requirement of funding?
The real answer of course is that nobody is obligated to help the other with their product. The issue comes down to consumers and what they want to support. I think Valve is being perfectly fair here and Epic is not. The Steam Deck is an open system, if Epic wanted to build a storefront for it, they could. They choose not to, because they don’t want to promote Steam Deck sales.
Isn’t it funny that the “run your own marketplace and keep all revenue” option that Epic took Apple to court over is already available on the Steam Deck from Day 1 and Epic chooses not to take advantage of it. It’s almost like company using a pile of cash to artificially tip the scales in their favour is perfectly fine as long as its them.
Everyone made their business choices here, and they have to live with the consequences.
Why would I think from the perspective of a business? I’m not a business, I’m a consumer. I’m not saying they were wrong for taking the money, they gotta do what they gotta do. I’m saying I don’t want it and don’t want to support it.
The original comment was basically asking why Epic got so much hate when in this specific circumstance, their actions are justifiable or even actually produced something of value.
I said they are missing the point which is just that people don’t like Epic and their influence on PC gaming, and you said I need to think like a business.
I think you’re arguing something totally different now.
That’s a separate issue, I want the benefits of a launcher, just not Epic’s.
You can, but it requires going through the desktop interface to install them, if they use another launcher you have to set up that, frequently some trial and error, and then adding them into the Steam interface so they can launch easily with proper input support.
Do all that and set them up correctly, and they’ll run, but without one of the primary Steam Deck benefits which is that Valve does pre-compilation of shaders. That only works for native Steam titles, and it can be the difference between a game being playable and a stuttery mess, especially for more graphically intense titles.
For some games, there are also hardcoded patches in Proton that look for the SteamID of the game to apply them. Those also won’t have those fixes applied when adding them as non-Steam games.
It’s subjective or we wouldn’t be arguing about it would we? Maintaining my own backup of downloaded DRM free games not offered through a service is not a benefit to me, it’s an inconvenience. I already explained why, and what the benefits are.
You don’t need an account to listen to DRM free music or movies, true. But if you delete them either on purpose or because of data loss, you have to go get them again should you want them. Which means digging through emails or accounts or backup drives to get your copies again. That’s not worth it to me, I prefer being able to set up Steam and just go, delete games and redownload them as needed in a click.
People are on Lemmy for lots of different reasons, you shouldn’t assume that the primary reason anyone is here is because they deeply care about free software or decentralization. I’m here because Reddit banned 3rd party clients and I hate their app, same reason I’m on Mastodon.
Why shouldn’t he be downvoted? A downvote isn’t rude, and it’s not an indicator of how sane the opinion is. It indicates that the comment misses the point. They assume it’s about DRM, or that Epic didn’t to enough to deserve exclusivity, or that it’s not a true exclusive because you can pay the developer directly.
It’s not. It’s just about not wanting another launcher that doesn’t bring anything to the table. GOG is for old games, Itch is for small indies, and Steam is for everything else.
Epic is just Steam but worse, doesn’t work well on Steam Deck, with some exclusives that will hit Steam in a year. Doesn’t offer anything new or improved, just makes things worse by splitting a market by paying off developers, and because it doesn’t offer anything compelling, will probably die of when Epic eventually wastes all its Fortnite money and falls on hard times.
I wouldn’t give them a penny, they’re actively working to make PC gaming a worse experience when Steam arguably brought it back from the brink of death. Before Steam, PCs were about to become MMO and RTS machines. It’s hard to overstate how big their impact was.
Not if you own a Steam Deck, or want cloud saving, or have hundreds of games and don’t want to hope you remember your login and password for this one game 10 years from now and that the website still exists, or worry about keeping a local backup of the game if you want to play it in the future.
DRM-free direct downloads are a great option, but better than Steam? That’s subjective. For me, I want all of those things I listed so a non-Steam PC game for me is a last resort, pretty much only reserved for games that I really want to play.
I don’t know why people find this so difficult to understand, I have to assume they’re being wilfully obtuse. Would you download a separate app and create an account for every song you wanted to listen to or every movie you wanted to watch? Of course not. So why would games be any different?
Easy setup on Steam Deck?
Plus just exposure and availability. I had Aleph One set up, 1-2 computers ago. But bringing over non-Steam games every time I have to set up Windows again is a pain in the ass.
My Steam library migrates en masse between machines. I wish everything was in it. Just makes things easier.
AliExpress isn’t the problem here. This is fake Shopify sites spun up and down in a matter of days that only exist to harvest info and payment. I’ve placed dozens of AliExpress orders, I always get what I ordered even from new stores.
Wow it’s almost like buying up half the gaming industry and then producing literally nothing wasn’t a great idea.
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