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
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.
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?
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.
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.
I was wondering how all those Sony games worked on GOG.
And has had them for many years before 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
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"
The true Bethesda killer was Bethesda themselves
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.
If anything is a "Bethesda-killer", it's games like Outer Wilds, not The Outer Worlds.
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.
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.
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
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.
The gov only considers a large business a monopoly if it's doing anti competitive practices to maintain or grow it's market share. That description in no way fits steam or valve.
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.
Which is why you don't have physical copies of those games - you bought a steam key, exactly like you could have done digitally from humblebundle of greenmangaming or myriad of other stores, this one just had it printed on a piece of paper instead of sending you an email.
A Steam key Valve didn't get a cut from, btw.
So all those files on the disc I had to install were for something else then?
Helped you (and Valve) to save some bandwidth. But yes. If it requires a Steam account to play, you bought a license allowing you to access a game using Steam, and not an actual game you own.
So it's anti consumer bullshit.
That is done because of a game publisher, not steam.
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.
Oh look, another boring block of text so you can avoid replying to the commentor who proved you're either dumb or just lying.
We get it, your point can be dumbed down to a mouth-breathing "capitalism bad".
And, to be clear, Capitalism is bad. I'm on board. But riding Gaben's dick, or the dick of any boring dystopian billionaire instead of the people actively fighting to maintain the system is just grossly missing the point
Not all evils are equal, and any perceived slight by Steam is honestly smoke for the thousands of disgustingly rich venture capitalists constantly abusing the system that exists and lobbying the shit out of any attempt to fix it. I don't blame Gaben for owning more yacht's than anyone needs, because, at the end of the day, he's providing a quality service through an unfair system. He's not the one fighting to provide shittier and shittier systems, demanding fatter and fatter paychecks and encouraging us to blame each other for the state of the world while he runs off with the largest slice of the cake.
Should he have the wealth he has access to? Fuck no. But, again, the dishonest and disgustingly simplified argument that homie is making is only idiofying the cause. Target the problems, not the lucky guys who are providing halfway reasonable services through our broken-ass system.
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.
I'll bite. I hate billionaires. Let's check this out.
Things that hurt indie devs in this article:
Lack of available talent
Burnout
Lack of upfront funding (before a game is ever released)
Generally bad economy post COVID
Actual predatory exclusive tactics from epic or gamepad
The nebulous idea that the entire industry and fans need a culture change
Things not cited in this article as a problem:
Steam in any capacity. Directly or implied
Lack of funding is mentioned every paragraph?
belt-tightening can often mean simply shutting down.
Sheffield says it’s hard not to feel guilty when other studios go under, even as his own struggles. “We're all kind of fighting for a tiny slice of the same pie,”
“When an indie doesn't get funding for its game, you just quietly never see their work again,”
The industry is struggling because steam and the other stores keep them on the brink, they have no leeway. I don't know how steams greed could be seen as unrelated.
Pick a better battle because you're making all of us anti-capitalists look like fucking idiots.
Do you know of any other company that racks in as much cash and gets defended this hard? All I'm seeing is people defending an other billionaire cunt just because they use his product.
Would you tell me to shut up if I was denouncing Elon Musk or Bezos? You can't be anti-capitalism and pro-Steam. The moment you defend a billionaire, you are part of the problem.
I'm not saying I'm pro-steam. I'm saying you're doing a dogshit job of providing compelling arguments and are making us look stupid.
Making 10 billion in a year while having 70 employees isn't a compelling argument to you?
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
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.
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.
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?
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
LOL 79 - 71 = 8, not 9. Can't even do basic math on your made up numbers.
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
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.
What a weird hill to die on.
Anyway, enjoy being wrong.
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.
Gaben has the only good monopoly, he's pretty much Jesus.
Now can we get proton support for GoG that is as convient and reliable as it is in Steam?
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.
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 + 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.
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.
I’m not saying it doesn’t work. I’ve set several things from GoG up using Lutris. But in Steam it’s a two step process:
Click Install
Click Play
I want that level of ease from GoG.
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 in Steam is absolutely easier. Lutris just automates work that some other user did, and if you're doing it in something like Heroic launcher instead, you have to figure that out yourself. It often involves things like installing other Microsoft components that are bundled with the application on Steam, and in one case, even though the game was verified on Steam, there was no Lutris script, and I just couldn't get it working on the GOG version.
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.
Paying someone else to do it and verify that it works is exactly part of why I parted with my money in the first place. At least GOG has a very generous refund policy, but it's a lot more work on my end.
Oh, absolutely.
The point I'm making is that with its process Lutris + Wine are scaling up much faster to seamlessly make all sorts of Windows games Click & Play in Linux, than Steam can or even will try to (don't expect Steam to get around to cover older games that aren't successful AAA titles).
It's the same old same old, open source software solution vs closed corporate software solution that happens in so many other domains: the open source one starts clunky and quirky and it will always tend towards the side of "giving users enough rope to hang themselves with" (too many option, many very powerful) whilst the closed corporate one will from the very start be slick and easier to use but very limited when it comes to what users can do to customize it or even fix it when it doesn't work, but over time and if it manages to survive the open source one will be better and far more capable and flexible than the corporate one simply because contributions to it scale up with interest in it and number of users whilst that's not so for the corporate one.
It's what you see with for example Blender vs Adobe's suit of 3D modelling programs or Linux vs Windows (if it weren't for the well entrenched ecosystem of Windows-only applications, I doubt Windows would still be around).
That's why I think something like Lutris + Wine are the future, not Proton integrated into the Store application of Steam.
But really what I'm asking for, as a customer, is for GOG to do this work for me before I buy. Because it's all open source, there's nothing stopping them. Valve pumped a bunch of money into the projects to improve things for everyone, but they're still doing more work on their end.
Valve is a much, much bigger company than GoG, plus Valve's Linux strategy is really a "have our own console on the cheap" strategy.
But yeah, GoG should be doing more for gaming on Linux, maybe not as much as Valve but proportionally so. At the moment they're doing almost nothing at all: they have Linux offline installers available for games which do support Linux directly, but that's it.
So whilst I find it unrealistic to expect that GoG should be contributing to gaming on Linux as much as Valve, I do agree they should be doing more.
PS: Mind you, I'm not trying to make the case that GoG is perfect and Steam is shit, I'm trying to make the case that open and flexible to use is better than closed and tightly integrated with a specific store, which is why I generally prefer GoG with their offline installers, as well as Lutris + Wine (quite independently of GoG) and would be happy enough even if Lutris had no GoG integration since long before moving my gaming rig to Linux I had the habit of downloading and using the offline installers and did not at all use GoG Galaxy.
If there's one thing that 30 years of being a Software Engineer have taught me is that you want your system to be as decoupled as possible from any business, because even if they are nice at the moment that's no guarantee that at a later date they won't leverage people having their systems integrated with theirs to take advantage of their customers (the phenomenon of enshittification being a good example of that).
Dafuq is a proton
A proton is a positively charged subatomic particle doing in the nucleus of an atom. But in this context, Proton is a translation layer that allows games that were built for Windows to run on Linux.
it's what people on linux use to play windows games on linux
That's Wine
Are you being purposefully obtuse? Proton is based on Wine yes, but it is it's own distinct project.
Yes, that is the upstream. Valve’s downstream of wine is called proton.
People use steam because it's good service, and a good product.
In fact, they also gave Linux a boost
They also have things like cloud saving
Developers use them because apparently they have some awesome features too for things like multiplayer and such and a great API
I like steam as a user but it's still proprietary software and I'm slightly concerned about what is going to happen when Gabe Newell steps down as president and ceo of Valve.
Now if we could just have GOG Galaxy for Linux. It would make my life so much easier.
Lutris lets you add your GOG account and download/install games directly. its not Galaxy, but its pretty flawless.
Lutris is awesome.
Open source games, games with their own launcher, games on steam, gog, etc are all in it. Can pick to run things natively on Linux, use proton (pick your version or just use latest), wine, or choose from others, and it does it seamlessly. For games you already have installed on steam, you don't need to reinstall them, it finds them and makes them runnable from within lutris once you connect your steam account, you can also install games that you own on any of your connected launchers, and browse/download your undownloaded games from them
Examples for some of the stuff I have all in it now:
Catacyslm: DDA catapult launcher (free and open source game - highly recommend you try it out. Takes some getting used to, but there isn't much you can't do. Also, make sure you get cataclysm-tiles or use a launcher. ASCII is pure, but hard to get used to. Also, DO NOT buy it on steam.)
All of my installed steam games
Cyberpunk 2077 and the witcher 3 via gog
FFXIV (the official launcher, not steam)
Vintage story (open source but not free - highly recommend if you like open world survival crafting games with a big emphasis on survival)
Heroic Game Launcher is pretty cool. It does game save sync with GOG games too.
I know, I use it. I'd prefer an official Galaxy port though.
I feel you. Installing Fallout London was such a pain in the ass for Linux.
I wrote a guide for getting fallout london up and running if you need a hand
I have it installed already, but thank you for the guide. I'll refer to it in case something breaks lol.
100% agreed. just wish GOG was more linux friendly.
best of both worlds: piracy.
Much of the pirated games though will be GOG installers so might as well just install it with lutris/wine
yes
i wouldn't pirate an indie game tho
Unless you already bought it
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.
My understanding is that GOG is an exception to this. Here is a quote that I got from an Ars Technica article
California's AB2426 law, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom Sept. 26, excludes subscription-only services, free games, and digital goods that offer "permanent offline download to an external storage source to be used without a connection to the internet." Otherwise, sellers of digital goods cannot use the terms "buy, purchase," or related terms that would "confer an unrestricted ownership interest in the digital good." And they must explain, conspicuously, in plain language, that "the digital good is a license" and link to terms and conditions.
Since GOG does offer permanent offline installers that can be used without an internet connection, GOG's sales are exempt from this new law.
Gog themselves refer to it as a license in there agreement
And it is a license. I'm just responding to the comment about the law.
Except that is relevant to the part about law
This has literally always been the case with Steam, the only difference is that people are told up front now. Things will likely continue to operate exactly the same as it has until now, I doubt Valve wants to disrupt the giant money train they have.
I would be surprised if it even was possible for them to change so that the games are bought. I suspect that would be quite complicated legally.
It's literally in the title that GOG does exactly that. Why would Steam's hands be legally tied if GOG's aren't?
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.
As far as I know there is no mandatory DRM on Steam either, so if a publisher wants to they can just make their game be portable and not require Steam to even be installed. Pretty sure all the re-releases that use DOSBox or ScummVM are like this, for example.
Yeah there are loads of DRM free games on steam (mostly indies of course). Steam just offers a very basic (and easily bypassable if you know how) DRM to devs/publishers but they absolutely don't need to use it.
How is having an offline installer that can't be taken away, not the same thing as owning?
Because you are still only licensed the game
The amount of people thinking they are getting ripped off by steam now is astounding.
They are the reason this step is incredibly necessary.
I mean I've always had an issue that digital goods could always be revoked/taken back. That's why I didn't buy things on steam until it became basically the only way (as consoles have less physical media). This is just a great reminder for the public that we're consistently loosing control over our digital lives.
I've been an advocate for forcing companies to change the wording for digital goofs to "lease" rather than "buy". Cause at the end of the day, no one owns their steam library.
I mean, we are... Gabe became a billionaire that owns a yacht collection, his money came from somewhere, there's no reason to defend any billionaires or their companies unless you are a billionaire yourself.
Gabe heads a company which is successful because it respects its employees, customers, and suppliers instead of constantly trying to marginalize and abuse them. They are not perfect by any means, but they do fit into the definition of ethical capitalism, which should not be understated. They don't employ anticompetitive tactics like bribing/coercing developers into exclusivity contracts. They don't operate with a bunch of 1099 contractors so they can avoid providing benefits. Etc.
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.
I like GOG, but this is just weasel-words to take advantage of the ignorance of the public. Whether you receive the installs directly or not, you still don't own your games, you are just licensing them, same as Steam.
This doesn't tip the scales into the "this is wrong" territory for me, but I do think this kind of word manipulation exploiting an unknowledgeable public is a little bit slimy.
edit: I had a bit of knee-jerk reaction to the sensationalism of the headline; what GOG actually says is fine and doesn't imply anything beyond licensing in my eyes.
I just like calling it "the kill shot", as though GOG is about to take all of Steam's market share some time next week.
please let this be true it would be really funny
I think it is fair. When you buy games through GOG, you get the offline installer. Nobody can take that away from you.
When you buy games through Steam, you can only install them via the Steam client. If the Steam servers are offline, you cannot install your games. In theory, some games are without any DRM, and you can just zip them up, but even then that doesn't always work, and you shouldn't have to. That's not to take away from Steam, of course, it is great at what it does.
Providing an offline installer that works no matter what is as good as "owning" the game IMO, even if "technically" you are just purchasing a license to use the game.
edit: I went and read what GOG itself actually says. The headline is slimy, GOG's disclosure is fine. I don't think they're implying anything beyond what they offer.
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.
We don't have to do this. It's the juxtaposition of GOG's claim paired being intentionally paired with the steam disclaimer so as to present it as if an alternative.
I don't think "weasel words" is the right term here.
You own the GOG games like you own a book you bought, and like you don't own a DRM-crippled book, even though you might be entitled to read it under certain circumstances. The difference between downloading an installer and downloading a game on Steam is, the installer will continue to work even if GOG folds or decides they don't like you anymore. But if Steam blocks your account, all the games you bought are gone, and Steam is fully in the right to do so since you don't own their games.
That's not true. You still only receive a license to play the game, you do not own it. Directly from GOG's website:
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.
Practically this means you cannot resell your GOG installer in the way you could resell a physical book.
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.
Absolutely. GOG has a much better license and distribution model, but it's still a license.
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.
You can resell, trade, give, lend a book you bought. You're just not allowed to do the same with any copies you've made. At least where I live
Like I said, the illustration does break down.
There are no products for which you get the IP because you bought one unit. Edit: IANAL, there might be.
Not a book, nor a car. So I don't see how that's relevant.
Sorry if I misunderstood your point.
I don’t think “weasel words” is the right term here.
I agree with you. GOG's wording is fine, I was hasty in my reaction.
Doesn't owning something mean you can sell it? That doesn't apply to GOG, though.
By the definition of this California law, they seem to count as offering ownership.
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.
But that’s against the User Agreement with GOG. You don’t have that right, DRM or not.
GOG are not selling you something you own, just like the rest of the gaming platforms. They just give you the right to download and keep DRM-free installers (for the most part) for games you license / purchase.
I like GOG, don’t get me wrong, but you don’t own anything you buy from them, you just possess. Ownership means you have control over that possession too which is only really true of a minuscule fraction of FOSS games that are licensed with MIT-0, 0BSD, Unlicense, CC0 or some other public domain license (which doesn’t include GPL, MIT, Apache licenses).
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.
MIT still has copyright attribution which means you don’t own it, just have lots and lots of rights. You own the code, but you don’t own the name etc.
MIT-0 is public domain, there is no copyright by the creators, that right is assigned to all of us. You own that content and idea. It’s why anyone can use Sherlock Holmes and do anything they want with the character as he’s public domain. You don’t have to call him Schmerlock Hoves.
But yeah, for all intents and purposes to the thread, you’re right. MIT etc you can sell the code/binaries so gives you practical ownership.
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.
Here's another reminder to sign this initiative if you live in the EU.
I'd totally sign....if the Russian funded tory party hadn't decided we should leave because they were scared of the far right taking votes.
Spread the word, then.
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.
The vast majority of the bestsellers on steam either have normal DRM or DRM via being an online service. At least the bestsellers in 2023.
Does GOG work on Linux?
Many of their games do have native linux versions, and a lot do work under wine or proton, which can be used as a Non-steam game in Steam or even without Steam.
Their launcher doesn't yet have a native linux version but it's completely optional, and does still run under wine if you really want it.
If I'm not going to use their game manager, then why would I buy the game from them instead of just buying it directly from the game studio? I guess because game studios rarely distribute their own games anymore?
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.
Tarkov is only direct to my knowledge
If it works on Steam it works on GOG. Nothing about proton is limited to Steam.
There's a Linux specific Steam program though. Is there a Linux specific GOG program?
The Heroic Games Launcher can download and run GOG games. It's a community-run project, but officially affiliated with GOG.
How does GOG support Heroic?
They set up a commission with gog if you buy games through heroic
Is this an actual, specific deal with Heroic, or some general affiliate linking thing?
No clue if it's heroic exclusive but it's more than just affiliate linking. Heroic embeds the actual gog store page in the launcher and gets a percentage of anything you buy per their agreement with gog
For the record, the affiliate link is listed here:
Just curious if there is a specific deal between Heroic and GOG.
Cool, thanks.
You mean a native version of GOG? I don't think so, but you can use it through Lutris.
Nowadays the Heroic Games Launcher is the preferred solution for downloading and running GOG games. It's a community-run project, but officially affiliated with GOG.
Cool, thank you.
NGL This feels disingenuous coming from GOG, Yes, you can keep the installers, but you do NOT own the game.
Seriously not trying to just be contradictory:
What's the difference? In practical terms, what does this mean for me as the consumer? We don't own the intellectual property, but may use the software as-is? From a practical, consumer standpoint that feels the same as the days of owning your software on a disc, unable to be taken as long as you have physical control over the device. I'm fine with calling this "owning" personally.
I'm absolutely willing to be wrong on this. I'm by no means an expert. Please, if I have missed something, let me know.
Can you sell them? or trade, give, even lend them? My guess is you can't. And when I was a kid I did all those things.
It's not anedoctal IMO, but a change in paradigm.
I'm not saying it's all bad. I buy games on GOG. But I don't own them really
A 2015 study in France showed 54% where more willing to buy a game when they knew they could sell them when done
There is no drm so zip the installer and everything to your friend and call it a day
We were talking about legal offers. Are you legally the owner of your game.
Of course you can share, reproduce, pirate ... but that's not the point here.
I can see the functional difference there, with regards to sell/trade/loan. You could of course emulate the functionality, or rely on the honor system for abandon ware stuff, but that's clunky, inefficient, not worth the energy.
I hadn't considered the second hand aspect. Even as a kid, I was always more a "build a library" kind of person versus a "cycle my catalog" kind of person. I was considering things from an availability to play the game perspective alone. Thanks for the different perspective!
I don't want to advocate for shoveling money into any company, but if you could sell your steam games it would screw over indie devs in a big way. Many games made by small studies or one person don't have as much content as AAA studies and would be far more prone to a small handful of copies being distributed back and forth on the used market instead of each being a sale that goes to the developer.
Some devs would see a drop in sales as much as 90% and I just don't think it's worth it to shoot the gaming industry in the foot like that.
Just to be clear: my main point was that you don't own any more the game bought on GOG than on Steam.
And there are definitely upsides to this type of market.
Although nowadays I wouldn't buy a just released triple A 70€ game knowing I can't sell or give it (not that I play those much anymore). The games I actually want to keep a few and far between.
I buy second hand Switch games for my nephews. It's cheap, I'm actually giving them something, and they can trade them with their friends or sell them to buy fortnite skins the little shits
Again, not hating on GOG, I've been a customer for a long time. Mainly because I don't want any kind of launcher. I play 99% solo games, don't need no updates or multiple clicks to launch a game.
I would ABSOLUTELY argue that you more own a game purchased on gog, with an offline installer, than one purchased on steam. I now see the functional difference between owning a drm-free installer vs owning a physical game, but there's also a gulf of difference between steam and gog
Just to be entirely fair. The rest of what you said is absolutely spot on.
I agree, you are "more owner" with a GOG game.
There really is no difference. For almost all intents and purposes, GOG's offline installers can be treated the same way as physical CDs of way back then, with one of the only exceptions being that you cannot resell them.
Depending on your perspective, the sell/trade/loan aspect of physical can be a huge deal. I outlined in another comment, selling/trading games was never my thing, but it was my cousins. From my perspective, there's marginal difference, but there IS a difference.
Yeah? And whats the difference in practice?
Plus, unless the installers have the full package, it'll still require an internet connection. Usually installers download the files and then install them.
They’re called offline installers for a reason.
I'll give gog this, I have never seen an installer from them that needed an internet connection, That being said, they actively call it licensing in their own agreement
When have they not had the full package on GOG?
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 has 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.
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.
With stuff like UMU a Linux version of galaxy would be easier than ever, And yet somehow I still doubt we'll see it until Linux gets a much higher marketshare.
And yet somehow I still doubt we’ll see it until Linux gets a much higher marketshare.
CD Project is doing nothing to improve that market share, hence why I don't care to spend any money on GOG.
GOG is funding the FOSS Heroic Games Launcher through an affiliate partnership
GOG has an affiliate links program. Heroic signed up for that. GOG isn't specifically funding Heroic. Wake me up when CD Project / GOG is hiring a developer of Mesa or something along those lines. You know, an actual part of the technology foundation that's being used by a wide range of Linux distributions.
An office worker sitting at a desk somewhere at a Linux-running PC is benefiting from technology advancements upstreamed by Valve as part of Steam Deck performance improvements.
Edit: GOG's "funding" is an advertising tracker:
The end result is still part of GOG's revenue going toward the development of Heroic.
It doesn't meet your high standard and that's okay. I prefer to count my blessings in this regard.
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.
Man, the forums really got bad at such at a rapid pace, and I'd love to know what changed to make it that way.
Probably the same reason it's happening all over the corporate web: fewer eyeballs moderating content. I was never enough of a regular on Steam communities to be sure, unlike GameFAQs (which I can tell you has always been that way).
I do agree the community discussions have gone to shit. But that's true of the entire fucking internet. People are assholes when veiled behind anonymity. That's not a Steam issue. It's a human issue.
Sure. There's just degrees of it. Your average Steam community discussion board is far, far worse than the community you're in right now.
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 a weird hill to die on.
Anyway, enjoy being wrong.
Doesn't steam have a clause to the effect of "if we go out of business, you'll get X period to download your games so you can manage them yourself"?
I don't know if it's a clause but Gabe said it at one point. Is that legally binding though? It wouldn't surprise me one bit that whatever VC eventually buys steam and then runs it into the ground would have no problem changing the user agreement to whatever suited them....
It's not legally binding, since it isn't part of the user agreement you review when buying games on Steam.
I think I read in the steam agreement itself - I could be wrong, but I generally have a source tagged to my knowledge, and the knowledge is tagged as a direct quote from the document
And yes, if a VC buys out steam I'd be horrified, but it's structurally resistant to that. It's largely employee owned and heavily employee managed, their handbook helped me understand the concept of how employee owned businesses could be the answer to many of society's problems
If there’s a grace period, perhaps, however:
Steam does not provide installers for games, this means that whatever game you want, needs to be 100% functional and already be parsed/deployed/installed by steam on your hard drive.
That game needs to be DRM free, meaning that it has an executable available that can be launched without steam running or requiring any sort of authentication or input from the steam servers/services before being able to launch, play or even interact with the menus
So only the DRM free games will remain, and only the installed ones at that. Anything that wasn’t will be lost to the wind the moment the distribution service or storage (yours or theirs) bits the dust…
installers for games are usually just a script that unzips the game and makes some shortcuts. Steam installs all your games in a standard way in a folder of your choice. You can straight up copy that folder to another computer. You can use another launcher and just play your games, there are already many that can read steam's standardized format. I've done it multiple times to avoid redownloading my library
It depends how steam sunsets their DRM, but yes - obviously if a game has 3rd party DRM, that third party is in control. Steam could choose a user hostile way to sunset their own DRM, but they could release ways to deactivate it
DRM is bad, steam provides an easy way for developers to use steam DRM, and it's generally less user hostile than most DRM. To me, this seems like harm reduction
Ultimately, it's not up to steam what, if any, DRM a game uses. They manage their in house offering, but the developer doesn't have to use it if they don't want to
Even if that's not the case, the drm is very easy to crack.
As long as you understand the terms of your agreement with Steam as a platform, everything is fine. Physical media for games are outdated anyway, especially with frequent updates, patches, and DLC releases. Regarding older titles that are no longer supported, well, as the saying goes: "If buying isn't owing..."
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.
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”.
The license is with regards to "GOG Service", not "GOG Contents". You need the former to get access to the latter, sure. But what isn't clear about this?
You still own the contents (though, as mentioned, individual titles may have additional blablabla). If you don't think this distinction makes sense when it comes to GoG vs Steam, then maybe you're just discussing something entirely different?
Yeah, you have to download the installer before they pull the rug.
I suppose. If you are doing things against TOS and you suspect just might happen, by all means.
You legally didn't "own" your physical games either if you haven't noticed.
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.
Okay steam, if its just a digital license and not ownership.. Then surely you'll be significantly lowering prices, Since you charge full ownership prices for games, not license prices.. Right?
I don't think it's Steam setting the prices.
They indirectly are inflating it with their 30% cut
They are also deflating it by providing services that developers would otherwise have to spend time and money on to develop themselves.
Their 30% cuts allowed Gabe to start collecting yachts, they could charge a lot less while still offering the same services and only Gabe would see his finances take the hit, no one else in the world would be poorer if they charged 20% instead.
So games sold on storefronts owned by the same publishers as the game should be 30% cheaper right? Right?
Should be cheaper, emphasis on should, but at the same time if they sell directly and take the same cut, that's one less intermediary in the chain so more money going to the devs.
None of the managerial class are good people, wake up, all billionaires are taking advantage of us.
G*mers really don’t want the industry to evaluate the $60 price point and apply inflationary adjustments going back to when it became the standard.
The $60 was based on 55%+ going to distribution channels, +physical media costs, so it could be down from there.
regular reminder that digital distribution was sold to us under the false promise that games would be cheaper, because they wouldnt have to pay for printing boxes, CDs, manuals, greebles, Wouldnt have to pay for shipping or storage, or any other burden addition of physical media.
That we'd be able to buy games for 30 dollars, and that that the developers and everyone involved would make more money than they would have paying 50 for a physical game.
Yeah, this is the original sin, they just banked the cost the whole time until they could cry that they need to charge more because of inflation.
and now, they are wanting to sell games for 70-80 bucks for AAA titles.
Its not cause the games are 50 dollars that they arent making enough hundreds of millions. The only reason these AAA games arent making bank is because they're shit
Can anyone honestly remember the last AAA title that wasnt an absolute dog pile?
Fr tho people seem to forget abt inflation a lot when talking abt the old days
Why compare oranges and apples? Console and PC games were never the same from a price perspective.
This is a really interesting chart. A lot of N64 games were $70 and even $80 at launch which is upwards of $150 today. Just crazy.
People keep saying SNES/N64/etc games were super expensive...and i just wanna ask where they were buying them?
Cause everytime I went into the stores to get one they were 49.99.
People seem to forget that just moderately decent games sell magnitudes more today than they did 20 years ago, too, thus continuing to bring in insane cash (as long as you arent sony or other companies that are obscenely wasteful..) despite inflation, this stable pricing making them a good entertainment investment for people whose minimum wage hasnt changed in like 15 years
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).
What file format does the Steam backup use?
For current exports, it's some custom .csm/.csd file combo. Not sure if there's any tools for working with it, seems like it'd be more annoying than just using a normal archive format either way.
That's bad. I guess if I want to back up my Steam games, it's going to be tarballs.
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.
Chad GOG
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.
wdym you can play steam games offline the only exception is needing the steam client?
To install a game you have bought on steam you need the steam client, the steam servers, internet and your steam account. If any of those stops being available you can no longer install the games you have bought. So while you can play the games once installed without most of the above, you can lose access to your not currently installed games.
Also, on steam you purchase licenses to the games which they can revoke. I.e. if steam turned evil they could take away games from your library and you couldn't do anything about it really.
Comparatively on GOG, you get a binary installer you can download and can keep forever without DRM so you don't need anything else to install the game in the future, even if it disappeared from your GOG account for some reason, you could still install and play the game.
If Steam stops working, you could replace the Steam API with the Goldberg emulator, and an already installed game should work, if there is no other DRM.
But yes, GOG is definitely better.
I just wish GOG Galaxy worked on Linux.
Heroic launcher has been amazing
thank you for the detailed explanations i just thought steam only needs the client to work
You also need a Steam account, to which all your games are linked. If you somehow get perma-banned off of Steam, you lose everything.
ohh yeah i forgot
Offline installer. So a game gets removed from your library for any reason. Now you get a new PC and can't play the game anymore. At GoG you get an installer that doesn't check servers and can work with no internet connection etc. So even if they were forced to remove a game from your library, you still have the installer and can install it whenever you want. So if you keep a hard drive of installers, you will forever own the game as long as you don't lose that data.
ohh
Unpopular opinion: if I have to fudge with Wine instead of Proton, I simply will not bother. It's 2024. I'm not going to fiddle with configs, or get a setup together just to play a single game. That's ridiculous. A game should 100% be one click to run, whether it's native or not. and if that's not what is expected in 2024, Linux get it together. sincerely: a full time Linux gamer that is a single parent and doesn't have time to fiddle just to play a game. Wine and most of its front ends need a major overhaul.
Then just use Proton? You don't need Steam for it.
And sitting there and demanding "Linux" to get it "together" because it is 2024 is rather ignorant due to the fact that it is not Linux' fault that the software in question needs additional workarounds in order to make it run.
People out there are using their freetime to come up with solutions for problems caused by corporations using proprietary libraries and software.
I don't think that your opinion is unpopular.
I get what you want, I do wish the same, and a lot of peoole would agree with it as well, but the context in which we operate here matters a lot.
I test games for a living and most of the time wine runs perfectly fine. You can also just use umu laucher which does everything for you.
Also I don't really get your point. Who's forcing you to use wine instead of proton?
I'm not aware of how things are now, but at least previously you couldn't really use Proton outside of Steam.
So I assume OC defends Steam as the only platform that can smoothly run games with Proton instead of regular Wine, which does not work as well for certain games and/or requires tedious configuration.
You are right about proton. But the tedious configuration part is not true. Proton and ge-wine(now UMU) do the same thing, i.e applying custom patches. Wine base package is not expected to do this.
I see, thanks!
You need to "get it together" and buy games for your platform.
"That's ridiculous"
Heroic is decent imo. It lets you download Wine, manage prefixes, enable/disable dxvk/vkd3d, configure gamescope & mangohud and so on.
So does lutris and bottles. Don't know what OP is talking about.
No mention of DRM in the reviews or anywhere in the forum...
No mention of DRM anywhere...
You're right I was misremembering the reviews complaining about the UELA instead
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
How weird, I wonder if there's something wrong with my GOG account? I don't think I've received an email from them in years?
No, if you claim the giveaways you have to subscribe to their newsletter. That's all. If you aren't doing that, you'll almost never get an email.
Ye that's why I stopped claiming games
I see, that makes sense. Thanks!
You should not be getting promotional emails if you opt out, so something is wrong with your account/settings specifically. Contact them or filter your emails.
That's what I figured... Some bug on their end or something because every time I get one I unsubscribe. I plan to just delete my account and go back to a mix of pirating and steam
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
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?
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.
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.
I was wondering how all those Sony games worked on GOG.
And has had them for many years before 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
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"
The true Bethesda killer was Bethesda themselves
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.
If anything is a "Bethesda-killer", it's games like Outer Wilds, not The Outer Worlds.
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.
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.
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
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.
The gov only considers a large business a monopoly if it's doing anti competitive practices to maintain or grow it's market share. That description in no way fits steam or valve.
I have physical copies of PC games that require a Steam Account.
Which is why you don't have physical copies of those games - you bought a steam key, exactly like you could have done digitally from humblebundle of greenmangaming or myriad of other stores, this one just had it printed on a piece of paper instead of sending you an email.
A Steam key Valve didn't get a cut from, btw.
So all those files on the disc I had to install were for something else then?
Helped you (and Valve) to save some bandwidth. But yes. If it requires a Steam account to play, you bought a license allowing you to access a game using Steam, and not an actual game you own.
So it's anti consumer bullshit.
That is done because of a game publisher, not steam.
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.
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.
Oh look, another boring block of text so you can avoid replying to the commentor who proved you're either dumb or just lying.
We get it, your point can be dumbed down to a mouth-breathing "capitalism bad".
And, to be clear, Capitalism is bad. I'm on board. But riding Gaben's dick, or the dick of any boring dystopian billionaire instead of the people actively fighting to maintain the system is just grossly missing the point
Not all evils are equal, and any perceived slight by Steam is honestly smoke for the thousands of disgustingly rich venture capitalists constantly abusing the system that exists and lobbying the shit out of any attempt to fix it. I don't blame Gaben for owning more yacht's than anyone needs, because, at the end of the day, he's providing a quality service through an unfair system. He's not the one fighting to provide shittier and shittier systems, demanding fatter and fatter paychecks and encouraging us to blame each other for the state of the world while he runs off with the largest slice of the cake.
Should he have the wealth he has access to? Fuck no. But, again, the dishonest and disgustingly simplified argument that homie is making is only idiofying the cause. Target the problems, not the lucky guys who are providing halfway reasonable services through our broken-ass system.
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.
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.
https://www.wired.com/story/death-occurs-in-the-dark-indie-video-game-devs-are-struggling-to-stay-afloat/
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.
I'll bite. I hate billionaires. Let's check this out.
Things that hurt indie devs in this article:
Lack of available talent
Burnout
Lack of upfront funding (before a game is ever released)
Generally bad economy post COVID
Actual predatory exclusive tactics from epic or gamepad
The nebulous idea that the entire industry and fans need a culture change
Things not cited in this article as a problem:
Lack of funding is mentioned every paragraph?
The industry is struggling because steam and the other stores keep them on the brink, they have no leeway. I don't know how steams greed could be seen as unrelated.
Pick a better battle because you're making all of us anti-capitalists look like fucking idiots.
Do you know of any other company that racks in as much cash and gets defended this hard? All I'm seeing is people defending an other billionaire cunt just because they use his product.
Would you tell me to shut up if I was denouncing Elon Musk or Bezos? You can't be anti-capitalism and pro-Steam. The moment you defend a billionaire, you are part of the problem.
I'm not saying I'm pro-steam. I'm saying you're doing a dogshit job of providing compelling arguments and are making us look stupid.
Making 10 billion in a year while having 70 employees isn't a compelling argument to you?
Are you sure you know what anti-capitalism is?
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.
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?
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 is not a fair comparison to Steam, hence why I refocused to Xbox.
"Obviously I didn't mean what I said, don't be a child!" 🙄
They could even do it for free, out of the goodness of their hearts!
"I was told there would be no fact-checking"
Wow, those goalposts are really movin' now!
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.
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?
😪
Yes, yes, we get it.
That kind of behavior really cements the image that I have of you, lol
Cute.
This is just false.
reference
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.
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:
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.From the verge article
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:
Verge:
Are you done being an idiot?
LOL 79 - 71 = 8, not 9. Can't even do basic math on your made up numbers.
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
Disingenuous? Dumb? Who knows!?
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:
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.
What a weird hill to die on.
Anyway, enjoy being wrong.
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.
Gaben has the only good monopoly, he's pretty much Jesus.
Preach brother!
Now can we get proton support for GoG that is as convient and reliable as it is in Steam?
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.
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 + 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.
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.
I’m not saying it doesn’t work. I’ve set several things from GoG up using Lutris. But in Steam it’s a two step process:
I want that level of ease from GoG.
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 in Steam is absolutely easier. Lutris just automates work that some other user did, and if you're doing it in something like Heroic launcher instead, you have to figure that out yourself. It often involves things like installing other Microsoft components that are bundled with the application on Steam, and in one case, even though the game was verified on Steam, there was no Lutris script, and I just couldn't get it working on the GOG version.
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.
Paying someone else to do it and verify that it works is exactly part of why I parted with my money in the first place. At least GOG has a very generous refund policy, but it's a lot more work on my end.
Oh, absolutely.
The point I'm making is that with its process Lutris + Wine are scaling up much faster to seamlessly make all sorts of Windows games Click & Play in Linux, than Steam can or even will try to (don't expect Steam to get around to cover older games that aren't successful AAA titles).
It's the same old same old, open source software solution vs closed corporate software solution that happens in so many other domains: the open source one starts clunky and quirky and it will always tend towards the side of "giving users enough rope to hang themselves with" (too many option, many very powerful) whilst the closed corporate one will from the very start be slick and easier to use but very limited when it comes to what users can do to customize it or even fix it when it doesn't work, but over time and if it manages to survive the open source one will be better and far more capable and flexible than the corporate one simply because contributions to it scale up with interest in it and number of users whilst that's not so for the corporate one.
It's what you see with for example Blender vs Adobe's suit of 3D modelling programs or Linux vs Windows (if it weren't for the well entrenched ecosystem of Windows-only applications, I doubt Windows would still be around).
That's why I think something like Lutris + Wine are the future, not Proton integrated into the Store application of Steam.
But really what I'm asking for, as a customer, is for GOG to do this work for me before I buy. Because it's all open source, there's nothing stopping them. Valve pumped a bunch of money into the projects to improve things for everyone, but they're still doing more work on their end.
Valve is a much, much bigger company than GoG, plus Valve's Linux strategy is really a "have our own console on the cheap" strategy.
But yeah, GoG should be doing more for gaming on Linux, maybe not as much as Valve but proportionally so. At the moment they're doing almost nothing at all: they have Linux offline installers available for games which do support Linux directly, but that's it.
So whilst I find it unrealistic to expect that GoG should be contributing to gaming on Linux as much as Valve, I do agree they should be doing more.
PS: Mind you, I'm not trying to make the case that GoG is perfect and Steam is shit, I'm trying to make the case that open and flexible to use is better than closed and tightly integrated with a specific store, which is why I generally prefer GoG with their offline installers, as well as Lutris + Wine (quite independently of GoG) and would be happy enough even if Lutris had no GoG integration since long before moving my gaming rig to Linux I had the habit of downloading and using the offline installers and did not at all use GoG Galaxy.
If there's one thing that 30 years of being a Software Engineer have taught me is that you want your system to be as decoupled as possible from any business, because even if they are nice at the moment that's no guarantee that at a later date they won't leverage people having their systems integrated with theirs to take advantage of their customers (the phenomenon of enshittification being a good example of that).
Dafuq is a proton
A proton is a positively charged subatomic particle doing in the nucleus of an atom. But in this context, Proton is a translation layer that allows games that were built for Windows to run on Linux.
it's what people on linux use to play windows games on linux
That's Wine
Are you being purposefully obtuse? Proton is based on Wine yes, but it is it's own distinct project.
Yes, that is the upstream. Valve’s downstream of wine is called proton.
People use steam because it's good service, and a good product.
In fact, they also gave Linux a boost
They also have things like cloud saving
Developers use them because apparently they have some awesome features too for things like multiplayer and such and a great API
I like steam as a user but it's still proprietary software and I'm slightly concerned about what is going to happen when Gabe Newell steps down as president and ceo of Valve.
Now if we could just have GOG Galaxy for Linux. It would make my life so much easier.
Lutris lets you add your GOG account and download/install games directly. its not Galaxy, but its pretty flawless.
Lutris is awesome.
Open source games, games with their own launcher, games on steam, gog, etc are all in it. Can pick to run things natively on Linux, use proton (pick your version or just use latest), wine, or choose from others, and it does it seamlessly. For games you already have installed on steam, you don't need to reinstall them, it finds them and makes them runnable from within lutris once you connect your steam account, you can also install games that you own on any of your connected launchers, and browse/download your undownloaded games from them
Examples for some of the stuff I have all in it now:
Catacyslm: DDA catapult launcher (free and open source game - highly recommend you try it out. Takes some getting used to, but there isn't much you can't do. Also, make sure you get cataclysm-tiles or use a launcher. ASCII is pure, but hard to get used to. Also, DO NOT buy it on steam.)
All of my installed steam games
Cyberpunk 2077 and the witcher 3 via gog
FFXIV (the official launcher, not steam)
Vintage story (open source but not free - highly recommend if you like open world survival crafting games with a big emphasis on survival)
Heroic Game Launcher is pretty cool. It does game save sync with GOG games too.
I know, I use it. I'd prefer an official Galaxy port though.
I feel you. Installing Fallout London was such a pain in the ass for Linux.
I wrote a guide for getting fallout london up and running if you need a hand
https://lemmy.world/post/18456924
I have it installed already, but thank you for the guide. I'll refer to it in case something breaks lol.
100% agreed. just wish GOG was more linux friendly.
best of both worlds: piracy.
Much of the pirated games though will be GOG installers so might as well just install it with lutris/wine
yes
i wouldn't pirate an indie game tho
Unless you already bought it
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
My understanding is that GOG is an exception to this. Here is a quote that I got from an Ars Technica article
Since GOG does offer permanent offline installers that can be used without an internet connection, GOG's sales are exempt from this new law.
Gog themselves refer to it as a license in there agreement
And it is a license. I'm just responding to the comment about the law.
Except that is relevant to the part about law
This has literally always been the case with Steam, the only difference is that people are told up front now. Things will likely continue to operate exactly the same as it has until now, I doubt Valve wants to disrupt the giant money train they have.
I would be surprised if it even was possible for them to change so that the games are bought. I suspect that would be quite complicated legally.
It's literally in the title that GOG does exactly that. Why would Steam's hands be legally tied if GOG's aren't?
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.
As far as I know there is no mandatory DRM on Steam either, so if a publisher wants to they can just make their game be portable and not require Steam to even be installed. Pretty sure all the re-releases that use DOSBox or ScummVM are like this, for example.
Yeah there are loads of DRM free games on steam (mostly indies of course). Steam just offers a very basic (and easily bypassable if you know how) DRM to devs/publishers but they absolutely don't need to use it.
How is having an offline installer that can't be taken away, not the same thing as owning?
Because you are still only licensed the game
The amount of people thinking they are getting ripped off by steam now is astounding.
They are the reason this step is incredibly necessary.
I mean I've always had an issue that digital goods could always be revoked/taken back. That's why I didn't buy things on steam until it became basically the only way (as consoles have less physical media). This is just a great reminder for the public that we're consistently loosing control over our digital lives.
I've been an advocate for forcing companies to change the wording for digital goofs to "lease" rather than "buy". Cause at the end of the day, no one owns their steam library.
I mean, we are... Gabe became a billionaire that owns a yacht collection, his money came from somewhere, there's no reason to defend any billionaires or their companies unless you are a billionaire yourself.
Gabe heads a company which is successful because it respects its employees, customers, and suppliers instead of constantly trying to marginalize and abuse them. They are not perfect by any means, but they do fit into the definition of ethical capitalism, which should not be understated. They don't employ anticompetitive tactics like bribing/coercing developers into exclusivity contracts. They don't operate with a bunch of 1099 contractors so they can avoid providing benefits. Etc.
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.
I like GOG, but this is just weasel-words to take advantage of the ignorance of the public. Whether you receive the installs directly or not, you still don't own your games, you are just licensing them, same as Steam.
This doesn't tip the scales into the "this is wrong" territory for me, but I do think this kind of word manipulation exploiting an unknowledgeable public is a little bit slimy.
edit: I had a bit of knee-jerk reaction to the sensationalism of the headline; what GOG actually says is fine and doesn't imply anything beyond licensing in my eyes.
I just like calling it "the kill shot", as though GOG is about to take all of Steam's market share some time next week.
please let this be true it would be really funny
I think it is fair. When you buy games through GOG, you get the offline installer. Nobody can take that away from you.
When you buy games through Steam, you can only install them via the Steam client. If the Steam servers are offline, you cannot install your games. In theory, some games are without any DRM, and you can just zip them up, but even then that doesn't always work, and you shouldn't have to. That's not to take away from Steam, of course, it is great at what it does.
Providing an offline installer that works no matter what is as good as "owning" the game IMO, even if "technically" you are just purchasing a license to use the game.
edit: I went and read what GOG itself actually says. The headline is slimy, GOG's disclosure is fine. I don't think they're implying anything beyond what they offer.
Are you referring to the use of the word "killshot"? Otherwise, the headline says exactly the same thing.
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.
We don't have to do this. It's the juxtaposition of GOG's claim paired being intentionally paired with the steam disclaimer so as to present it as if an alternative.
I don't think "weasel words" is the right term here.
You own the GOG games like you own a book you bought, and like you don't own a DRM-crippled book, even though you might be entitled to read it under certain circumstances. The difference between downloading an installer and downloading a game on Steam is, the installer will continue to work even if GOG folds or decides they don't like you anymore. But if Steam blocks your account, all the games you bought are gone, and Steam is fully in the right to do so since you don't own their games.
That's not true. You still only receive a license to play the game, you do not own it. Directly from GOG's website:
Practically this means you cannot resell your GOG installer in the way you could resell a physical book.
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.
Absolutely. GOG has a much better license and distribution model, but it's still a license.
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.
You can resell, trade, give, lend a book you bought. You're just not allowed to do the same with any copies you've made. At least where I live
Like I said, the illustration does break down.
There are no products for which you get the IP because you bought one unit. Edit: IANAL, there might be.
Not a book, nor a car. So I don't see how that's relevant.
Sorry if I misunderstood your point.
I agree with you. GOG's wording is fine, I was hasty in my reaction.
Doesn't owning something mean you can sell it? That doesn't apply to GOG, though.
By the definition of this California law, they seem to count as offering ownership.
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.
But that’s against the User Agreement with GOG. You don’t have that right, DRM or not.
GOG are not selling you something you own, just like the rest of the gaming platforms. They just give you the right to download and keep DRM-free installers (for the most part) for games you license / purchase.
I like GOG, don’t get me wrong, but you don’t own anything you buy from them, you just possess. Ownership means you have control over that possession too which is only really true of a minuscule fraction of FOSS games that are licensed with MIT-0, 0BSD, Unlicense, CC0 or some other public domain license (which doesn’t include GPL, MIT, Apache licenses).
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.
MIT still has copyright attribution which means you don’t own it, just have lots and lots of rights. You own the code, but you don’t own the name etc.
MIT-0 is public domain, there is no copyright by the creators, that right is assigned to all of us. You own that content and idea. It’s why anyone can use Sherlock Holmes and do anything they want with the character as he’s public domain. You don’t have to call him Schmerlock Hoves.
But yeah, for all intents and purposes to the thread, you’re right. MIT etc you can sell the code/binaries so gives you practical ownership.
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.
Here's another reminder to sign this initiative if you live in the EU.
I'd totally sign....if the Russian funded tory party hadn't decided we should leave because they were scared of the far right taking votes.
Spread the word, then.
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.
The vast majority of the bestsellers on steam either have normal DRM or DRM via being an online service. At least the bestsellers in 2023.
Does GOG work on Linux?
Many of their games do have native linux versions, and a lot do work under wine or proton, which can be used as a Non-steam game in Steam or even without Steam.
Their launcher doesn't yet have a native linux version but it's completely optional, and does still run under wine if you really want it.
If I'm not going to use their game manager, then why would I buy the game from them instead of just buying it directly from the game studio? I guess because game studios rarely distribute their own games anymore?
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.
Tarkov is only direct to my knowledge
If it works on Steam it works on GOG. Nothing about proton is limited to Steam.
There's a Linux specific Steam program though. Is there a Linux specific GOG program?
The Heroic Games Launcher can download and run GOG games. It's a community-run project, but officially affiliated with GOG.
How does GOG support Heroic?
They set up a commission with gog if you buy games through heroic
Is this an actual, specific deal with Heroic, or some general affiliate linking thing?
No clue if it's heroic exclusive but it's more than just affiliate linking. Heroic embeds the actual gog store page in the launcher and gets a percentage of anything you buy per their agreement with gog
For the record, the affiliate link is listed here:
https://heroicgameslauncher.com/donate
Sounds technically just like affiliate linking, even if the browser is embedded.
https://affiliate.gog.com/
Just curious if there is a specific deal between Heroic and GOG.
Cool, thanks.
You mean a native version of GOG? I don't think so, but you can use it through Lutris.
Nowadays the Heroic Games Launcher is the preferred solution for downloading and running GOG games. It's a community-run project, but officially affiliated with GOG.
Cool, thank you.
NGL This feels disingenuous coming from GOG, Yes, you can keep the installers, but you do NOT own the game.
Seriously not trying to just be contradictory:
What's the difference? In practical terms, what does this mean for me as the consumer? We don't own the intellectual property, but may use the software as-is? From a practical, consumer standpoint that feels the same as the days of owning your software on a disc, unable to be taken as long as you have physical control over the device. I'm fine with calling this "owning" personally.
I'm absolutely willing to be wrong on this. I'm by no means an expert. Please, if I have missed something, let me know.
Can you sell them? or trade, give, even lend them? My guess is you can't. And when I was a kid I did all those things.
It's not anedoctal IMO, but a change in paradigm. I'm not saying it's all bad. I buy games on GOG. But I don't own them really
A 2015 study in France showed 54% where more willing to buy a game when they knew they could sell them when done
There is no drm so zip the installer and everything to your friend and call it a day
We were talking about legal offers. Are you legally the owner of your game.
Of course you can share, reproduce, pirate ... but that's not the point here.
I can see the functional difference there, with regards to sell/trade/loan. You could of course emulate the functionality, or rely on the honor system for abandon ware stuff, but that's clunky, inefficient, not worth the energy.
I hadn't considered the second hand aspect. Even as a kid, I was always more a "build a library" kind of person versus a "cycle my catalog" kind of person. I was considering things from an availability to play the game perspective alone. Thanks for the different perspective!
I don't want to advocate for shoveling money into any company, but if you could sell your steam games it would screw over indie devs in a big way. Many games made by small studies or one person don't have as much content as AAA studies and would be far more prone to a small handful of copies being distributed back and forth on the used market instead of each being a sale that goes to the developer.
Some devs would see a drop in sales as much as 90% and I just don't think it's worth it to shoot the gaming industry in the foot like that.
Just to be clear: my main point was that you don't own any more the game bought on GOG than on Steam.
And there are definitely upsides to this type of market.
Although nowadays I wouldn't buy a just released triple A 70€ game knowing I can't sell or give it (not that I play those much anymore). The games I actually want to keep a few and far between.
I buy second hand Switch games for my nephews. It's cheap, I'm actually giving them something, and they can trade them with their friends or sell them to buy fortnite skins the little shits
Again, not hating on GOG, I've been a customer for a long time. Mainly because I don't want any kind of launcher. I play 99% solo games, don't need no updates or multiple clicks to launch a game.
I would ABSOLUTELY argue that you more own a game purchased on gog, with an offline installer, than one purchased on steam. I now see the functional difference between owning a drm-free installer vs owning a physical game, but there's also a gulf of difference between steam and gog
Just to be entirely fair. The rest of what you said is absolutely spot on.
I agree, you are "more owner" with a GOG game.
There really is no difference. For almost all intents and purposes, GOG's offline installers can be treated the same way as physical CDs of way back then, with one of the only exceptions being that you cannot resell them.
Depending on your perspective, the sell/trade/loan aspect of physical can be a huge deal. I outlined in another comment, selling/trading games was never my thing, but it was my cousins. From my perspective, there's marginal difference, but there IS a difference.
Yeah? And whats the difference in practice?
Plus, unless the installers have the full package, it'll still require an internet connection. Usually installers download the files and then install them.
They’re called offline installers for a reason.
I'll give gog this, I have never seen an installer from them that needed an internet connection, That being said, they actively call it licensing in their own agreement
When have they not had the full package on GOG?
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 has 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.
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.
With stuff like UMU a Linux version of galaxy would be easier than ever, And yet somehow I still doubt we'll see it until Linux gets a much higher marketshare.
CD Project is doing nothing to improve that market share, hence why I don't care to spend any money on GOG.
GOG is funding the FOSS Heroic Games Launcher through an affiliate partnership: https://heroicgameslauncher.com/donate
GOG has an affiliate links program. Heroic signed up for that. GOG isn't specifically funding Heroic. Wake me up when CD Project / GOG is hiring a developer of Mesa or something along those lines. You know, an actual part of the technology foundation that's being used by a wide range of Linux distributions.
An office worker sitting at a desk somewhere at a Linux-running PC is benefiting from technology advancements upstreamed by Valve as part of Steam Deck performance improvements.
Edit: GOG's "funding" is an advertising tracker:
The end result is still part of GOG's revenue going toward the development of Heroic.
It doesn't meet your high standard and that's okay. I prefer to count my blessings in this regard.
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.
Man, the forums really got bad at such at a rapid pace, and I'd love to know what changed to make it that way.
Probably the same reason it's happening all over the corporate web: fewer eyeballs moderating content. I was never enough of a regular on Steam communities to be sure, unlike GameFAQs (which I can tell you has always been that way).
I do agree the community discussions have gone to shit. But that's true of the entire fucking internet. People are assholes when veiled behind anonymity. That's not a Steam issue. It's a human issue.
Sure. There's just degrees of it. Your average Steam community discussion board is far, far worse than the community you're in right now.
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 a weird hill to die on.
Anyway, enjoy being wrong.
Doesn't steam have a clause to the effect of "if we go out of business, you'll get X period to download your games so you can manage them yourself"?
I don't know if it's a clause but Gabe said it at one point. Is that legally binding though? It wouldn't surprise me one bit that whatever VC eventually buys steam and then runs it into the ground would have no problem changing the user agreement to whatever suited them....
It's not legally binding, since it isn't part of the user agreement you review when buying games on Steam.
I think I read in the steam agreement itself - I could be wrong, but I generally have a source tagged to my knowledge, and the knowledge is tagged as a direct quote from the document
And yes, if a VC buys out steam I'd be horrified, but it's structurally resistant to that. It's largely employee owned and heavily employee managed, their handbook helped me understand the concept of how employee owned businesses could be the answer to many of society's problems
If there’s a grace period, perhaps, however:
So only the DRM free games will remain, and only the installed ones at that. Anything that wasn’t will be lost to the wind the moment the distribution service or storage (yours or theirs) bits the dust…
installers for games are usually just a script that unzips the game and makes some shortcuts. Steam installs all your games in a standard way in a folder of your choice. You can straight up copy that folder to another computer. You can use another launcher and just play your games, there are already many that can read steam's standardized format. I've done it multiple times to avoid redownloading my library
It depends how steam sunsets their DRM, but yes - obviously if a game has 3rd party DRM, that third party is in control. Steam could choose a user hostile way to sunset their own DRM, but they could release ways to deactivate it
DRM is bad, steam provides an easy way for developers to use steam DRM, and it's generally less user hostile than most DRM. To me, this seems like harm reduction
Ultimately, it's not up to steam what, if any, DRM a game uses. They manage their in house offering, but the developer doesn't have to use it if they don't want to
Even if that's not the case, the drm is very easy to crack.
As long as you understand the terms of your agreement with Steam as a platform, everything is fine. Physical media for games are outdated anyway, especially with frequent updates, patches, and DLC releases. Regarding older titles that are no longer supported, well, as the saying goes: "If buying isn't owing..."
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:
Which they define as:
The license is with regards to "GOG Service", not "GOG Contents". You need the former to get access to the latter, sure. But what isn't clear about this?
You still own the contents (though, as mentioned, individual titles may have additional blablabla). If you don't think this distinction makes sense when it comes to GoG vs Steam, then maybe you're just discussing something entirely different?
Yeah, you have to download the installer before they pull the rug.
I suppose. If you are doing things against TOS and you suspect just might happen, by all means.
You legally didn't "own" your physical games either if you haven't noticed.
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.
Okay steam, if its just a digital license and not ownership.. Then surely you'll be significantly lowering prices, Since you charge full ownership prices for games, not license prices.. Right?
I don't think it's Steam setting the prices.
They indirectly are inflating it with their 30% cut
They are also deflating it by providing services that developers would otherwise have to spend time and money on to develop themselves.
Their 30% cuts allowed Gabe to start collecting yachts, they could charge a lot less while still offering the same services and only Gabe would see his finances take the hit, no one else in the world would be poorer if they charged 20% instead.
So games sold on storefronts owned by the same publishers as the game should be 30% cheaper right? Right?
Should be cheaper, emphasis on should, but at the same time if they sell directly and take the same cut, that's one less intermediary in the chain so more money going to the devs.
None of the managerial class are good people, wake up, all billionaires are taking advantage of us.
G*mers really don’t want the industry to evaluate the $60 price point and apply inflationary adjustments going back to when it became the standard.
The $60 was based on 55%+ going to distribution channels, +physical media costs, so it could be down from there.
regular reminder that digital distribution was sold to us under the false promise that games would be cheaper, because they wouldnt have to pay for printing boxes, CDs, manuals, greebles, Wouldnt have to pay for shipping or storage, or any other burden addition of physical media.
That we'd be able to buy games for 30 dollars, and that that the developers and everyone involved would make more money than they would have paying 50 for a physical game.
Yeah, this is the original sin, they just banked the cost the whole time until they could cry that they need to charge more because of inflation.
and now, they are wanting to sell games for 70-80 bucks for AAA titles.
Its not cause the games are 50 dollars that they arent making enough hundreds of millions. The only reason these AAA games arent making bank is because they're shit
Can anyone honestly remember the last AAA title that wasnt an absolute dog pile?
Fr tho people seem to forget abt inflation a lot when talking abt the old days
Why compare oranges and apples? Console and PC games were never the same from a price perspective.
This is a really interesting chart. A lot of N64 games were $70 and even $80 at launch which is upwards of $150 today. Just crazy.
People keep saying SNES/N64/etc games were super expensive...and i just wanna ask where they were buying them?
Cause everytime I went into the stores to get one they were 49.99.
People seem to forget that just moderately decent games sell magnitudes more today than they did 20 years ago, too, thus continuing to bring in insane cash (as long as you arent sony or other companies that are obscenely wasteful..) despite inflation, this stable pricing making them a good entertainment investment for people whose minimum wage hasnt changed in like 15 years
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).
What file format does the Steam backup use?
For current exports, it's some custom .csm/.csd file combo. Not sure if there's any tools for working with it, seems like it'd be more annoying than just using a normal archive format either way.
That's bad. I guess if I want to back up my Steam games, it's going to be tarballs.
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.
Chad GOG
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.
wdym you can play steam games offline the only exception is needing the steam client?
To install a game you have bought on steam you need the steam client, the steam servers, internet and your steam account. If any of those stops being available you can no longer install the games you have bought. So while you can play the games once installed without most of the above, you can lose access to your not currently installed games.
Also, on steam you purchase licenses to the games which they can revoke. I.e. if steam turned evil they could take away games from your library and you couldn't do anything about it really.
Comparatively on GOG, you get a binary installer you can download and can keep forever without DRM so you don't need anything else to install the game in the future, even if it disappeared from your GOG account for some reason, you could still install and play the game.
If Steam stops working, you could replace the Steam API with the Goldberg emulator, and an already installed game should work, if there is no other DRM.
But yes, GOG is definitely better.
I just wish GOG Galaxy worked on Linux.
Heroic launcher has been amazing
thank you for the detailed explanations i just thought steam only needs the client to work
You also need a Steam account, to which all your games are linked. If you somehow get perma-banned off of Steam, you lose everything.
ohh yeah i forgot
Offline installer. So a game gets removed from your library for any reason. Now you get a new PC and can't play the game anymore. At GoG you get an installer that doesn't check servers and can work with no internet connection etc. So even if they were forced to remove a game from your library, you still have the installer and can install it whenever you want. So if you keep a hard drive of installers, you will forever own the game as long as you don't lose that data.
ohh
Unpopular opinion: if I have to fudge with Wine instead of Proton, I simply will not bother. It's 2024. I'm not going to fiddle with configs, or get a setup together just to play a single game. That's ridiculous. A game should 100% be one click to run, whether it's native or not. and if that's not what is expected in 2024, Linux get it together. sincerely: a full time Linux gamer that is a single parent and doesn't have time to fiddle just to play a game. Wine and most of its front ends need a major overhaul.
Then just use Proton? You don't need Steam for it. And sitting there and demanding "Linux" to get it "together" because it is 2024 is rather ignorant due to the fact that it is not Linux' fault that the software in question needs additional workarounds in order to make it run. People out there are using their freetime to come up with solutions for problems caused by corporations using proprietary libraries and software. I don't think that your opinion is unpopular. I get what you want, I do wish the same, and a lot of peoole would agree with it as well, but the context in which we operate here matters a lot.
I test games for a living and most of the time wine runs perfectly fine. You can also just use umu laucher which does everything for you.
Also I don't really get your point. Who's forcing you to use wine instead of proton?
I'm not aware of how things are now, but at least previously you couldn't really use Proton outside of Steam.
So I assume OC defends Steam as the only platform that can smoothly run games with Proton instead of regular Wine, which does not work as well for certain games and/or requires tedious configuration.
You are right about proton. But the tedious configuration part is not true. Proton and ge-wine(now UMU) do the same thing, i.e applying custom patches. Wine base package is not expected to do this.
I see, thanks!
You need to "get it together" and buy games for your platform.
"That's ridiculous"
Heroic is decent imo. It lets you download Wine, manage prefixes, enable/disable dxvk/vkd3d, configure gamescope & mangohud and so on.
So does lutris and bottles. Don't know what OP is talking about.
Who are you making demands to, precisely?
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...?
I believe Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous has DRM and is still sold on GOG.
Okay, let's see...
No mention of DRM in the reviews or anywhere in the forum...
No mention of DRM anywhere...
You're right I was misremembering the reviews complaining about the UELA instead
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
How weird, I wonder if there's something wrong with my GOG account? I don't think I've received an email from them in years?
No, if you claim the giveaways you have to subscribe to their newsletter. That's all. If you aren't doing that, you'll almost never get an email.
Ye that's why I stopped claiming games
I see, that makes sense. Thanks!
You should not be getting promotional emails if you opt out, so something is wrong with your account/settings specifically. Contact them or filter your emails.
That's what I figured... Some bug on their end or something because every time I get one I unsubscribe. I plan to just delete my account and go back to a mix of pirating and steam