Plus, unless the installers have the full package, it’ll still require an internet connection. Usually installers download the files and then install them.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If we’re talking about DRM as in a measure to prevent copying, or require online security check, or anything like that, then no GOG game has DRM. One of GOG’s core policies is that all of their games are DRM free. However, some people have stretched the definition a little to include other stuff. For example, if an online multiplayer game requires GOG Galaxy to connect to its online servers, some people consider that to be DRM.
There are some posts on GOG’s official forums where people try to list all the games that have “DRM” of any kind. So if you’re interested, that’s where you could look. But if you just want to have confidence that you’ll be able to install and run the game in the future, then don’t worry about it. No GOG game has anything that would prevent that.
The info is here and none of that “DRM” means you can’t in the future, after the servers are down, install the game from your copy of the offline installer and play it.
None of that is DRM in the sense we’re talking about here: the kind of mechanism that allows the game to be taken away from you or won’t let you install it or play it in single-player anymore when the publisher decides they don’t want to pay for servers anymore.
It is, none the less, a deviation from the No-DRM promise, IMHO.
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
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.
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.
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.
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…”
I’ve been playing more GoG games with Lutris + Wine in Linux than Steam games with Proton and I even have one situation of a game were the copy I bought in Steam doesn’t work with Proton, but the pirated copy I downloaded to see if that would work runs absolutely fine with Lutris + Wine.
For me at least it’s actually easier to sort problems out with games when using Lutris + Wine than it is with Proton and I can even make sure all games I run from Lutris are wrapped in a “firejail” sandbox, which amongst other things blocks all network access, something I can’t do with Proton.
It’s a vendor-tied solution meant to keep you in the Steam ecosystem, so for all the great work they did in past getting it to have broad compatibility, the future is not Proton, it’s Wine.
Lutris 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Plus, unless the installers have the full package, it’ll still require an internet connection. Usually installers download the files and then install them.
When have they not had the full package on GOG?
They’re called offline installers for a reason.
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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.
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.
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.
Yeah? And whats the difference in practice?
Does GOG work on Linux?
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.
Cool, thanks.
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
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.
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
I love how this article takes shots at steam despite valve being THE company holding the bar up in the gaming space.
I could list examples but I honestly don’t even think I need to
Valve is holding up the bar not because valve is great but because everyone else is so shit. I’ve had a ton of issues with steam throughout the years and it’s just… nothing else is better. I was actually excited for the epic store launch and it’s… Well, not the worst, because being the worst is a challenge some places take seriously, but certainly not a good steam replacement especially for low data people.
Steam may not let me control the updates to steam, but it won’t force refresh my library causing ping spikes all the time as an intended feature.
Yeah… it’s also a new law in California is it not? Kill shot? Hahahaha. Right. Who wrote this headline xD
It’s like every clickbait gaming website whenever a new MMO game drops and they call it the WoW-killer for the umpteenth time in the past 15 years.
Flashbacks from the advertising for The Outer Worlds, and IGN calling it the “Bethesda-killer”
Lol that comparison was also going through my head. I remember it being a fun game though, more than any Bethesda games from the past decade or so, but frankly that bar wasn’t really high either.
The true Bethesda killer was Bethesda themselves
If anything is a “Bethesda-killer”, it’s games like Outer Wilds, not The Outer Worlds.
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.
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:
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.
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.
Gaben has the only good monopoly, he’s pretty much Jesus.
Preach brother!
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.
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.
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.
They aren’t really a monopoly. You can purchase games elsewhere. They are simply the gold standard of gaming platforms.
A monopoly on what? PC game storefeonts? Itch.io, gog, epic, gamepass, some are better than others, but steam isn’t anti-competition
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.
I was wondering how all those Sony games worked on GOG.
And has had them for many years before now
Which ones? Do they disclose that they contain DRM?
If we’re talking about DRM as in a measure to prevent copying, or require online security check, or anything like that, then no GOG game has DRM. One of GOG’s core policies is that all of their games are DRM free. However, some people have stretched the definition a little to include other stuff. For example, if an online multiplayer game requires GOG Galaxy to connect to its online servers, some people consider that to be DRM.
There are some posts on GOG’s official forums where people try to list all the games that have “DRM” of any kind. So if you’re interested, that’s where you could look. But if you just want to have confidence that you’ll be able to install and run the game in the future, then don’t worry about it. No GOG game has anything that would prevent that.
The info is here and none of that “DRM” means you can’t in the future, after the servers are down, install the game from your copy of the offline installer and play it.
None of that is DRM in the sense we’re talking about here: the kind of mechanism that allows the game to be taken away from you or won’t let you install it or play it in single-player anymore when the publisher decides they don’t want to pay for servers anymore.
It is, none the less, a deviation from the No-DRM promise, IMHO.
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
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.
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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.
That’s a failure to download the installers to begin with, not them being taken away from you after the fact.
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.
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.
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…”
Now can we get proton support for GoG that is as convient and reliable as it is in Steam?
I’ve been playing more GoG games with Lutris + Wine in Linux than Steam games with Proton and I even have one situation of a game were the copy I bought in Steam doesn’t work with Proton, but the pirated copy I downloaded to see if that would work runs absolutely fine with Lutris + Wine.
For me at least it’s actually easier to sort problems out with games when using Lutris + Wine than it is with Proton and I can even make sure all games I run from Lutris are wrapped in a “firejail” sandbox, which amongst other things blocks all network access, something I can’t do with Proton.
It’s a vendor-tied solution meant to keep you in the Steam ecosystem, so for all the great work they did in past getting it to have broad compatibility, the future is not Proton, it’s Wine.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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And it is a license. I’m just responding to the comment about the law.
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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.
Chad GOG
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.
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
So, “licensed” is a legal term. Explain to me how being able to keep something forever, isn’t the same as owning?
I’m speaking in a legal sense. Please reread my original comment.
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i wouldn’t pirate an indie game tho
Unless you already bought it
Much of the pirated games though will be GOG installers so might as well just install it with lutris/wine
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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.