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You pretty much said it. The Steam version often has all sorts of stuff for Steam integration… and the Steam version is the default version. So various hooks for achievements and networking and mod installation may be different. Messing with any of that could easily break something. Furthermore, GOG does have its own API that some games use (again, for achievements and cloud saves); so if a game has chosen to use those features they may accidentally break something.
But even aside from possible difference between versions; bugs in the game itself still have to be addressed on every platform. Even if they don’t bother testing the new version, they still have to at least push the update - which is still more work than zero work. This is why it is fairly common to see games that are under active development only have their beta version on Steam (or in some cases only Epic), even when they intend to launch on a bunch of platforms.
So for some games (certainly not all, but definitely some), patches come on Steam first and GOG at some point later. Maybe a day later, or a week later, or in some rare cases not at all. Similarly for DLC. And that definitely isn’t GOG’s fault. There isn’t really anything GOG can do about it. It’s just a side-effect of Steam being the far bigger platform.
You’ve pretty much got it. It’s bad, but it’s not horrible. Trying to execute some random file such as a texture basically just doesn’t work… but only by luck. It’s possible, but unlikely that the data might look enough like an actual program to run and do something unpredictable.
I’m not aware of any major reasons why its a problem to make everything as executable (and I know that when I open an NTFS drive from linux, all the files are executable by default - because NTFS doesn’t have that flag). From my point of view I just think its sloppy. I figure it can’t be hard for GOG to just correctly identify which files are meant to be executable. For most games its just a single executable file - the same one that GOG’s script is launching. And presumably the files that developers provided GOG have the correct flags in the first place.
Anyway, not really a big deal. Like I said, I just think it’s a bit low-effort.
It’s pretty hard for GOG. Many of the things people don’t like about GOG are not really GOG’s fault, they are just a result of small market share. Steam is the bigger platform, and so naturally it gets priority for basically everything.
You game doesn’t work on Steam? Then you’d better fix it immediately, because that’s where the bulk of players are. But if your game doesn’t work on GOG… well… maybe fix it when you get some spare time. (Or maybe don’t have a GOG version, because you don’t want to have to keep multiple platforms up-to-date.)
So publishers and developers are generally less cooperative with GOG. And GOG themselves obviously have much more limited resources to do stuff themselves.
Steam’s recent work with Linux has been great. And I do wish GOG would have something like that. But again, Valve has vast resources for that kind of thing - and they’ve been working on it ever since the Windows 8 appstore threatened to wipe them out. (That threat fizzled out; but nevertheless, that was what got the Linux ball rolling for Valve.) I’m in two minds about whether GOG should try to boost their Linux support. On the one hand, GOG is all about preservation and compatibility… and so it makes sense to have better Linux compatibility. On the other hand, it would be leaning further into a niche; and working on a problem that is kind of solved already. i.e. We can already run GOG games on Linux with or without a native linux version… it just could be nicer… Maybe it’s not a good use of GOG’s resources to go for that.
(That said, when I look at their linux start.sh scripts and see
cd "${CURRENT_DIR}/game" chmod +x *
it makes me think they could probably put at least a bit more effort into their linux support.)
Note, if you actually look at that list you’ll see it’s a very loose interpretation of DRM. All of the games on that list work without any kind of phone-home security check, or unlock code, or anything like that. The list is stuff like “getting the DLC requires a third party account”. It’s definitely a list of things people don’t like, but whether it is or isn’t ‘DRM’ is not so clear cut.
GOG’s official position is that the store doesn’t allow DRM at all. They describe what they mean by DRM on that same page, and it sounds fairly reasonable; but its certainly understandable that some people would prefer a stricter set of rules.
I don’t think so. On my screen I see that post I responded to said this:
The game will be removed on 13. December?
So in my post I tried to explain that the games will still be available to download from GOG, but it will no longer be purchasable. Different people mean different things when they say “removed from GOG”, so I thought this was good to clarify.
It will be removed from sale on 13 of December, but everyone who already bought it will continue to be able to download it from GOG indefinitely. Furthermore, GOG has stated their commitment to ensure the game remains compatible with newer computer and operating systems. That’s what the preservation project mentioned in the post is about.
I was totally fine playing HL1, and HL2, and HL2 episode 1… but I never finished episode 2 because of motion sickness. The problem isn’t really with episode 2 though. The problem is just that I got old, and now I get motion sickness from FPS games that didn’t affect me before.
But I do know that not every FPS makes me sick. I think mouse-look smoothing helps. I’m not certain what else, but I’d try messing with the field-of-view angle and stuff like that.
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.
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.
Yeah… Civ 1, 2, 3, and 4 were all good - for different reasons. Civ 5 was where the design decisions stopped being about gameplay and started being about maximising profit. Making the game functional and fun was lower priority to making paid DLC. Players buy the buggy and unfinished game… then pay more to fix it piecemeal with the DLC. Such is the power of brands and advertising.
Charging for updates isn’t intrinsically bad. A good expansion pack at a fair price can be a good deal for both the players and the devs. But there is a modern trend of games trying to squeeze players for every dollar they can get; and when content is deliberately held back in the hopes of selling it for a bit more money later, it starts to become a bit perverse. The game itself can become an advertisement for selling more bits of the game in the future - and it just devalues the experience.
In the specific case of Stardew Valley, the game is a major hit - and it continues to sell well. So even though existing players are getting the new content for free, the developer is still going to get paid. Obviously he could get a lot more if he charged for it, but he has decided he doesn’t need that. He’d rather just make the game as good as he can make it.
Here’s a personal story of mine, about a different game: Several years ago I was selected to be a beta tester for a major game franchise. I was a very well known member of that community, know for making custom balance patches and bugfixes - and so they wanted me to test their new release. I was pretty excited to be a part of that. But when I got my first beta copy, I didn’t really play it much because the game barely worked. It crashed very frequently, and so my feedback was basically just “it crashes when I do this”. I figured it wasn’t worth trying to give balance ideas when the game was in that state. Anyway… time went on, and things didn’t improve much. There were some graphics changes and a bit of UI work… but it was still super unstable. The release date was getting pretty close. But before it was even possible to do a full playthrough without constant reloads to dodge game-ending bugs, there was detailed plans posted on the beta forums talking about the first 4 DLC packs that would be released after the game launched.
I stopped taking AAA games seriously after that. I was totally disillusioned. They were launching their AAA game in non-functional state, with the hope of fixing the worst bugs in a day 1 patch. Very little useful playtesting was done, and so the features of the game were a bit slap-dash, but yet somehow they were dividing up content for as many DLCs packs as possible. They didn’t even have a functional game and yet they were talking about how to sell more stuff. It was a real eye-opening experience for me; and it really colours the way I see other games that launch in a buggy state, where pretty much the only thing that works is the in-game store.
So yeah, I can appreciate the view that maybe charging for updates is a slippy slope that Concerned Ape doesn’t want to step onto; even if he does have very solid footing for if he wanted to tread that ground a bit.
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Forced accounts are evil - including Android. Here’s my Android story:
When I got my first Android phone, my intention was to not have an account - or at least have as much isolation between any account and my actual usage as possible. So I decline account creation when I first started using the phone, and told the phone to only store all contacts locally. That worked, and I was pretty happy with it. But later, I wanted to download a couple of basic apps from the app store - and that required an account. So I created a bogus account to download the apps. …
After creating the account to download stuff, I noticed that the contacts had automatically associated themselves with that new account had automatically uploaded all my contacts and personal info to google to sync with this account. This is precisely the thing I was trying to avoid in the first place. So, I immediately logged into that account via google’s website and told it to not store any contact info, and to delete all existing info. Which it did.
But then some time later… the account again decided to sync with my phone - this time to delete all the contacts from my phone (presumably because I’d deleted them from the online account). So although I’d gone to some deliberate lengths to tell my phone to only store data locally and to not upload it, what i ended up with was all personal data uploaded, and then purged from my phone. I had to try to restore my contacts from an ancient sim-card backup from my old phone.
Since then, I’ve decided that I will not use a google account for my phone for any reason, ever. I’ve use F-droid and the Aurora store instead. (But actually I very rarely use any apps anyway.)
A nice thing about GOG is that you can choose whether or not you use their launcher. You can use GOG Galaxy, and it will download game updates and sync saves. or you can just not use it; and just launch the games directly. Or you can put shortcuts to the gog games into steam and launch them from there. Or you can launch your steam games from galaxy if you like. … I appreciate that kind of stuff a lot, because although I think Steam does a good job, I’m very wary of lock-in and companies becoming too powerful.
(And of course, for real indie games, itch.io is the place to go.)
Look, I can see where you’re coming from about the over-emphasis on winning; but it just sound like you’re talking about an entirely different issue to what Valve is trying to address.
Your suggestion, if I understand it correctly, is to have the game automatically make a judgement about every player’s individual skill during the match itself, and apply some buff or penalty if it detects a major discrepancy between players. Is that what you are suggesting?
I suspect that the existence of mechanics like that would lead to a lot of angst, regardless of whether it ‘works’. People already have a tendency to blame their team and blame match-making for making them lose. Imagine if they could also blame the game itself for holding them back. … It could be a perfect system that never gets it wrong, and it would still cause a lot of people to get upset. And I don’t see how it could fix the problem of smurfing anyway unless it is a seriously over-zealous system that erases basically any skill advantage.
Also, I don’t think such auto-detection would be reliable. But although we could could discuss the technicalities of what might or might not work… I just don’t think it’s worth pursuing in dota anyway. Perhaps it would be better suited to some other game.
Heck, I’d say if they are actually playing a game and streaming it, then that’s legit… but I can tell you that I’ve seen a lot of “stretching” and “exercise” streams where it’s basically just strategic shots of a girl’s arse. As in, that is genuinely the purpose of the stream. There is no actual exercise happening. Some streamers even have “!phub” in their description, suggesting users type that for more info about the streamer… And the ASMR category seems to be a 25-75 split between people actually trying to do ASMR, and people doing a kind of soft-core porn show.
The worst thing is that if you watch one of those streams, for curiosity, or if you were just in the mood for it, Twitch then makes your recommendations look like a porn site for the next couple of months. (I’m not against porn; but I definitely don’t want to be getting porn recommendations when I go to twitch.)
Yeah. I don’t have a lot of negative things to say about Steam, and there’s a lot of high-value stuff. The mod workshop is great. Linux support is top-tier. There’s a lot of good stuff. The only major bad thing from my point of view is lock-in. Having a vast library of games tied to one account isn’t great. And having publishers and mod-makers etc essentially forced to rely on that platform is not good. Steam itself is good - but consolidation of power is generally a bad thing.
For that reason, most of my new games have been coming from GOG over the last couple of years. GOG’s DRM free policy means there’s basically no lock-in effect. That’s a major strength, even if some of their other features aren’t as strong as Steam.
Are you saying that Rocket League was removed from the Steam accounts of the people who already owned it? That sounds like a big deal, and surely must be illegal. But I didn’t see mention of that in the link you posted. Most of the things in the list seemed to be just saying that they didn’t think the Epic store is high quality. (eg. prices too high, not enough features, difficult to use return policy, etc.) Those are all fair complaints, and good reasons to not use the store - but again, they are only good reasons to not use the store. They aren’t really good reasons to crusade against it. There are heaps of crap online stores, and generally people just ignore them.
The Rocket League thing you mentioned would be a good reason to get upset at Epic beyond just not wanting to buy from them. So I’m kind of surprised to see it missing from such a comprehensive list of grievances.
Others have mentioned spyware, and like I said, I care about that. That’s a big red flag. But I looked at the links in the post you gave, and as far as I could tell they were all speculation. Things like Tencent owns 40% of Epic, and Tencent is bad - so Epic is probably bad. … Which is quite possibly true! I certainly wouldn’t want to trust Epic with my personal info. But it’s still a big step away from them having spyware built in.
I personally think that many gamers put up with too much privacy invasion and ‘telemetry’ in the form of online accounts and especially ‘anti-cheat’ software. The “anti cheat” software that some games require explicitly demand access to see every program you have installed, every program you have running, and in some cases even read RAM outside of what the game is allocated. That’s an enormous security risk and privacy breach… but people install that crap all the time with barely a whisper - but then complain about the risk the Epic will share its telemetry data with Tencent. I’m certain that some of Epic’s online games have software like that, but that wasn’t mentioned in thread you linked to.
Maybe I just don’t care about the same things that other people care about. Like, if Epic has a crap store… I just don’t care. It makes no difference to me how crap it is. It makes to difference if they say it is going to be great, and it falls short of what they said. I’m not going to go around telling people how crap it is, because I don’t think it matters. I don’t intend to use the store anyway; and if other people like the store for some reason, then fine. I don’t think it matters. They can like it, and I won’t try to convince them otherwise. But if they are somehow removing games you’ve already bought elsewhere - then that’s a big deal. That would be worth telling people about. I hope you can see what I mean.
The reason people hate Epic is fairly obvious – they don’t give a shit about the gaming industry nor about players.
What do you mean by that? For developers, they take a much smaller fee than Steam or GOG, and for players they’re constantly giving away free games.
At some point their client contained literal spyware.
That sounds like a decent reason to campaign against them. I haven’t heard anything about that before. What was the story behind that? (As in, when / why / how / what? Perhaps you have a link or something.)
brute force market share via sleazy exclusivity contracts
I’ve heard people talk a lot about exclusivity contracts… but can you name even a single game that has such a contract? When people have discussed this the past, the relevant developers basically said “there is no contract”. But maybe there is some different case I don’t know about. In any case, that personally doesn’t bother me anyway. If some developer wants to take money to be on one store rather than another, they can do that at their own peril. As for customers, we’re only talking about a store. It’s not like anyone is in danger of not being able to buy / play their favourite games. So it seems like a bit of a nothing-burger to me. Like, is there actually something bad happening here? Or are people just speculating that something bad might one-day happen if Epic got bigger?
their software doesn’t have one tenth of the features Steam has,
Steam has more features, yeah. Steam is very good. But Steam has been around for some 20 years. It’s hard to catch up with that so quickly. In any case, although missing features is a good reason to prefer Steam, it certainly isn’t a reason to campaign against Epic.
… So from your list, I’ll keep the spyware thing and the CEO complaint. I don’t know enough about either of those to say much though. I don’t recall who the CEO of Epic is right now, so I won’t say whether or not I think that’s a good reason. And the spyware… I take that kind of stuff seriously. Right now I’m posting this from Linux - because I’m fed-up with Windows spyware. But as I said, I’ve not heard any details about any Epic spyware thing.
Incidentally, I’ve found that Steam is very good for Linux gaming. … But obviously that doesn’t mean that I’m going to start making posts trash-talking Epic. I don’t find it weird that people prefer Steam. I just find it weird that people put so much energy into attacking Epic.
I personally get most of my games from GOG and itch.io these days. And I’ve never bought anything from the Epic store whatsoever.
I will say though that I find it kind of weird how much hate Epic gets for their store. Like, I understand that someone prefers Steam, or doesn’t want to buy stuff from Epic etc. - but what we see goes way beyond that. Epic has people actively campaigning against it, as if its mere existence is insulting. I don’t really get why.
As for the 30% cut… Developers will try to price their games competitively, and within customer expectations. So with or without Steam’s 30% cut, you can expect games to be similarly priced. The large 30% cut from Steam is basically coming out of the developer’s revenue rather than from your pocket. (I’m under the impression that GOG also has a similar 30% fee. Epic has a lower fee. And on itch.io the seller gets to choose how money goes to itch.io anywhere from 0% to 100%. So itch.io is the best deal for developers in terms of fees.)
Steam is pretty good, in many ways. … … There is a little bit of customer abuse creeping in though. It annoys me that I can’t turn off the “what’s new” panel. It’s nothing more than an advertisement panel, and the only options are to say ‘show less’ for individual games, one by one (and even then, it doesn’t stop showing advertisements related to those games).
In any case, I don’t use Epic’s launcher at all; so I won’t try to comment on which is better. I just think it’s good to point out that Steam isn’t perfect, and I agree that competition probably does them some good.
I often don’t find what I want in DDG; and I then try !g to look for it with Google… and Google doesn’t find it either.
In my experience it is very rare for Google to help me with a search that DDG failed with. As for the converse, I wouldn’t know - because I never search Google first. Why wouldn’t I? They’re evil.
That said, I will point out that I don’t use a google account, and I block most google-related cookies. I know that some people find Google gives better results due to its personalised results; and obviously I’m not ‘benefiting’ from that. So it is believable that you get better results from Google than I do, due to it knowing more about you, and thus guessing what you might want to see.
A lot of people joke about how postit notes on your computer are super insecure etc… But the fact is that the vast majority of threats are from people in other parts of the world, attacking your computer over the internet. So although a piece of paper with your passwords right next to your computer is very insecure vs people who are in your house; those are generally not the people you are worried about anyway! So that isn’t so bad.
As for a piece of paper in your wallet… That’s legitimately a high-security approach. There and some obvious downsides; but from a security point of view, it’s very good - especially if your ‘enemies’ don’t know about it. (Which they probably don’t; because unless you’re some high-profile political target or a spy or something like that, probably no one is watching you closely enough to care how you store your passwords.)
I assume the primary reason for Valve supporting Linux is to protect themselves against possible hostility from Microsoft. So yeah, it’s a business decision to protect Valve’s profits; but frankly - it’s also beneficial to everyone who isn’t Microsoft.
Overall, I’m not a great fan of Steam. (And generally it’s me talking down Steam; recommending itch.io and GOG; and sometimes even defending Epic against what I think are unfair attacks.) But here I’m just saying that I don’t really see the negative of Valve creating Steam OS. Although I don’t intend to use Steam OS, I think I’m already benefiting from the support Valve has given Linux to create Steam OS.