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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOG.com
Technically it doesn’t stand for anything now, but it was definitely Good Old Games.
GOG is “Good Old Games”, a digital distribution service for PC games run by CD Projekt Red, developers of The Witcher and Cyberpunk. It mostly focuses on old games from the Win95/98 days that have been patched/fixed by their in-house dev team to run on modern Windows releases. However, it also sells all CD Projekt Red titles and seems to be expanding to just be a regular PC game distribution service.
It’s being talked about a lot right now because unlike Steam, EGS, and other stores they sell you a DRM-free download. Because of recent legislation in California, companies are required to use clearer language when they aren’t selling you something that you own forever, they are instead selling you a license to access something.
This has reignited discussion on digital ownership, Steam, and what happens if you die or Steam shuts down/is acquired and you lose your non-transferable access to the games in your library. GOG is the ideal solution right now, because it while it offers a client that is simple to use like Steam (called “GOG Galaxy”) but if they announce a shutdown or acquisition, you can simply download offline installers for all your games and you don’t lose access to anything.
Isn’t this always the case? I get people have a hate-on for Windows 11 lately but every major version of Windows 10 has kept the old version for a month or so, allowing you to revert if needed. You can run disk cleanup and get the space back early if you want.
I guess the notable part here is that the disk cleanup part isn’t working? You can also just wait for the time to elapse and it will delete itself.
Fortnite is a money printing machine. Skins that cost pennies to make go in, and billions of dollars come out. How in the hell was it ever not “financially sound” other than pissing away money on badly executed lawsuits, timed exclusives on a formerly open platform and other assorted dick measuring contests?
This guy is the worst. You’re not an underdog or a friend, you’re the worst kind of capitalist. The one who just stumbled upon a huge pile of cash and has no idea what to do with it, but is certain that he deserves it.
Why any game in 2024 is targeting one specific frame rate is beyond me. Just do like any other competent release, and offer a “Quality/Performance” option where one targets 30fps with max visuals and one targets 60fps and cuts what it needs to get there.
I think people are well aware that the current console generations are just midrange PCs frozen in time at this point. Nobody is expecting miracles, just give them both options and be done with it.
Higher revenue cut for publishers. That’s it. This is just a big anti-consumer pissing contest about who gets a bigger slice of the pie when a sale is made. Everything else is just distracting noise. If Valve charged 5% then none of this other stuff would matter. Valve charges 30% base with some sweetheart deals for devs who sell millions of copies. Same as Sony, Nintendo, Apple, and most other online software marketplaces.
This is a high percentage to pay vs retail margins for a brick & mortar storefront, but a reasonable percentage when you think of it as a customer acquisition cost. So the question is, did I go to Steam to buy the game or did I go to Steam and buy the game? Everyone will have a different opinion on this, but in my opinion Valve revived PC gaming when it was on the brink, and a large percentage of sales that happen on the platform are because of the eyeballs it brings and the value it delivers.
Borderlands 4 coming back to Steam is strong evidence of this, even with Epic essentially paying developers the difference in potential lost sales out of pocket. You can’t pay for the lost conversations, word-of-mouth, and other “free” advertising that those lost sales would have generated. So Borderlands 3 looks great on a balance sheet, but nobody really liked it or cared about it, and Epic won’t pay you to make games nobody plays forever.
It might seem better for the storefront to take less of a cut from a consumer perspective, but in reality it barely matters. This doesn’t go towards reducing game costs for consumers or improving bonuses & wages for developers. The market has already been set. Any behind the scenes change in revenue sharing just goes to the next group in line, which is of course the already wealthy and massive publishers.
So do whatever works for you. Just don’t let them pull the wool over your eyes and act like this fight is about anything other than which already very rich people get slightly richer.
Because they have a very simple solution: offer their game through their storefront. Why is it Valve’s problem that the World of Goo developers want to forgo their popular storefront because they partnered with a company that forbids it as a requirement of funding?
The real answer of course is that nobody is obligated to help the other with their product. The issue comes down to consumers and what they want to support. I think Valve is being perfectly fair here and Epic is not. The Steam Deck is an open system, if Epic wanted to build a storefront for it, they could. They choose not to, because they don’t want to promote Steam Deck sales.
Isn’t it funny that the “run your own marketplace and keep all revenue” option that Epic took Apple to court over is already available on the Steam Deck from Day 1 and Epic chooses not to take advantage of it. It’s almost like company using a pile of cash to artificially tip the scales in their favour is perfectly fine as long as its them.
Everyone made their business choices here, and they have to live with the consequences.
Why would I think from the perspective of a business? I’m not a business, I’m a consumer. I’m not saying they were wrong for taking the money, they gotta do what they gotta do. I’m saying I don’t want it and don’t want to support it.
The original comment was basically asking why Epic got so much hate when in this specific circumstance, their actions are justifiable or even actually produced something of value.
I said they are missing the point which is just that people don’t like Epic and their influence on PC gaming, and you said I need to think like a business.
I think you’re arguing something totally different now.
You can, but it requires going through the desktop interface to install them, if they use another launcher you have to set up that, frequently some trial and error, and then adding them into the Steam interface so they can launch easily with proper input support.
Do all that and set them up correctly, and they’ll run, but without one of the primary Steam Deck benefits which is that Valve does pre-compilation of shaders. That only works for native Steam titles, and it can be the difference between a game being playable and a stuttery mess, especially for more graphically intense titles.
For some games, there are also hardcoded patches in Proton that look for the SteamID of the game to apply them. Those also won’t have those fixes applied when adding them as non-Steam games.
It’s subjective or we wouldn’t be arguing about it would we? Maintaining my own backup of downloaded DRM free games not offered through a service is not a benefit to me, it’s an inconvenience. I already explained why, and what the benefits are.
You don’t need an account to listen to DRM free music or movies, true. But if you delete them either on purpose or because of data loss, you have to go get them again should you want them. Which means digging through emails or accounts or backup drives to get your copies again. That’s not worth it to me, I prefer being able to set up Steam and just go, delete games and redownload them as needed in a click.
People are on Lemmy for lots of different reasons, you shouldn’t assume that the primary reason anyone is here is because they deeply care about free software or decentralization. I’m here because Reddit banned 3rd party clients and I hate their app, same reason I’m on Mastodon.
Why shouldn’t he be downvoted? A downvote isn’t rude, and it’s not an indicator of how sane the opinion is. It indicates that the comment misses the point. They assume it’s about DRM, or that Epic didn’t to enough to deserve exclusivity, or that it’s not a true exclusive because you can pay the developer directly.
It’s not. It’s just about not wanting another launcher that doesn’t bring anything to the table. GOG is for old games, Itch is for small indies, and Steam is for everything else.
Epic is just Steam but worse, doesn’t work well on Steam Deck, with some exclusives that will hit Steam in a year. Doesn’t offer anything new or improved, just makes things worse by splitting a market by paying off developers, and because it doesn’t offer anything compelling, will probably die of when Epic eventually wastes all its Fortnite money and falls on hard times.
I wouldn’t give them a penny, they’re actively working to make PC gaming a worse experience when Steam arguably brought it back from the brink of death. Before Steam, PCs were about to become MMO and RTS machines. It’s hard to overstate how big their impact was.
Not if you own a Steam Deck, or want cloud saving, or have hundreds of games and don’t want to hope you remember your login and password for this one game 10 years from now and that the website still exists, or worry about keeping a local backup of the game if you want to play it in the future.
DRM-free direct downloads are a great option, but better than Steam? That’s subjective. For me, I want all of those things I listed so a non-Steam PC game for me is a last resort, pretty much only reserved for games that I really want to play.
I don’t know why people find this so difficult to understand, I have to assume they’re being wilfully obtuse. Would you download a separate app and create an account for every song you wanted to listen to or every movie you wanted to watch? Of course not. So why would games be any different?
lol it gets shorter every time this story is told. It was 18 months, and it started with a fully complete game engine with tons of finished assets.
For a similar comparison, GTA Vice City was released in October 2002 and GTA San Andreas was released in October 2004 with a 2 year dev cycle. Starting with a complete engine and doing what amounts to a total conversion does significantly shorten dev time.
Also, it’s not like they moved mountains to achieve this. FNV shipped with countless game breaking bugs and would CTD every 10 minutes on my system at launch. It only became playable after the first few patches. GTA SA shipped on disc, with the version that most people played being the initial PS2 version, and that version works quite well. So basically they achieved the 6 month reduction by lopping off the QA cycle.
Was it a short dev cycle even with that all being said? Yes, especially for an HD era game on an engine the team wasn’t as familiar with as the GTA SA team would have been. But let’s not rewrite history.
Ahh that helps explain it, I don’t follow closely so I assumed it was just a standard annual release like NHL/Madden/FIFA etc, not a “once in a while” like some of the smaller leagues.
Although because this worked on this release, they’ll definitely try it on a major league one next. My bet is NHL because that will ruffle less feathers, then if that goes well it will make it to Madden & EA FC, the cash cows.
If your concern is “value for dollar” you wouldn’t be buying an FPGA console in a limited edition material. Seems like a weird comparison. You can also get an R36S for like, $30 on AliExpress that will play everything from N64/PS1 and earlier.
A standard Analogue Pocket is much cheaper, this is just an option for those that really want a metal shell. Also, a metal “unfolded” shell for a GBA SP (which is I’m sure is what inspired this offering) is like $150 so it’s not even that crazy a markup.
Yep, ask anyone who owns both. Nobody is playing a Gameboy game on a Steam Deck when they have an Analogue Pocket. Experience is much better, it just feels right on it.
That being said, if that’s not an important thing to you then a Steam Deck will play Gameboy games with near perfect accuracy and no issues, as well as do a million other things. So it’s indisputably a better value.
I would never pitch an Analogue Pocket at someone because if its the kind of thing you want, you already know about it and probably have one.
Easy setup on Steam Deck?
Plus just exposure and availability. I had Aleph One set up, 1-2 computers ago. But bringing over non-Steam games every time I have to set up Windows again is a pain in the ass.
My Steam library migrates en masse between machines. I wish everything was in it. Just makes things easier.
They tried that and made one good but derivative game and two awful games. Capcom has no idea where to take the franchise, that’s why they farmed it out after DR1 to a company that got so sick of only making Dead Rising games that they basically built something completely different behind Capcom’s back and then shut down because Capcom didn’t want it.
I’m way more excited for this. It’s better to start at the only original game in the franchise, excise the “early 360 era” horrible controls, and remind a generation why they liked it in the first place when most only have vague memories of it.
Then, another develop might actually want to take a crack at it or will bring Capcom a good pitch.
This is so dramatic and condescending. God forbid they just make something that people like. A lot of the areas that Nintendo makes top sellers in, other companies don’t even bother to compete.
Outside of indies, there aren’t many games like Animal Crossing, Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Mario Kart, Mario Party, Mario Sports titles, etc.
If you don’t believe me, watch the Summer gaming launch streams. It’s just 3rd person action, FPS, indie. 3rd person action, FPS, indie. With half of those games being GaaS to boot. Repeat for 1hr and end show. Platformers, kart racers, horror games, Metroidvanias, top down adventure, party games, these genres have just been abandoned to indies.
People like Nintendo because they make accessible, fun games that other major publishers don’t. They make games that you pay once for, even if that price is high. They make games that you can play together. They make games END, which is a shocking concept for an industry that wants to drip feed you and make your life about just their game, forever until you die.
Gex’s voice and lines are so iconic and specific, I hope they have every regions lines. Not having them will ruin the nostalgia for any region that’s missed.
Plus, people who know Gex from memes and YouTube will expect the US voice & lines, so you really want to cover all your bases.
EDIT - Oh it’s LRG, then judging by Clock Tower it’ll be the same games with some new art. Disappointing.
Am I the only one disappointed with how lazy this is? They put more effort into Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties than this. I have no idea why it has taken 3 years to make when it look like the original game with a translation patch running in an emulator.
I realize they’ve animated some intros and drawn some new art and stuff, but it would have been nice to get a faithful remake like SMRPG, or like The Dragon’s Trap where they redraw everything and make it widescreen but offer you the option to return to original graphics at any time.
If all they were going to do is QoL improvements and stuff like that, I would have preferred that they just don’t do the new animations and instead include Clock Tower PSX & Struggle Within with QoL improvements in one package.
The way it is it’s just not enough of an improvement over the SNES original with a translation patch to be worthwhile. Which is a shame because the people most likely to buy this are the same people who know how to get the translated SNES ROM very easily.
I know, but the only touch optimized one is glui and it just doesn’t look good. It’s more than a skin issue too, the app is just clunky.
I appreciate that it has so many options, but if it offered just a simplified layer similar to Delta, it would be amazing. Right now it just throws too much at you for the person who just wants to just play a game.
I am shocked this got approved already, and unaltered too.
ScummVM, Provenance, Ignited and Folium are all stuck in review, and as far as I can tell this is the complete RetroArch with no changes or compromises.
It’s also already the best PSX emulator because it doesn’t crash with external controllers and supports hi resolution.
I just wish RetroArch in general had a better interface. The XMB interface isn’t bad on PC but on mobile it’s just so clunky.
EDIT - They also have an Apple TV version!! I’m even more shocked.
EDIT 2 - PPSSPP Standalone also launched! https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/ppsspp-psp-emulator/id6496972903
The sad part is this might actually end up being a net positive in the long run. Their two biggest acquisitions were Bethesda and Activision-Blizzard, one company that has started their decline and another that is deep into it.
Microsoft pissing away $100B to buy these companies only to turn around and kill them 5-10 years later will end up breaking up the gaming conglomerates that have killed the western games industry. The only sad part is all the people that will lose their jobs and all the classic IP that will be squandered.
I think the studio closures was just the last straw. Like they spent almost $100 billion and they’ve made NOTHING. Like not one goddamn thing.
Say what you will about Sony and Nintendo but they have output and they care about gaming because they have to, it’s the only way they make money.
Microsoft could shutter their gaming division tomorrow and they would save money, not lose it. Whatever exec championed the buyouts for Game Pass is clearly gone or asleep at the wheel. So the end result is they own WoW, Candy Crush and CoD that print money and a bunch of franchises that haven’t seen a good release in 10+ years.
The fact that they bought inExile, Obsidian and Bethesda and didn’t immediately start work on a Fallout 1/2 remake or an FNV sequel is evidence enough they they have no fucking clue what they’re doing. How does a company own so many studios and make no games!?
Has Microsoft put out a single worthwhile AAA title in the entire console generation? I bought an Xbox Series X after the Bethesda acquisition and I’ve used it once to boot up Starfield and then quit after 15 minutes when I realized it was boring as hell.
They have this uncanny ability to spend more money on acquisitions and then completely stall the output from that company until every game blows.
They had one good franchise that they didn’t run into the ground, Halo. And after they got control of it they killed that too. They own half the industry now and I feel like they produce less games than ever before.
I feel like they’re going to get bored, kill their games division in 5 years and the whole industry will have to rebuild.
I hope Valve never does this. Tons of games on Steam only work with community fixes, it sets a bad precedent if they pull them because they don’t work in their official state.
It’s better to have them then not, I would just force a disclaimer during sale for abandoned titles that most players have reported that the game does not function without community patches.
Because it all routes through one digital storefront without the possibility of competition, so digital pricing on console storefronts is artificially high.
Plus, they’ve already shut down stores on older consoles and people have lost games. That’s less likely as console companies learn how to make competent digital storefronts and account systems, many have felt the burn of losing all your digital purchases on console and won’t let it happen twice.