People talking about money kinda missing the point this is a culture issue. They need to sort themselves out clean house if people can’t be reasonable for their staff.
There’s nothing wrong with the business model of selling older games at affordable prices. This is about poor management. (Or deliberately bad management by a “CEO” who was hired to destroy GOG to remove a popular choice from us).
Thankfully if GOG goes down I don’t lose anything.
Now if Steam goes down, I lose my entire library
Gabe Newell has promised that if Steam goes down you won’t lose your library, but we only have his word as assurance.
If steam goes down I’m sailing the high seas from then on.
A lot of steam games dont have drm
You would lose only most of your library, not all of it
As a result, no one on the team has the courage to express their opinion. Under Gołębiewski, GOG typically makes business decisions that may be profitable in the short term, but may not contribute to the platform’s long-term growth.
Why half ass things when your the good guy?
I hope they stick around they are great for gaming. I need to buy off there more often.
The publication added that CD Projekt cuts jobs at its subsidiary every two to three years, with annual staff turnover reaching around 30%.
As summed up by another former employee, “GOG has been acting well tactically from a financial perspective, but poorly strategically, and the current business model is likely running out of steam.”
So nothing burger? Other than a corpo being anti-worker which is not news…
“no pun intended”
I really like GOG so it would be highly unfortunate to see them go under. I guess we really can’t have nice things in this day and age.
GOG is a side project of CD Project, the makers of The Witcher and Cyberpunk. They are massively wealthy. If GOG goes down, it’s because CD Project lets it happen, not because there is no other way.
I see what they did there. groan.
Too bad, I use Steam and it works wonderfully on Linux, but i don’t want it to be the only option.
i don’t want it to be the only option.
Neither do I but it is. GOG doesn’t support Linux. Heroic is a 3rd party community effort. Valve is currently the only company making financial investments into Linux gaming.
Many more companies than Valve are making financial investments into Linux gaming, including companies that own various Linux distributions (Red Hat, Canonical, etc.), CodeWeavers (who amongst other things have been contracted by Valve on a lot of Proton work) and to a lesser extent Humble Bundle.
It does support Linux: it lets you download Linux installer for games that have a Linux port.
The lack of GOG Galaxy on Linux just means you have to manually manage your games.
It does support Linux: it lets you download Linux installer for games that have a Linux port.
GOG lets publishers upload various installers but GOG does nothing to support them, let alone offer something like Proton (which is open source, so they could take and integrate it for free).
No one needs to “offer” Proton. It’s available freely for anyone. I think some people think Proton is a Steam thing. It isn’t. Yeah, Valve did a lot of work on it, which is great, but it isn’t limited to them. Vlave has essentially unlimited resources, and I’m happy they spent some making improvements for WINE, but GOG does not have nearly the same resources. I wouldn’t expect them to put their effort into that. Valve only did because they were building hardware that they wanted to run Linux.
No one needs to “offer” Proton. It’s available freely for anyone.
And that’s how GOG does not support Linux: Paying customers need to figure it out on their own. They don’t even value their customers to a degree to take and integrate existing open source solutions.
GOG is the only big option if you want to own the games you purchase.
That’s not how copyright laws work anywhere. You don’t own anything, it’s just a license.
In case of Steam.
With GOG I get an actual license key & terms that state my ownership.
With GOG I get an actual license key & terms that state my ownership.
No, the intellectual property is not transferred to you. You have no clue how copyright works.
GoG Vault would disagree with you on that.
You can download the full installers and keep them, nobody can take them away or disable it remotely
GoG Vault would disagree with you on that.
They are free to disagree on laws but they are still bound by them.
You can download the full installers and keep them, nobody can take them away or disable it remotely
That’s true but if your license is revoked, you’re illegally in possession of the game assets.
That’s not how it works but hey, you do you
and?
Who says you have to respect the laws? Just pirate if publishers mess with players
Just pirate
What’s the point of GOG then?
Morals
Morals
Nothing moral about a store that affirms Microsoft’s Windows monopoly.
Same reason we have Barnes and Nobles in the states. I like to browse before I hit zlibrary.
Not everything is on GoG
We have itch.io
GameWorldObserver.
Can they be trusted?
NOOOOOOO I LOVE GOG
Any other sources for this? Not for the job cutting, but for GoG’s business model going downhill? Haven’t big layoffs happened every few years since the start of GoG?
The word choice is certainly not accidental.
I’m really happy with my experience with GOG, but they put a lot of effort into their Windows app and i ws pretty blunt with my feedback, it is pretty useless to me and I find it unhelpful. Heroic game launcher on Linux great and cost GOG $0.00. My thought is that they have been focusing on the wrong things, fundamentally I love their strong DRM stance and when I am travelling internationally,the games I bought off GOG work, unlike Steam😡😡😡😡. So if they have come to this realization, then nothing about these changes are disturbing as a customer, but sad to hear their employees taking the hit. 😢
when I am travelling internationally,the games I bought off GOG work, unlike Steam😡😡😡😡.
You must be doing something very wrong. I bring my Steam Deck on travels and it always works.
I’ve traveled domestically and had the Steam Deck randomly decide that the games I preloaded need to be authenticated again because I didn’t explicitly put the device in “offline mode” before traveling. A GOG game sideloaded through Heroic would just work.
This year I was in three foreign countries with my Steam Deck. Once per flight, the other two by car. On the plane I activated airplane mode because duh but outside the plane airplane mode was always off.
By default Steam downloads shader caches off Valve’s servers. So if Steam saw before that an update is available and you didn’t download it, Steam wants to be online to download them. You can disable shader cache downloads in desktop mode but then the games have to compile the shaders by themselves which takes time computing resources, and in turn wastes battery power.
Also, pretty recently there was a bug in Steam that messed up authentication in general. It required me to log in twice (!) on every power on. The bug is now gone. It wasn’t a feature.
Nope, this is something different. I booted up Metaphor: ReFantazio, and it just about made it to the main menu before telling me I needed to be in offline mode, but you can’t explicitly put the device in offline mode if you don’t have an internet connection, funny enough. Fortunately I was on an Amtrak with Wi-Fi, but I shouldn’t have needed to do that. As far as I can tell, the reason I needed to authenticate the game again is because the Deck ran a “validating install” step on boot, but I have no idea when that step is going to happen, and once again, I shouldn’t have to plan ahead for being offline.
I booted up Metaphor: ReFantazio, and it just about made it to the main menu before telling me I needed to be in offline mode
Sounds like a game bug.
but you can’t explicitly put the device in offline mode if you don’t have an internet connection, funny enough
“…” button --> Airplane mode.
the reason I needed to authenticate the game again is because the Deck ran a “validating install” step on boot, but I have no idea when that step is going to happen
When you do something to bork the game data. It’s either user error or a bug but definitively not regular behaviour.
It’s not a game bug; that’s Steam’s DRM.
Airplane mode is not offline mode. I found that out explicitly this year due to how Ubisoft’s launcher interacts with playing offline in Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. Offline mode is found from the Internet menu in the Steam Deck interface and is very much not the same thing as just not having an internet connection, as much as that would make sense.
I didn’t break any game data. This is an OS level feature, and it just does it sometimes on boot. I’m glad you’ve never been inconvenienced by these things yourself, but this is the intended functionality.
It’s not a game bug; that’s Steam’s DRM.
Funny how you got hit by that on an domestic train trip and I traveled abroad several times and not got that weird behaviour even once. I simply never use offline mode. On the plane I was in airplane mode and when not on the plane I was on hotel wifi, personal phone hotspot, or just not connected to any wifi. Steam also never just out of the blue validated my game data. Must be a problem on your end.
I didn’t even know they had a client. I do everything via their website.
strong DRM stance
They have allowed content protected by DRM into their store four times already, which is not surprising, given GOG is owned by CD Projekt Red who included DRM into their own DLC for Cyberpunk, including on GOG. That’s not “strong” in any sense of the word.
So in other words, they sell you the “feel good” anti-DRM narrative but quickly look the other way when it’s good for business. At that point, might as well purchase on Steam, where DRM is common but optional and Valve actually cares about making the games platform-agnostic, easy to backup, easy to share, etc.
EDIT: cool downvotes, doesn’t change the fact that GOG provides software protected by DRM on their “strongly anti-DRM platform”. There is no amount of downvotes in this world that can change this reality.
I don’t follow the logic here. You said it yourself – GoG has only allowed DRM onto their platform four times. This is a violation of their anti-DRM policy but it still means like 99% of games on GoG have no DRM. It’s good to be principled about these things but I don’t see how this merits a knee-jerk response to run to Steam (a platform where 99% of games do have DRM and no guarantee other than an informal promise that they’ll do “something” to make their games available if Steam were to shut down).
anti-DRM policy
What anti-DRM policy? They included DRM into their own game, what kind of policy is that?
“I have a strict, non negotiable anti-beer policy! Except every weekend when I drink a 12 pack! And sometimes in social events! And at night to take the edge off! Sometimes on Wednesdays too!”
Not the person you’re replying to but there’s a big difference between: “We allow DRM, but don’t force it” to “We strongly oppose DRM, but allow it and even put it into our own games”. One is just business, the other makes you a hypocrite. And the issue with GOG is that they’re the latter.
See my other reply, they have allowed this much more than 4 times, and their own games have some form of DRM. Plus the amount of games with DRM on steam is much less than 99%, as a general rule if the game is on both platforms it has the same or equivalent DRM. So it’s essentially up to the publisher whether a game will have DRM or not, and because the vast majority of games have the same stance on DRM regardless of platform of purchase citing GOG stance against DRM becomes a moot point.
In short, games on GOG can have DRM and games on Steam can be DRM free. And as a general rule a game’s DRM stance will be the same regardless of store. So if you want to play game X and it’s available on both GOG and Steam, chances are pretty high that it is DRM-free on both, and if it has DRM on steam chances are pretty high it also has DRM on GOG.
Four times? How many times has Steam allowed it? Trying to follow your argument, TIA!
Did I ever claim Steam is a “strongly DRM free platform”? Did Steam ever sell itself as the non evil alternative due to a quoted “lack of DRM?”
If you’re trying to follow my argument, you’re not doing a good job.
If I understand this correctly, you value Steam’s honesty over a few instances in which GOG hypocritically violated their own DRM policy. That sucks, for sure, and GOG should be called out for it – but at the end of the day, the vast majority of games in my GOG library can be downloaded as offline installers that don’t need to contact a server, while the vast majority of the games I own on Steam can’t (barring, of course, circumventing Steam’s fairly weak DRM scheme, which is illegal).
you value Steam’s honesty
Both are multi-millionaire it not billionaire companies. There’s no way to attribute virtues like “honesty” to corporate entities.
But GOG is a much worse store than Steam, lacking features Steam had a decade ago and, most importantly, being loudly indifferent to how the games work on platforms other than Windows. Any gaming thread gets flooded by GOG fans talking about how we should support them anyway, because they’re great and anti-DRM… Except I’m telling you they aren’t, if their own games are at risk of being pirated they add DRM, if somebody wants to publish games protected by DRM on their platform they allow it. That’s not anti-DRM.
Steam’s DRM is disabled by default, and Valve is aware it’s trivially easy to bypass and said multiple times they don’t care. That’s just as “anti-DRM” as GOG if we go by their actions, rather than their marketing claims.
Don’t fall for marketing claims when they themselves are using DRM, it’s ridiculous.
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the games I bought off GOG work, unlike Steam
Which games from steam don’t work? I’ve never had any issues at all and I have traveled internationally for years while playing my whole library. I think that might be something specific to some game and that game wouldn’t be available on GOG anyways so it’s a moot point. In other words games work or don’t by their own stance on DRM, and I’m sorry to tell you but
I love their strong DRM stance
That’s a myth. They do allow DRM on their store, there’s a huge thread discussing which games have DRM: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/drm_on_gog_list_of_singleplayer_games_with_drm/page1
And that’s just focusing on SP, any MP game has DRM. So I’ll ask again, which game didn’t work on steam when traveling?
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.
Yeah, but if you follow that DRM definition almost no game on Steam has DRM either.
All of the games on that list work without any kind of phone-home security check, or unlock code, or anything like that.
You didn’t scroll down the linked forum post, did you?
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DEFCON - Linux: Game contacts a key verification server as described here. Win and Mac have offline executables that skip the verification. But under Linux there is no DRM-free offline executable.
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F.E.A.R. - arguably a bug that stays unfixed. Securom remnants weren’t removed and can cause the single player game not to start.
That’s pretty DRM-y.
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any MP game has DRM
Well, that’s not true either. I hate this trend of developers only relying on the platform-provided servers for multiplayer, but you have to find a game with LAN. That limits your selection a lot, but I for sure played Star Wars: Episode I - Racer from GOG in LAN without talking to their servers at all.
Sure, but those also are DRM free on Steam, so my point remains.
I can’t say conclusively that every LAN game on GOG is DRM-free on Steam, but there are times where Steam’s DRM has caused annoyances for me when trying to play offline on Steam Deck that I would not run into with side loaded GOG games, which I detailed in another comment here.
You can’t also say conclusively that every LAN game on GOG is DRM-free on GOG either.
I read that other comment, that’s an issue with the specific game. I’ve played dozens of games without connection and not putting it on offline mode, if that specific game tries to phone home on login that game is wrong. I wished Steam would have a DRM-free tag to be able to differentiate them easily.
Not the person you asked, but one game I had problems with on Steam that I did not on GOG was the OG Riven. It was still playable, but the various animations associated with pressing buttons and suchlike were completely broken. Very rare experience though and I have played many retro games on Steam.
Never heard of that game, but I can definitely believe it, old games are where GOG really shines. But that doesn’t seem like a DRM thing, more like the game is abandoned on Steam but not on GOG, sometimes GOG patches some old games with their own runtime, curiously if that is the problem running the steam version on linux using proton (and especially proton-GE) is also very likely to work.
Yeah a lot of retro games on GOG were fixed up with patches and stuff like that (often by GOG themselves) and sometimes regardless of any fixes applied, there are version disparities between the two platforms where usually the Steam versions is a slightly older release of an old no longer updated game compared to the GOG version though I’ve seen it happen the other way around, too.
