GOG.com

[Azdul]

GOG was good when they stayed in their lane. There was a small profit to be made in being the store for old games. But I have been noticing that you can find more of them on Steam now so IDK that bridge may have burned.

This DRM free stuff was never going to work out. The vast majority of consumers could not give a shit (we all know how gamer boycotts pan out) and publishers love DRM.

You just can't beat Valve.

I won't buy anything 'Rockstar' since they removed soundtrack from the games I supposedly 'own', with Valve cooperation in enforcing mandatory patches. Not to mention that Steam publishers do not really have incentive to remove DRM when it stops working, leaving customers with non-working game.

There is a market for DRM-free games, and when GOG does not deliver, smaller players like Zoom or Itch.io will step in. Or developers will sell the games directly, knowing that for some people DRM is a deal breaker.

In last 5 years I've never found any game exciting enough to buy DRM copy from Steam.

 

[Zoo]

GOG was good when they stayed in their lane. There was a small profit to be made in being the store for old games. But I have been noticing that you can find more of them on Steam now so IDK that bridge may have burned.

This DRM free stuff was never going to work out. The vast majority of consumers could not give a shit (we all know how gamer boycotts pan out) and publishers love DRM.

You just can't beat Valve.

I won't buy anything 'Rockstar' since they removed soundtrack from the games I supposedly 'own', with Valve cooperation in enforcing mandatory patches. Not to mention that Steam publishers do not really have incentive to remove DRM when it stops working, leaving customers with non-working game.

There is a market for DRM-free games, and when GOG does not deliver, smaller players like Zoom or Itch.io will step in. Or developers will sell the games directly, knowing that for some people DRM is a deal breaker.

In last 5 years I've never found any game exciting enough to buy DRM copy from Steam.

I bought the GTA games from Gamersgate after the mandatory patches, but they aren't the versions with butchered soundtracks, because the keys were older. So they didn't alter my "owned" games.

Nonetheless, I prefer GOG to Steam for old games, the rollback feature (sadly, Galaxy needed) is better than the opting for beta versions.

 

[Azdul]

GOG was good when they stayed in their lane. There was a small profit to be made in being the store for old games. But I have been noticing that you can find more of them on Steam now so IDK that bridge may have burned.

This DRM free stuff was never going to work out. The vast majority of consumers could not give a shit (we all know how gamer boycotts pan out) and publishers love DRM.

You just can't beat Valve.

I won't buy anything 'Rockstar' since they removed soundtrack from the games I supposedly 'own', with Valve cooperation in enforcing mandatory patches. Not to mention that Steam publishers do not really have incentive to remove DRM when it stops working, leaving customers with non-working game.

There is a market for DRM-free games, and when GOG does not deliver, smaller players like Zoom or Itch.io will step in. Or developers will sell the games directly, knowing that for some people DRM is a deal breaker.

In last 5 years I've never found any game exciting enough to buy DRM copy from Steam.

I bought the GTA games from Gamersgate after the mandatory patches, but they aren't the versions with butchered soundtracks, because the keys were older. So they didn't alter my "owned" games.

Nonetheless, I prefer GOG to Steam for old games, the rollback feature (sadly, Galaxy needed) is better than the opting for beta versions.

Besides Steam, I have physical copies, but they do not run due to DRM being kernel-level driver incompatible with Windows 10, but mainly due to Rockstar being assholes:


Steam copies were updated to remove songs, but not to fix crashing on new Windows. And Rockstar sues guys hosting open source reimplementation of the engine, because they have hilariously bad remaster to sell:


DRM and DMCA create a legal way to shut down open source reimplementations, due to 'circumventing copy protection' clause. No wonder that some publishers love it.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Still the question of ownership.

They might give you legalese speak about how downloading an installer is totes owning the game but in reality you're still granted the license to use the software just like it has been even before digital media.

 

[flyingjohn]

Dark eye chains adventure game is free:
https://af.gog.com/en/game/the_dark_eye_chains_of_satinav?as=1649904300
Interesting secret:

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Was what ever confirmed to be real? I've never seen it replicated.

 

[Avonaeon]

Still the question of ownership.

They might give you legalese speak about how downloading an installer is totes owning the game but in reality you're still granted the license to use the software just like it has been even before digital media.

If you have the offline installer saved locally, they can't do shit, license or not. It is de facto ownership.

 

[AN0N]

Ahhh a WIN for preservation!!!!! AND ON SALE!!!!
https://af.gog.com/en/game/dustborn?as=1649904300

Yikes.....

 

[Alienman]

Preserve to show young developers what not to do.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Still the question of ownership.

They might give you legalese speak about how downloading an installer is totes owning the game but in reality you're still granted the license to use the software just like it has been even before digital media.

If you have the offline installer saved locally, they can't do shit, license or not. It is de facto ownership.

It's your in the sense that you have it in your computer, but it's not yours in the sense that it belongs to you. Lawyers are gay weird like that.

 

[Melcar]

What doesn't belong to you are the assets. Music, art, graphics, etc.

 

[Risewild]

It's your in the sense that you have it in your computer, but it's not yours in the sense that it belongs to you. Lawyers are gay weird like that.

Apparently you do own the games you buy on GOG:

Legal Right of Ownership​

Importantly, owning your GOG games is not merely a vague idea or ethical position. There have been major legal cases, such as Oracle vs. Google, confirming that if software has no DRM or license terms restricting use, purchasers are free to do whatever they want, including reselling it.

So with GOG‘s DRM-free model, you have the court-backed right to reuse purchased games freely as you choose. Whether installing them on multiple devices, bequeathing them in your will, or even reselling the files, you own them in every sense just like physical games or media. No EULAs or usage agreements can override those property rights.

Source:
Do you truly own the games you buy on GOG?

 

[Mark Richard]

There has always been a distinction made between ownership of the end product and the individual assets contained therein. You don't own the Dustborn characters and cannot sell duplicate copies of its hit theme song. No, no, I don't want to hear any protests. It's impossible.

What you do own is a single irrevocable licence for the game itself and the right to resell. So let's explore the limitations on that for a moment. You cannot keep your copy and sell duplicates. It might technically be okay to sell an individual music file from the game if you can permanently erase it from your end afterwards so no duplicate exists, as if selling the right-hand corner of a painting. If you can't host an event on the street and blast out copyrighted music, it follows that you wouldn't be allowed to host a tournament in a public space with a giant screen for all to see and present it like esports (having a group in the same space playing their own copy of a game is fine without a public audience). Let's Plays without any commentary are technically out of bounds but no one cares. With Commentary is fine because its classified as transformative media.

But then the laws are different for each country so disregard everything I just said.

 

[RedpilledBiggerHeadshot69]

Nah, it was simply the lack of competence for their increased ambition. Just look how utterly garbage their website is. Remember how often things broke? Remember how their redesign made part of the people unable to do anything? Remember when they gave the middle finger to Japanese developers/publishers who then just doubled-down on Steam? Remember all their politicial and social (in the bad way) activism? Remember when they screwed over Russian and Belarusian users? Remember when they betrayed their principles? Remember that they forced (and probably still do) people to move to Poland to work at GOG?

All GOG had to do was keep promoting DRM-free games and fix their shit.

Instead, they pushed Galaxy hard on everyone and discontinued the offline installers download tools. Now we have to rely on third-parties like gogrepo or lgogdownloader to do what GOG should be doing: being able to synchronize our GOG libraries to our devices for safekeeping.

I have a customized version of gogrepo and I can attest to the mess and river of inconsistencies that their web API is. They could have fixed that first and most of their website issues would get fixed as well. It's not rocket science, just a complete lack of care.

It's 2025 and their website is still unable to distinguish games that we've bought from a bundle from their individual parts. If you buy Game A with DLCs 1, 2 and 3, it doesn't mark that you already own Game A Bundle that also comes with DLC 1, 2 and 3. The same occurs in reverse, so you end up having to double check if you got everything for Game A or if there's some missing piece of DLC that you don't know about. This is another easy fix on their data model that they refused to implement in all these years.

Galaxy had a real value proposition, on paper, with the integrations. Enough to merit the philosophically 'unclean' nature of it given their whole anti-DRM shtick? And the existence of playnite? Debatable, but I absolutely understand everyone who says flatly 'no, it wasnt'. Was it ever properly supported or fleshed out? Nope. Then some years ago they threw in the towel in a pivot back to pretty much just the web store. Presumably in order to... have the worst of both worlds and remain Steam's flailing hippie little sister forever, as seems to be shaking out. As you rightly point out, despite such pivoting, basic issues remain unaddressed for years even in the website.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Galaxy was a demand from devs and publishers so they could have some semblance of tracking in their games' sales. Mind you, indies are much, much more strict with this than AAA devs.

 

[RedpilledBiggerHeadshot69]

I can't speak to the birth of the original version, but that rings a little hollow, sales data are certainly tracked w/o any client. Unless I'm misunderstanding you and you somehow mean playtime tracking etc. IIRC it was more about trying to poach a little digital storefront client market with the release of TW3 giving a compelling enough reason to initially pull users in. Then it was just chugging along playing basic-functionality catch-up with Steam until the big 2.0 idea with the multiplatform stuff. That was a genuinely novel idea in the (commercial) space and at peak it reached maybe 80% of the completeness it would've needed to really make that have a point. Now it still sits in 'beta' despite being the only officially available version for nearly half a decade, as what limited working bits of the things that could have made it genuinely cool have slowly decayed into non-functionality. A giant wasted opportunity all around, but it was always just a side project to the web store, and GOG itself is just a side project to RED

 

[Lord_Potato]

I can't speak to the birth of the original version, but that rings a little hollow, sales data are certainly tracked w/o any client. Unless I'm misunderstanding you and you somehow mean playtime tracking etc. IIRC it was more about trying to poach a little digital storefront client market with the release of TW3 giving a compelling enough reason to initially pull users in. Then it was just chugging along playing basic-functionality catch-up with Steam until the big 2.0 idea with the multiplatform stuff. That was a genuinely novel idea in the (commercial) space and at peak it reached maybe 80% of the completeness it would've needed to really make that have a point. Now it still sits in 'beta' despite being the only officially available version for nearly half a decade, as what limited working bits of the things that could have made it genuinely cool have slowly decayed into non-functionality. A giant wasted opportunity all around, but it was always just a side project to the web store, and GOG itself is just a side project to RED

I don't know, lately I updated all the plugins and now enjoy all my library from 6 launchers (GOG, Steam, Epic, Origins, Ubi, Amazon) in one place.

 

[RedpilledBiggerHeadshot69]

For how many of those were you able to get working versions set up via the settings window integrations searchbar, though?

I imagine Epic and MS integrations are at least minimally maintained given their official status. Everything else involves jumping through manual, not-officially-documented hoops just in order to function. These integrations also potentially could have been able to do much cooler things. There's cross-platform friends, in that they show up in the sidebar anyway, in the Steam one IIRC - imagine cross-platform messaging. But Playnite does the omni-library better and Discord obviates even any theoretical unified gaming store messaging client in the same way it largely killed steamchat as a social tool.

It's a very pretty and useable library management client, but that's not enough to make it really stand out, and it could have been so much more

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

I can't speak to the birth of the original version, but that rings a little hollow, sales data are certainly tracked w/o any client. Unless I'm misunderstanding you and you somehow mean playtime tracking etc. IIRC it was more about trying to poach a little digital storefront client market with the release of TW3 giving a compelling enough reason to initially pull users in. Then it was just chugging along playing basic-functionality catch-up with Steam until the big 2.0 idea with the multiplatform stuff. That was a genuinely novel idea in the (commercial) space and at peak it reached maybe 80% of the completeness it would've needed to really make that have a point. Now it still sits in 'beta' despite being the only officially available version for nearly half a decade, as what limited working bits of the things that could have made it genuinely cool have slowly decayed into non-functionality. A giant wasted opportunity all around, but it was always just a side project to the web store, and GOG itself is just a side project to RED

It's not just about purchases, they need to track piracy. Indies are extremely wary of GOG because the fact that it's a DRM platform means they the game is instantly pirated.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

I can't speak to the birth of the original version, but that rings a little hollow, sales data are certainly tracked w/o any client. Unless I'm misunderstanding you and you somehow mean playtime tracking etc. IIRC it was more about trying to poach a little digital storefront client market with the release of TW3 giving a compelling enough reason to initially pull users in. Then it was just chugging along playing basic-functionality catch-up with Steam until the big 2.0 idea with the multiplatform stuff. That was a genuinely novel idea in the (commercial) space and at peak it reached maybe 80% of the completeness it would've needed to really make that have a point. Now it still sits in 'beta' despite being the only officially available version for nearly half a decade, as what limited working bits of the things that could have made it genuinely cool have slowly decayed into non-functionality. A giant wasted opportunity all around, but it was always just a side project to the web store, and GOG itself is just a side project to RED

It's not just about purchases, they need to track piracy. Indies are extremely wary of GOG because the fact that it's a DRM platform means they the game is instantly pirated.

Yeah, remember there are pirate sites that dealt exclusively in GOG games.
It very much is a point of concern to such devs.

 

[RedpilledBiggerHeadshot69]

The fuck? And how do you think Galaxy is tracking piracy? Scanning your drive for illegimate GOG copies, silently? Running an installer w/o a license for it will end up adding it to Galaxy as a 'generic' game and functioning just fine as such. In an indirect way you could track a limited subset of pirated copies from those data, but that would be of questionable value, and I'm pretty sure that's never been happening.

Anyone paranoid about tracking piracy would be far better served monitoring both public and private trackers

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

The fuck? And how do you think Galaxy is tracking piracy? Scanning your drive for illegimate GOG copies, silently? Running an installer w/o a license for it will end up adding it to Galaxy as a 'generic' game and functioning just fine as such. In an indirect way you could track a limited subset of pirated copies from those data, but that would be of questionable value, and I'm pretty sure that's never been happening.

Anyone paranoid about tracking piracy would be far better served monitoring both public and private trackers

I remember this was asked around at the time and the concession was that the only way to bring more publishers into gog was having a launcher, because it was a way for them to have proper control over sales and ownership.
Plus. the client was one of the top voted options in the community wishlist for ages. It's not like nobody wanted it. And as I said, this was a problem mostly with indies. You hear about indies being rejected by GOG but there's more indies who reject gog themselves, since it's just as easy as uploading the offline installer to some site.

 

[AN0N]

Honestly making a bad game is THE ultimate DRM.

Cat Headed Eagle
I don't think indie devs care about piracy, if they did, they wouldn't made a game in the first place. Whatever the platform is, there is always a way.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Honestly making a bad game is THE ultimate DRM.

Cat Headed Eagle
I don't think indie devs care about piracy, if they did, they wouldn't made a game in the first place. Whatever the platform is, there is always a way.

Oh they care, over the years a lot of them have been asked if they plan on a GOG release of their games and that's the answer they gave. They see GOG as a pirate friendly platform and they don't want that.

 

[AN0N]

What makes steam make less "obtainable"? They can't afford denuvo thats for sure. Dunno, sounds like they're retarded thinking like valve would care, I mean they do let you know:
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/drm