Oh man. I’ve supported gog from the beginning, always purchased there.
Even if it was more expensive or late or downsides (especially to steam).
Still, they didn’t always hold up to the drm free standard they set.
Then they come up with this, which to me sounds like ‘give us subscription money for what we already did the whole time’.
The Patrons initiative is particularly interesting
No it’s not! I care for the games. I want a drm free packaged version. You name the price, but keep all original features.
I don’t give a flying shit about any online badges or whatever. How could I know where the additional money goes? By my estimate I’ll pay the subscription and your ceo gets more money but the games wont see any of it…
Oh and spamming me with mails telling me how awesome it would be for me to be patron but completely without any real, tangible, non corpo speak reason to leaves a bad taste and kills a little confidence in you every time.
Same here.
The whole things has a massive “grift” vibe, especially given that they’re double dipping since supporters of their “Game preservation efforts” still have to pay for those games.
Happy to keep on buying games from them in preference to from Steam, some even from the “Good old game” bucket, just not willing to assume a monthly monetary commitment to some black-box “trust us” which feels a lot like the “Charity as a business” shit from the most sleazy “charities” out there (you know the kind: the ones with CEOs paid massive salaries and were only a small fraction of contributions actually ends up in the charitable objective).
Gog has been my preference for a few years now, but there’s no way I’m subscribing to a patreon that gets me literally nothing. I honestly assumed at first you’d get something out of it at first, like a free game from the preservation program every month or something similar to Amazon Prime’s giveaways. Its honestly cause me to start to re evaluate how much I purchase from them. Its kinda skeezy.
What Patreon? It’s just “patron” isn’t it? What I see is the digital equivalent of a tip jar that shows up during checkout. Ignore it if you want.
I assumed it was a Patreon because of the name, but its still a for profit company asking their customers for donations in the form of a monthly subscription so they can sell you more games. You don’t get anything tangible out of it, just a private Discord and a badge on your name.
Its skeezy no matter how you spin it.
I see it as a tip. They made the game available, put in the work to make it playable on modern systems, and host it so I don’t need to store it myself. Here’s a buck.
I tip a buck or two and normally purchase during sales.
They do care. See archive.org for example.
Conflating care with the bottom line of your corporation is disingenuous.
Seems the new GOG owner doesn’t care as they push AI use in the company
Something tells me the “double down” is to distract from that fallout
I suspect so… But not everyone knows so it’s still worth mentioning.
I know it, but I’m not sure why one would affect the other. I still get DRM free games on GOG that I’m not going to find on itch.io or elsewhere.
Because supporting GOG now means supporting unfettered AI usage. If you disagree with such policies, the only way to voice that discontent is with your wallet.
I suppose so, but even if that bothered me, it would still mean I’m not owning the games I buy when I shop elsewhere.
Depends on the game. As I mentioned in another thread, there are many games on Steam which are DRM-free and do not require the client. GOG’s advertising suggests they are the only method for getting such games, but as always, the devil is in the details.
Mostly it comes down to how much you feel about one issue over the other, but I don’t see how they can be unrelated if there’s a monetary transaction involved.
Considering games with no DRM can have it added retroactively, that Steam pushes updates I may not want with no option to decline, and that that wiki can’t even load in its entirety without erroring out for me and comes down to user submitted data, GOG’s DRM free promise is more than just advertising.
Was there another incident besides the 2026 sales promo image? I was a bit disappointing of their “response” if you can could call it that. But I don’t really see this as “pushing AI”, as far as I can tell this might just be an intern who was given the task to make a promo image and did not care at all.
They are hiring someone to advocate for us use
oof, found it. It is so weird seemingly every job listing for a software developer has the requirement of using AI nowadays. ITS NOT A SKILL, ITS MANDATORY TRAINING WHEELS. They will find worse programmers doing so, good ones can use AI if it makes sense you don’t have to force it.
Push slop and lose your business there will aways be other services that are more ethical.
I care. Enough to abandon my qualms about AI usage? Not really, it just means GOG is not the answer.
If there’s someone else doing the same work, by all means give to them instead.
archive.org and their collections to the rescue!
The true GOAT.
Do you not but games anymore then, or do you think steam is better?
Though if you only play FOSS or self published games, that would be kinda based.
I’m guessing by your wording that you’re aching to bash Steam, so I’ll preface this with: no corporation is ever going to get this 100% right; the world is drawn in greys, and only a Sith deals in absolutes.
“Better” is not very useful without context. In the context of AI usage, Steam is better. In the context of GOG, their main claim about game preservation is “no DRM”, but there is an important point often missed: lots of games on Steam also do not have DRM.
I have no issues “buying” games on Steam which have no DRM. For others, I factor the DRM into the price I’m willing to pay for access. These tend to be larger titles anyway, so I’m not terribly worried about it long term.
Long term game preservation? More about unofficial channels than relying on yet another corporation. GOG wasn’t changing that before, and they definitely aren’t now.
If you are ok with steam despite stuff like this then why is GOG somehow worse?
What incredible hyperbole. It is superisleading to describe that as going “All-In on AI”. It’s a change to the disclosure rules Valve requires for publishers, not that Valve is using AI themselves like GOG is.
I would prefer if they required disclosure of the use of any AI tools involved, but at this point AI has been so thoroughly shoved into every piece of software you can really just assume that some AI somewhere touched anything made after 2022. Generative AI is the bigger problem and this move focuses the attention on that.
If they abandon AI usage, I’d consider buying from them. Unless they give AI up and get a team of great humans at the helm to develop. They can get fucked, and I will spend my money elsewhere.
Old games rock. I recently played Prince of Persia; Warrior Within and there was no console update, game patch to download, daily login reward, update centre telling me updates I may have missed. None of that crap. Power-on, loading scree, game time, done!
Modern games are designed like a full-time job that you pay to work for the company.
I recently replayed Warrior Within as well.
I should say, there’s still plenty of modern games that don’t involve those kinds of things.
Hollow Knight, both the original as well as Silksong play exactly like that.
Hades 2 & Mewgenics are my two most recent ‘Just the Game’ games.
Bg3, resident evil village, oblivion remake, elden ring, cyberpunk, and I’m sure there are more those are just the ones I’ve played recently that don’t have any of those mechanics.
I love old games
New games, not so much
And no social media graffiti on the main menu.
I’m still weirded out by that, all these years later.
Check out Titanium Court
It’s very old school. Very impressive
GOG needs to copy Steam a bit more.
Give us game based discussion boards, a mod workshop, and most importantly a friends notification system. Steer into the social experience of old games.
game based discussion boards
These already exist, every store page has a “Forum discussion” link. You can also go here and you should find the “game specific forum” section where you can search for whatever game.
Apart from the fact that all things you listed exist in one form or another on GOG, have you considered that there are people that prefer not having all those random bullshit social features in their game store? Stream may be more popular, but getting out of their niche and copying steam will alienate their fans without attracting steam users.
Also fuck the workshop, it’s the worst thing that ever happened to modding. It’s a total pain in the ass to download and apply a mod that is only available there to any non-steam version. Additionally it produced a generation of gamers that is unable to trouble-shoot even the tiniest problem with the mods they applied.
GOG forums are mostly technical topics. Different builds for different storefronts can cause different problems, and good luck getting help from devs and mod authors on Steam if you have a GOG problem.
It’s very sluggish compared to Steam; everything is slower in GOG client. I wonder if it is a server problem or my region.
They have the opportunity to right their wrong of bailing on the StopKillingGames campaign, but they’re likely more worried about appeasing the corpo publisher more than they are defending their supposed core mission.
I don’t think they have even one game in their catalogue that StopKillingGames is about.
Not sure that was their point. It’s about the principal of it.
And in principle I’m fine with an online store that only sells conventional, offline singleplayer games to not give a pickle about service games.
Good to know but I’m not sure how that’s relevant to the principle originally being discussed.
The movement is about the legal right to keep what you paid for *period*. If you’re “fine” with publishers killing service games today, you’re just signaling to the industry that you’ll be fine with them adding mandatory online check-ins to your favorite single-player games tomorrow.
Apathy toward a principle usually ends with losing the privilege you thought was safe… Food for thought.
I really can’t bother.
There are a number of old LAN games there too. It’s basically the only place I can feasibly shop for multiplayer shooters at the moment. The sad part is that I think the newest one is Crysis Wars, from 2008.
Of course, and many singleplayer games had multiplayer modes, that stuff wasn’t necessarily separated.
For a number of these, they’re often games that had GameSpy servers or otherwise the online multiplayer portion of it was shut down, yet the game and multiplayer remain playable, and that’s what SKG is about.
StopKillingGames is also about keeping games with always online DRM (even present in many singleplayer games today) from rendering it completely unplayable, which would also determine if it could even be sold on GoG in the future.
All of GoG’s current catalog is only possible because the trend of always online DRM wasn’t a thing yet, but going forward, we’ll need SKG to ensure GoG is able to preserve newer games as they become old. If GoG cares about preserving games, then SKG couldn’t get more in their wheelhouse. Yet they ghosted the organizer for it.
Even on Steam I‘ve never bought a game with always online DRM. Is that really still a thing?
Yes, many games implement that. More famously The Crew (which was mostly a singleplayer game with a large campaign with some multiplayer tacked on) became completely unplayable after Ubisoft shut down the multiplayer portion of the game due to always online DRM. They only later patched the game to become playable in singleplayer again after the extreme backlash from the SKG campaign, which focused on The Crew as an example.
There are many more singeplayer games either already killed, or currently at-risk of being destroyed. SKG keeps an up to date list of them here: https://stopkillinggames.wiki.gg/wiki/Dead_game_list
Offer a good service and people will buy from your store, most customers either don’t care about DRM or care somewhat but don’t want to inconvenience themselves with a worse product for it. GOG have to catch up to Steam with stuff like family sharing and controller support for me to consider buying stuff there.
Why do you need family sharing if the games are DRM free? If the kid wants to play a game from your account you just pass him the exe, what’s the issue
Controller support depends from the game, if you mean a controller remapper like steam, then you either use a third party remapper or you simply add the shortcut in steam. With heroic launcher you can add gog games in your steam list with a single click
You don’t just pass the exe though, modern games are huge with a lot of files required. With Steam it’s a 2 step process:
- I look in the tab in my library for games in my brother’s account I have access to with family sharing.
- I download a game from the list.
That’s despite the fact my brother lives in the other side of the country, and it offers me all the Steam features I make use of like cloud saves as if my account had bought the game.
With GOG it’s
- Find the right webpage for my brother’s games (you can’t see them from within the GOG client for some reason.
- Ask my brother to download the installer
- Get my brother to send me the installer file over discord
- The installer is too big
- Say nevermind just give me your login info
- I try to login to his account with the GOG client
- Ask my brother for his 2FA authenticator code
- Finally login, and can download the game
- Remember to turn off cloud saves so you don’t override your brother’s cloud saves.
Based on a true story btw.
There’s probably things we could’ve done that would’ve made it easier and less steps, but it still wouldn’t have been just as simple as what Steam does, and I’m missing cloud saves and I’d have to do several of those steps again if I wanted the game on say my Steam Deck as well as my PC.
then you either use a third party remapper or you simply add the shortcut in steam
If I’m just going to use Steam or extra software to compensate for Steam features, I might as well just use Steam.
Every solution that doesn’t need an external proprietary app is a better solution.
For most people, that’s not the case if the alternative solution is worse or less convenient.
Every piece of free software that has ever attained some level of mainstream success and popularity has done so by offering a better product, not something worse with the excuse of “well at least we’re not proprietary”.
GOG allows you to download an unprotected installer. I don’t think they will ever go beyond that in the name of fair use and big publishers are reluctant enough to release on GOG. You were about to use a 3rd party app anyway, Discord. Just use WeTransfer or another filehoster/cloud service to send the file. And honestly, logging into another account and download the file is not as bad as you say.
See that’s kind of my point, when we’re on the 100th “oh just use this other external service/software”, most users (myself included) are just going to stick to the simple solution that just works.
Being able to just access family and friends games straight from my library without wasting all that time having to ask beforehand, manual downloads and file management/transfers and lack of cloud saves like it’s still the 90s is worth whatever moral cost you associate with using a piece of proprietary software.
I kinda miss the 90s
you can login in heroic once and then install what you need, and disable cloud saves as default option
with family sharing the DRM does not allow two people to play at the same time, don’t ignore this huge inconvenience
Can you use Heroic with multiple accounts? Because if not that’s meaningless.
No, but the workaround is to let the launcher use a different config
We don’t have plans to support multiple accounts, but you can still run Heroic pointing to a different config folder by using the XDG_CONFIG_HOME=~/.config2 env variable. You could create a shortcut to something like XDG_CONFIG_HOME=~/.config-user-1 heroic to open Heroic for one user and XDG_CONFIG_HOME=~/.config-user-2 heroic to open Heroic for another user.
To be fair, ‘you can do whatever you want with your games’ is totally different from ‘we should add features that actively support piracy’
My family share for GOG is an SFTP server, which I’m pretty sure you can also do just using FileZilla and forwarding one port. Or you hand them the files on a flash drive.
Its true, but also “please give the business more money” isn’t exactly the thing anyone but business owners and shareholders want to hear.
Only games I bought from these guys are the games I can’t get on Steam.
For me it’s the opposite.
My preference is itch.io, then GOG, then Steam.
The way I specialize is:
- JAST USA for the rare occasion they have a game I want, and I don’t want to bother with getting a patch.
- DLSite for the robust catalog of R18 games that are outside of my government’s snooping.
- DMM (with some special browser cookies to even get in) if I want to be sure my government isn’t snooping when I buy games.
- itch io for free games or games made by small time creators
- GOG for games released around 1995 - 2005
- Steam for general purpose
- Patreon if there’s a particular paid early access game I’m looking for.
all this stupid publicity makes me feel dirty for buying there
DRM-free games is the main reason why I buy on GOG. Preservation is nice to have and donate to round up the price of purchase but I don’t have money to become a patron. This feels important enough for me to care but not enough for me to put money every month in it. I’m glad people are doing it and that GOG exist.
