(Video not by me)
PC Gamer and GamingOnLinux recently covered a few things about GOG’s usage of genAI for promotional content, but this video goes into deeper coverage about their Head of Product being responsible for their direction. (Cue scam AI Instagram girls). It also covers how the company chose to respond to the backlash regarding their usage of genAI.
It’s sad to see them being brazen about their AI usage. I advocated for them several times, owning games (anything, really) is something that should be for granted. All of this makes their store look really cheap and turns off people from thinking about the idea.
You’ve got instances of DRM that you can count on your fingers that have all been reverted because what was easily identifiable DRM 20 years ago is a fairly blurry line these days. My own line has had to be redrawn several times, including for Hitman, because new games keep on coming up with new ways to screw with ownership.
I actually went to look into the examples mentioned above.
Hitman was apparently playable with “some targets” and other stuff locked behind online functionality but the base game was playable without. So this part definitely feeds into the “screwing people in new and exciting ways” that you mentioned.
For Deus Ex MD - apparently the binaries themselves were actually the DRM free ones, but the package that they gave GoG basically redirected all the DRM calls to Steam, which… resulted in a weird situation where it’s half stripped of some DRM measures while the other half required an actual crack to kill those calls that were redirected to a different platform entirely… so overall I wanna chuck it to a lazy “let’s get some brownie points and release it on GoG but let’s use this intern to package and ship it cuz we can’t be arsed to do a proper release” type of scenario.
Do I blame GoG for not checking it throughly? Yeah, a bit, but at the same time the onus should be on the providing party to deliver an adequate product that’s up to the requirements of the platform and if it’s not, maybe have a financial penalty clause for non-adherence in the distribution contract or something, I don’t know, I’m not a lawyer or anything.
Yeah, you nailed it. Hitman in particular is a weird one, because you can play through every level start to finish without the online checks, but the online unlocks allow you to keep replaying them with new loadouts, starting points, targets, etc. The extra content is a major part of the appeal. Fortunately for preserving those games, the community has reverse engineered the servers, but that doesn’t make me want to reward IO Interactive with my money for making it so that I need to rely on community fixes.
GOG doesn’t offer 20% of the features Steam does, but the trade off is a promise of no DRM headaches and full ownership values.
It simply took CDPR to wave some money their way to throw that away and have DRM on a major game. Removed after a literal outrage or not, this means the fundamental reason to use the platform is negotiable and relative. To me, that doesn’t make it different than Steam, and therefore, I’ll pick the store that actually works well.
GOG is hinting at Linux support after ages. Steam created Proton. This contrast tells me all I need to know.
As a GOG user, I don’t give a toss if they don’t offer even 1% of the features others may or may not offer. They promise I get a game, and I do get a game. It’s up to me to get those other features for my games provided they’re possible.
But I get it, there have been the cases like that Hitman game you mentioned, which shouldn’t have made it to the store at all. There’s a game where the news copy literally says that the DRM-free version is missing features. Ultimately though these instances are few and far, but they did have a lot of backlash to them before something happened. That’s something I agree with you on and they could do better. No signs of that getting better if their response to the LLM thing has been… Lackluster.
Also Valve did not create their fork of Wine. They just forked Wine, an already existing project. If Wine didn’t exist, Valve would have nothing. (Come to think about it, even their precious HL’s engine was IIRC a rewrite or fork of the one for Quake).
IIRC, even the HL2 engine was just an improvement on the HL1 engine with a commercial physics engine bolted on top.
Much like Google used to, Valve doesn’t really do anything new. They take existing ideas and remove the rough edges to provide a more polished experience than what is already available.
To their credit, that’s exactly why they succeeded with most of their ventures. Gabe Newell understands consumers well enough to know that most people don’t care about anything other than user experience. Or, as he put it, “piracy is a service problem”.
Naturally it is up to you. Not sure where in my comment did you get the impression that I get to demand which platform you use to get the games.
You do what you want. My headache right now is that I can’t tell if any multiplayer game I buy will be playable indefinitely into the future, and this is a headache I have with both of those stores. At least I know the single player stuff on GOG will be mine with far less effort than relying on a community maintained wiki somewhere for Steam. That you can name a select few examples that were immediately caught doesn’t shake my faith in what GOG promises on the tin. CDPR is just a matter of one hand not talking to the other, not trying to sneak a fast one by people.
Very much of a similar mindset - don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
While GoG is certainly not without its faults or shortcomings, at the end of the day they’re trying to stay true to their mission and delivering on it consistently.