(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.
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.