I love GoG and I have worked closely with a lot of people there on projects they are great. This announcement seems like good news.
No one has to sell games on Steam. No one has to use a model where they "rent licenses". They could sell you everything DRM free. They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business.
This is an opinion, stated as if it’s fact.
There are many factors contributing to the ongoing success of steam. Ease of access, a strong network effect, word of mouth from satisfied customers, a strong ecosystem of tools and a modding platform, willingness to work across many platforms and a variety of vendors including competitors, and more.
Boiling this down to one factor of “too many people pirate” is dramatic oversimplification.
I also grew up pirating, but I haven't been pirating games for more than 10 years now.
A few bucks costs much less to me these days than a headache with finding a cracked version and installing potential malware on my computer. Not even talking about supporting the artists and developers.
Gabe is right that piracy is a service problem. If you have proper easy installers, easy buying, easy refunds and you are from a middle class and higher - it doesn't make sense to download random executables from the internet. And if you have low-income, you won't buy stuff regardless of DRM and just wait someone to crack it.
Malware is potentially very expensive if you have any capital (tradfi or defi) that is anywhere near your gaming rig. Even a brokerage of 5 figures isn't worth touching something that could have malware.
Most the games young players play are all service oriented games anyway
What the guy said I found very insightful: he said that you don’t really need to spend a bunch of time and effort creating sophisticated license checks, you just need perhaps a single phone call to a server or something else that can be trivially defeated for anyone with a reasonable amount of technical knowledge. Why? Because the people who would defeat it are the kind of people who make horrible enterprise customers anyway. So in a way it’s just like a cheap lock. Won’t defeat anyone determined, because it’s not designed to. It’s designed to keep already honest people honest
Every single customer we had wanted to be legal. Didn't want to exceed their seats or do anything which would violate their sales agreement. In the case of our government clients, such violations could lead them into legal penalties from their employer.
Despite having an unusually honest customer base, the company insisted on horridly strict and intrusive DRM. Even to the point of using dongles for a time. It frequently broke. Sometimes we had to send techs out to the schools to fix it.
I ended up just ripping all of that out and replacing it with a simple DLL on the Windows client. It talked to an tiny app server side. Used a barely encrypted tiny database which held the two numbers: seats in use & total seats available. If for some reason the DLL couldn't make contact with the server, it would just launch the software anyways. No one would be locked out due to the DRM failing or because the creaky school networks were on the blink again.
This system could have been cracked in five seconds by just about anyone. But it didn't matter since we knew everyone involved was trying to be honest.
Saved a massive amount of time and money. Support calls dropped enormously. Customers were much happier. It's probably my weakest technical accomplishment but it's still one of my proudest accomplishments.
And yeah.. it’s trivial to bypass, but I’d rather have a choice not to.
There's nothing stopping anyone from making a business selling DRM free games. I think you can get original DRM free games on itch.io. There are probably other places. GoG is great, but they don't typically sell new games.
If someone thinks they can make high production value games without DRM I hope they try and succeed. Anyone here who is certain it is possible is welcome to try.
CD Projekt RED did exactly that with both Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, which were available on GOG day #1 (and the Steam version did not have any DRM whatsoever) and while the latter had a rough start because of technical issues, they both sold very well and were positively received (after some patches for CP2077 anyway).
GOG also releases many new high production value games on day #1 too, e.g. Expedition 33 (which won a crapton of awards in recent times) was released on it the same day as on Steam. Baldur's Gate 3 was also on GOG on release date as is Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon right now, which also seems to be a high production value game with relatively well reception.
The only games missing are those by companies whose business models rely on sucking out gamers' wallets dry with microtransactions (so they need the "protection" from their own customers that DRM provides) or companies that have people making decisions based on assumptions stuck in past decades.
Many big studios/publishers avoid gog indeed, but others don't, and definitely a lot of new DRM-free games come out there all the time. Maybe it is because of the types of games I want to play, I usually I have no trouble finding them there, with some notable exceptions of course (souls games, outer wilds).
Both clair obscur and Baldur's Gate 3 (goty 2025 & 2023) were in gog since the beginning (bg3 already since its beta). They both definitely sold very well, despite(?) that. All Larian and Obsidian games get there as they come out, as are quite many CRPGs in general, not even counting CDPR's ones. A lot of great/popular indie titles appear in gog around the same time as they do on steam in the last years.
GOG is not just for old games.
Once I was more economically stable, I did not download pirated games anymore, and I even bought a bunch that I had played and really liked, even if I barely played them again.
I am not putting any moral stance on this, I was not entitled to play anything without money to pay, but my point is that for me a lack of option to pirate these games would not have implied me paying for them. Probably I would have done something else with my time.
Yes, that obviously only works for offline games, but yeah, cracking Steaam games is as easy as cracking any other game, maybe even easier
You want to avoid shady websites for the game download, and shady websites for the crack download. You can do both of this with Steam
But this doesn't make the statement true - because the assumption that each pirated copy would've been paid for had there been no piracy. This is the same incorrect logic that music/movie copyright holders use to count pirated works' financial "damages".
That's not the opinon part. That pirating is the reason a game business isn't viable is.
Would you have bought every game you pirated? How much money did you spend on gaming because you got hooked because you could play more games than you could afford otherwise?
That is also an opinion. Also-- as an aside-- I am curious what you think the "right" reason is for piracy. DRM free games is not a new idea. They have always existed and people have tried different models with them like including advertising. Do you remember the Ford driving simulator? The skittles game. there have been other models and there is a huge universe of DRM free games for decades.
If you don't gain much from restricting copies, please explain to me why it is so common in the best games?
Just because everybody does it is not really a convincing reason
Also many DRM games are cracked quite quickly after release. How does that help sell more copies?
> why it is so common in the best games?
What best games? It's common in design by commitee predatory crap like EA/Ubisoft titles.
Thing is, a pirated copy isn't a lost sale. It's more like free marketing. It's possible that the above assholes would make more profit if they stopped spending on copy protection and advertising and just made and sold games.
In a world where it would be impossible to pirate software, I bet they would have at best 25% more sales. No one can afford to pay for every game, especially at launch price, so they'll just make do with fewer of them.
Linky about marketing costs:
https://www.trueachievements.com/n53671/aaa-game-development...
Juicy quote:
the CMA says that "this publisher also submitted that for one of its major franchise’s development costs reached $660 million and marketing costs peaked at almost $550 million."
Oh, Darkened Skye? Funny how it's just a fairly bland fantasy 3rd-person action-adventure game and then you get to spellcasting and it's skittles. Also, when I think of video game advertising, I think Cool Spot.
A 'right' reason for illicitly obtaining a video game would be if the game is unobtainable because of licensing shenanigans. Project Cars 2 has the best single player career mode of any existing circuit racing game and it being unavailable because the licenses to the cars (and maybe also the tracks?) expired is a shame.
Don't be shy, share it.
And this being one of the panels mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPSAb1BDHgI
If you’re the kind of person who actually pays for games even when you could pirate them with a few minutes of searching, you probably don’t fully understand how widespread the problem is. Many people will simply not pay for something if there is an option to get it without paying by default.
The only developers who can afford to do DRM-free games are those with such a high volume of users that they’ve passed their target threshold for income and are okay with leaving money on the table. For every 1 person you see claiming they will only spend money on DRM-free games in comments on HN or Reddit, there are probably 100 to 1000 more who don’t care about the DRM status of the game, they just want to buy it and play for a while.
Moreover, for offline games, there have always been ways to crack DRMs. I do not have data on that, but I have seen pirated versions of all these DRMed games and I doubt that DRM on its own actually inhibits pirating. Let's not forget that DRM precedes steam, and before it was usually about having to put the cd in order to launch the game. I have used cracks for games I actually owned because I did not want to use the cd, and often a damaged cd could mean being unable to play the game otherwise, even if all assets and files were installed on the hard drive. When a new kind of DRM came out, the only question was how long it would take for it to get cracked.
Pirating software comes with its own price/risks. The people who have less to lose are probably the ones that do not have the money to spend on all these games in the first place. In general going from number of pirated downloads to sales lost is far from straightforward. There is a lot of misunderstanding here about who and why downloads pirated games.
I don’t think this is as much of a question outside of social media attempts to justify piracy. If only 10% of the pirates would buy the game, that’s still lost sales.
The social media justifications for piracy always assume that the only reason anyone pirates a game or video is because they either couldn’t afford it or wouldn’t buy it anyway. The same arguments were made when Netflix clamped down on account sharing: Everywhere you would find predictions that Netflix would suffer as a result, people would start cancelling their accounts, and they’d regret the decision. Yet the opposite happened and they had more users sign up.
> There is a lot of misunderstanding here about who and why downloads pirated games.
I agree with this statement, but in the opposite direction. The misunderstanding is the mental gymnastics that go into painting all pirates as all poor individuals who have no money and therefore no choice but to pirate games. The reality is that piracy is just a choice of convenience and taking something for free because they can. People from all tax brackets do it.
Pirating is far from a "choice of convenience" nowadays. Getting a pirated copy is much more complicated than getting it in gog, you do not get updates (I assume you have to search and install it again), and involves serious risk installing malware. Especially with how bug-ridden new games tend to be nowadays, I cannot imagine getting a newly released game without some form of auto-updater.
A lot of successful DRM-free games exist, and games that have DRM are still pirated just fine. Pirating existed in games since ever. It is not for the lack of DRM that a game may fail to sell.
10% was an example of a low-ball number. I estimate the number is much higher.
> I do not care about the moral judgements.
If you don’t care about moral judgments, why have this conversation at all? Nothing matters, do what you want, pirate everything you can get away with.
I don't care about the morals of pirating in the abstract, because I don't think such an abstract morality makes sense and hence I am not gonna lecture people what they should do (they can decide themselves based on their situation). The argument that without some sort of abstract moral code one will just pirate everything makes no sense. I buy now the games I play because I am fortunate that I have the money to buy them, and because I want to support studios that I consider decent (so that they keep making decent games). Same with any other kind of art.
So what should they do? Go back and change where they were born? Abstain from participating in modern culture? Or reach out and take the thing which is free?
And they can’t even wait for them to go on sale? They need to buy them right at launch, at their full $60 price?
> Or reach out and take the thing which is free?
It’s not free. It has a price.
And do tell, what is the practical price of pirating a game you couldn't afford anyway? Risk of a virus? Some abstract cost to society itself? Nobody cares.
And those indies shouldn't equate a non-customer player with a lost sale either.
Given how many games on Steam are sold either DRM free (you can just transfer the files over to another PC and they just work) or functionally DRM free (Steam's DRM is trivially bypassed, so one step removed from DRM free), this doesn't really scan. Other than games with Denuvo and multiplayer games, DRM is a non-issue for actual pirates.
It seems a lot more likely to me that the people in charge will have a fit at the idea of releasing the games DRM free, but don't actually care to know anything about the details. So long as the DRM checkbox is ticked, and they don't know about the fact that Steam's DRM is trivially bypassed, everybody mostly gets what they want.
The scene exists for a reason, it is a very trust based ecosystem.
Now a days a lot of people are pirating games because the quality of games has gone down the drain. Publishers are releasing unfinished games and pricing them at record high. Consumers are pissed at the lack of value.
For people who have money for games but don't want to pay, the presence of DRM matters very little. 99% of games are usually trivially cracked, especially if you are willing to wait for some days or weeks after launch (an important sales window for the publishers).
For people who have money for games and are willing to pay, DRM turns out to be maybe an inconvenience, but definitely a guarantee that they don't actually own the game. The game can be taken away or even just modified in a way that invalidates the reason people paid in the first place.
“Important” is an understatement. Even for long-term success stories, the first three or four months often accounts for half of a game’s revenue.
And, despite so many people theorizing that “pirates don’t have money and wouldn’t pay anyway”, in practice big publishers wait in dread of “Crack Day” because the moment the crackers release the DRMless version, the drop in sales is instant and dramatic.
We've been exposed to what seems like FUD about piracy killing sales since approximately forever - you wouldn't dOwnLoAd a cAR - but seemingly zero actual evidence to date.
The best public report I can find is https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S18759... which shows a median difference 20% of revenue for games where Denuvo is cracked “quickly” but also no significant difference if Denuvo survives for at least 3 months.
What I’ve observed from internal reports from multiple companies is that, if you don’t assume an outlier blockbuster game, major game studios’ normal plan is to target a 10% annual profit margin with an expected variance of +/-20% each year.
So, assuming you have a solidly on-target game, DRM not just being there, but surviving at least a couple months is the difference between “10% profit moving the whole company forward on schedule” vs “10% loss dragging the whole company down” or “30% profit, great success, bonuses and hiring increases” depending on the situation.
Outside of games, I have seen many personnel reports on Hacker News over the years from small-time ISVs that they find it exhausting they need to regularly ship BS “My Software version N+1” just as an excuse to update their DRM. But, every time they do, sales go back up. And, the day the new crack appears on Pirate Bay, sales drop back down. Over and over forever. Thus why we can’t just buy desktop software anymore. Web apps are primarily DRM and incidentally convenient in other ways.
As an aside, I find this kind of behavior on the part of companies rather irritating. It's like, if you want people to believe that something affects your sales, you need to publicly release the sales data (and do so in a way that people will trust). Otherwise there's no reason for anyone to believe you're not just making stuff up.
They just need law makers to support IP/DRM laws that allow them to continue to operate. (I made games for a while at a small studio; I understand some of the pressures that studios are under and don’t support piracy of games.)
And they can get that support without publicly releasing detailed time-series sales data.
What change would their CFO see on their spreadsheets from this massive benefit?
I've been saying that for decades at this point. Web apps trade post-release support issues with slightly higher development costs upfront (dealing with browser compatibility), but the real kicker is that the company is now in complete control of who gets to use what and when.
MMOs show the same thing. There are plenty of multiplayer games with centralized servers that are effectively impossible to pirate. But subscription based MMOs score a clear win in terms of revenue.
(It turns out free to play gacha is even more lucrative than subscription, but I digress.)
So how did they measure the difference? They released one title with Denuvo then erased everyone's memories about it and released it again without?
Because if you compare different titles I don't know what you base that percentage on.
Notice that GP amounts to "well I can't actually provide any evidence, but if I could then here's what it would look like".
They have very high unemployment among young people, might be related.
then i had some money and i bought more games than i had time to play.*
now i neither buy or play games.
*the point is that at this point, there is no point wasting time trying to pirate games. every humble bundle. every steam sale. u just click and its yours. you dont even have time to play. why waste time pirating?
Yes, but if it was impossible to pirate, you'd still have no money to buy the games, so in the grand scheme of things nothing would change.
I’m a Diablo and StarCraft fan because of pirated games played during my childhood when I couldn’t convince my parents to let me buy them.
Not making that mistake twice. I imagine this is one of the reasons that Steam is so successful. No surprises and near zero friction. Why risk going elsewhere as a consumer?
Later I chose to provide my credit card for convenience. As far as I know I could have instead used gift cards or prepaid cards.
Regardless, there's also an issue of trust. I might choose to provide PII to a large central marketplace that has a good reputation but providing it to each individual producer seems highly questionable.
Really? When we were pirating games off each other as teenagers in the early 80s, we absolutely knew we were getting games for free that the publishers wanted us to pay for.
Can you share some examples of instances where the legal route is too difficult? I haven't felt this way in a long time. What are the changes necessary for you to purchase?
Not having to deal with Ubisoft/similar game launchers frequently forgetting my login, nagging to update itself, etc. is one reason I might choose to run a cracked copy.
I'm totally in the same boat; I've not bought several Ubisoft-games I was interested in playing because their launcher is such a cancer (if anyone from Ubisoft is on HN: What on earth are you guys smoking?).
I'm too lazy to bother with pirating games these days (I have more games than time to play them anyway), but younger me would've certainly went to the high seas to circumvent their ridiculous insult of a game launcher.
Alternatively, the card is rejected because "fraud prevention", see e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46424584
Or the game is not available in my "account's region", which is chosen arbitrarily based on God knows what.
In 2017/2018, they were in the position where MPAA and RIAA were saying: "Piracy costs us billions; Google must pay" + they had European Parliament on their ass.
Google financed that 'independent' study to support the view "Piracy is not harmful and encourages legal spend".
So the credibility of "independent" studies, is something to consider very carefully.
I am cautious about the conclusion, though. It seems clear there is a spectrum from “unscrupulously pirate everything” to “consume legitimately after pirated discovery”, and quantification is necessary.
You really need something way better than some shoddy survey to counter the obvious fact that price matters
And then much later being a university student, I had money of my own and have bought games I liked. Never pirated to save money. And you know, GOG came along, and I was thrilled having the old games from my childhood again as digital legal copy. With manuals and addons. I bought 20+ old DOS games I already knew. Better late than never.
A: I pirated a game 25 years ago and played it after school
B: I didn't
which cases do you think will make me more likely to buy more versions of that game later?
C. You didn't pirate, but played because your friends were deeply into it, so you skipped buying lunch to save money and pay for the game (pirating was hard for this specific DRM). You bought it at a discount on sale (remember, the price isn't fixed?). That feeling of overcoming hardship and friendship fused into a very positive experience, making it 10 times more likely for you to buy the next version than in A. or B. The overall likelihood still was tiny because now you have a family and don't have time to play, so that and
D. Considering the amount of uncertainty (your game company will go out of business in 25 years) the value of your "more likely" is $0
Edit: missed a word
I don't think it's required to be making some universal point when you clearly respond to the argument put forward in the post you reply to, do you?
When a product is providing value, and it's easier and more convenient to buy than pirating it, then people will buy it.
Netflix killed piracy until the platform fragmented and now you need half a dozen subs to watch everything. Expectedly, free streaming sites are now better than ever.
There used to be (maybe still is?) a period where a small number of publishers had DRM for the first few weeks, and removed it once it was cracked.
Just make your games a donation model if you really believe this. Or lets put up a version of Steam where all the games are free cracked copies of the game and see how it affects sales.
People pay precisely because they dont want to deal with the hassle pf pirating
Half the time I try to sign up for any of these services I get blocked for fraud because I’m in one country, my billing address in another and my bank in a third. Oh, and when something does work, it only works for a while until they lock the whole account with a bunch of paid content on it.
I've not had issues with Steam, though my Steam journey was early into online purchasing adventures
Yes, now imagine if we just removed the barrier to piracy completely. An easy to use client just like Steam, except all the games are free cracked copies.
There is no way thats not going to drop sales.
A free Steam full of certified pirates games with official games updates would obviously drop sales but this is moot as it will never exist.
Without those, you'd have sites full of pirated game downloads easily found through search engines. DMCA takedowns force those sites into shady corners of the internet, making them harder to find and riskier for the average user. And (effective) DRM makes users have to wait for a crack which may take weeks or months.
The result is that it's easier for the average person to just log into Steam/Epic/PSN/eShop and spend $60 to play immediately.
I'm sure there are exceptions but the usual claims take the observation about a minor speed bump and add a bunch of made up BS to justify consumer hostile practices.
Notice that there's nothing stopping a centralized darknet platform that vettes torrents from popping up. But as far as I know no one feels like bothering. That should give you some idea just how low the bar is here.
That's literally the situation today. It is that easy. People still mostly don't pirate games though.
You spend $60 on games? I just add them to my wish list at launch and buy them when they're 30, 20...
I have more unplayed games than time anyway.
Almost all games these days are basically like a work in progress, so if you pirate them then the game doesn't stay up to date.
Pirating games is just really inconvenient compared to tv/movies/music.
Which, as a mod author and consumer, isn't always a bad thing. More than once, I had to drop just enjoying a game, to patch my published mods because some update that is automatically pushed out, and people have to accept in order to even boot a single-player game. Why? I don't know, but it's really annoying sometimes.
Besides, nowadays cracking groups release smaller patches too, so while you might not get the update the same hour it was published on Steam, usually within a week or two the same group that uploaded the original release, has released another patch.
If the deal is providing entertainment for a price then why the publisher feels entitled to keeping the money if the entertainment didn't happen?
That's the basis of most of the Steam's business.
i don't pirate anymore because i have a job now.
Now I'll pirate if providers make it hard to do things right. I know I never "have" to pirate, but my wife once "bought" a movie on Amazon. A few years later, she was no longer able to access it. And she didn't get refunded for her purchase. So guess what? Screw you Amazon, I downloaded that movie and saved it on my home media server.
Another example, I was playing a mobile game that allowed me to watch ads to get a bonus. I'd always say no because they use one of the shittiest ad provider in existence. Then they started showing me ads even if I elected not to get the bonus, with a fun "pay $20 for ad free forever!"
Well screw you game dev, I'm pirating the ad-free version of your game.
> Consumers are pissed at the lack of value.
I think this is true, but I don't think this is necessarily causing piracy. Why would people want to pirate a shitty game?
My tolerance for software like that is very limited. It’s almost an immediate long-press and uninstall.
They're all free to play and their design is fundamentally affected by this. You end up either paying with time or with money.
This is what we've been told since time eternal but it seems more likely that those pirating are those that wouldn't be inclined to pay at all.
If it's EA or Ubisoft, they make boring design-by-commitee "AAA"s - lately with IAPs thrown in - and I don't even look at what they release.
There are a lot of different reasons people pirate games, and other stuff, not all reasons apply to everyone, and some reasons on apply to a few.
I used to pirate 99% of the games I played when I was young, because my family simply didn't have money to buy me video games. Once I grew older and had more disposable income, I started buying more games on Steam. Now I have more disposable income than I know what to do with, and I'm back to pirating games, but only for the ones that don't have proper demos available. I probably spent $1000 on games I no longer play and cannot refund, because I'm over the 2 hour limit, and nowadays I pirate the game, and if I enjoy it, I buy it as a way of supporting the developer.
I'm probably not alone with this sort of process, but it's probably also not the only reason other's pirate.
I bought Factorio early access on Gog, and Timberborn, and Loop-Hero.
It turns out that piracy is actually a service problem. Services like Steam and GOG provide a decent enough service that piracy becomes less common.
2) I don’t want viruses. I don’t want viruses more than I want to avoid paying $1-$20 for a game (as if I’m anywhere near caught up enough on my backlog of games from the last 40ish years for buying games at full launch-week price to ever make sense, lol, I do that like… once every several years, all the rest are very cheap)
Depends on the game and DRM. Nowadays I buy all of my games (a little bit safer than running who knows what on my PC), but when I didn't have a job or money I used to pirate a lot - most DRM protected games would eventually be cracked and made available regardless. If an uncrackable DRM was in place, I wouldn't buy the game - I just wouldn't play it. Depending on the mindset, the same logic applies to someone with money, they might never be a customer regardless of whether it can or cannot be pirated, especially for games that never go on big discounts and sales. I say that as someone who by now owns about ~1000 games in total legally (though mostly smaller indie titles acquired over a lot of years and sales).
The good online stores at least make the act of purchasing and installing games equally if not more convenient than pirating them - something all of those streaming companies that crank up their subscription prices and want to introduce ads would also do well to remember. I like Steam the best because it's a convenient experience, the Workshop mod support is nice, as well as Proton on Linux and even being able to run some games on my Mac, just download and run. I think the last games I pirated were to check if they'd run well on my VR headset, because I didn't want to spend a few hours tweaking graphics settings and messing around just to be denied a refund - in the end they didn't run well, so I didn't play or buy them, oh well.
Also, despite me somewhat doubting the efficacy of DRM (maybe it's good to have around the release time to motivate legit sales, but it's not like it's gonna solve piracy), it better at least be implemented well - otherwise you either get performance issues, or crap that also happens with gaming on Linux with anti-cheat, where you cannot even give the companies money because they can't be bothered to support your platform. Even worse when games depend on a server component for something that you don't actually need for playing the game on your own, fuck that. It's like the big corpos sometimes add Denuvo to their games and then are surprised why people are review bombing them.
Unfortunely needs of game developers and customers are not exactly align. Valve is good steward of their outsized market share when it's comes to gamers interests.
Epic Games tried to shake market with "gamers dont matter" policy (no reviews, no community, worse services) and low fees and failed miserably.
As game developer I'd love to see platform fee of 10%, but as gamer I dont want to buy my games and give power to Tencent, Microsoft or Google.
I could only dream that customer-first platform not owned by VC / PE money like GOG could compete with Steam. Unfortunately unlikely to happen.
The rush to defend Valve's monopoly is so weird since HN usually hates fat cat billionaires. Valve is raking in so much money as a middleman that Gabe Newell has ~$1 billion worth of yachts alone, in addition to the rest of his wealth, yet gamers want Valve to keep on bleeding them and game studios?
why should it be lower (or higher)?
steam's cut should be whatever they set, and the market responds. The natural equilibrium would get reached. The value steam provides, imho, certainly justifies their cut imho. There's plenty of other platforms to release games on - including free ones (such as itch.io, or your own website).
Any time you have no choice it at least makes for a very warped market.
so really, this is about getting reach, and that a 30% cut for said reach is too high. I am arguing that this price is a market price, for which it is justified by mere existence. If this price was too high, then these other platforms that you claim have no reach will get some reach, since the PC platform is not locked down (yet).
Unlike in the model of apple's app store (until recently at least?), which has no alternative possible. Even android's supposed alternative is somewhat going to get locked down by google looking at the trend. Then the claim would be that those platforms hold not only a defacto monopoly, but an actual one, and their cut is therefore not a real market price. That makes it possible to claim that they're unfairly pricing their platform. Steam doesn't have this issue at all.
In a way it can be justified in the sense that developers would rather get 70% than not make a sale at all if their games were only available on less popular platforms. But effectively that's what allows Steam to charge charge as much. They certainly have a dominant position in the market due to very little competition.
It's like retail/supermarket chains in certain countries being able to extort better conditions from their suppliers because they have very little choice. Or e.g. real estate agents being able to charge disproportionally high fees due to how the market is structured.
Whether someone considers that fair or not is of course rather subjective...
> Steam doesn't have this issue at all.
IMHO it's a matter of degree but fundamentally the same thing. The barriers to switching to a different store are just much lower than not having an Apple/Google phone but they still exist.
Steam has a "most favored nation" clause which means people can't charge less on Steam than they do on Epic Store. And Epic Game Store cut is 0% on the first million and only 12% after that, but it can't actually end up charging less to customers if Steam maintains the most favored nation clause.
studios that don't make good games correctly should bankrupt - ala, those so called AAA studios.
> gamers spending more for less
gamers buying overpriced games from bad publishers/studios that overspend and under-deliver are learning finally.
There has never been more indie games, and the selection has never been more diverse, and those available games has also been cheaper.
If you got time, this video outlines the evidence and the coming trends: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XigPD8BCkho
Except somehow they managed to get it right from the beginning and there was never any real market pressure to change it. Had Valve (or Apple of that matter) decided to charge e.g. 20% due to whatever reasons or conditions that existed in 2007 (but might not anymore) that would still somehow be the "natural equilibrium" even today in the exactly the same way.
The fee is also very sticky, platforms can't really increase without a massive amount if backlash, therefore reducing it becomes much riskier since they can never go back. Given a competitive market doesn't really exist a variable fee based on "market conditions" can't really be a thing either.
It's very hard for someone to undercut Valve just because of the scale. They might sill be very profitable if they charged 15-20% while other smaller stores might not be able to afford that. Same mechanics have always applied to most other monopolies or oligopolies in other industries.
Imo 30% is disgusting and needs regulation.
Edit: see also, credit cards
I can defend steam and its (key) features I need/use (Controllers, Linux gaming, Linux improvements)
I cannot defend valves gambling casino. I also cannot say it's a monopoly.
Yes, almost like there's an actual difference between Valve and typical other corporations? Ha ha just kidding, it must be random internet nonsense, definitely not worth applying any brain cells to!
The simple reality is that Valve is just a lot nicer to their customers in terms of behavior and utility than the overwhelming majority of companies, and that means many people cut them more slack for other things. People are willing to forgive a large cut if it feels like you're actually trying to provide an ever-more-useful service, rather than coasting on the bare minimum.
Steam isn't just a little bit better than competing stores/platforms, it's MONUMENTALLY better, and the gap is probably increasing rather than shrinking over time, because other stores don't look like they're even trying in comparison.
The 30% is mostly arbitrary though, IMHO had apple decided to charge 20% or 25% when the appstore came out that would have become the industry standard.
You're saying this about Steam, the 'Piracy is a service problem' company.
So I'm perfectly prepared to believe that Steam is a good option (I personally love it), and frankly if the worst happens and the games I pay for go away on Steam... there are options. Once I pay for something I no longer feel any guilt about seeking a backup for example, and neither should you, even if the industry groups count that as a full-sale price theft.
The fact that DRM negatively affects honest customers more than pirates still holds true.
Game piracy is fundamentally un-safe for players, since games are fundamentally executable code, where setup usually requires admin permissions, and pirate distributors are financially incentivized to add malware to turn the game system into part of someone's botnet. The only "safe" way to pirate is to do it on a dedicated machine, on a separate VLAN, network controls, etc., which most people will not set up. This is not like TV/movie piracy, which would depend on zero-day exploits in the video player.
Buying a DRM-free game legally is much safer.
We saw the exact same cycle with mobile distribution of audio and video - Amazon even had to fork Android to add kernel-level DRM before any of the video rights holders would allow Amazon Video on tablets (this is before Google added DRM to android in general).
And now? That DRM was circumvented, and you can torrent pretty much any Amazon video the day after it goes live. But it's inconvenient enough that most people don't, the rights holders still feel all warm and cozy, and nobody really cares.
So, how does it work for Valve to sell games which are also available at GOG without DRM? If too many people are pirating, why would anyone buy the Steam version?
I can't think of a game available on GoG that sells on Steam for > $20. I am sure one exists, but in general these are older, cheaper games.
You could also point to games that the Epic store gives away that are sold on Steam. That's an even better example. You are right that people don't just pay for games because they can't get them for free, they are also willing to pay to get them in a convenient format even when another format is free.
My question is, does that really support the model for most premium games? Nobody likes DRM, the game industry didn't used to have it.
Fair point but I think there are quite a few of those: Baldur's Gate 3 comes to mind. Expedition 33, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II even Cyberpunk, but it's true that nowadays Cyberpunk is a ~20$ title.
But not sure these were on GoG day 1. Or they added them after ~1 year after they got most of their sales on Steam and already the piracy of the games started.
Newsflash: Witcher and Cyberpunk are CD Projekt Red titles. CD Projekt Red was the initiator of GoG and owned it 100% until 2 days ago.
Every CD Projekt game was available on GoG from day zero.
It is easy to check such claims. This shows what kind of games are in gog since 2024 at >$20 (it may change the currency depending on your country though).
https://www.gog.com/en/games?priceRange=20%2C152.99&hideDLCs...
Far from complete but also a few big titles are there. Granted this is the price in gog but most of the times ime it is the same price as in steam, or around the same.
> Nobody likes DRM, the game industry didn't used to have it.
Aren't DRMs a pretty old thing at this time? I remember the days when DRM was basically about having to use the cd to launch the game as the game would check for that, even if everything needed to run the game was in the hard drive. People would use cracks or virtual drives even if they actually bought the game to avoid doing that. At least now DRMs are far less obstructive to someone who owns the game.
OK, but this model deployed in other parts of essentially any industry is equally scummy and abusive, no matter how much <$company> is liked, no matter how well they deployed it, no matter how many buckeroos it made someone.
in fact it's scummy any time the concept of sales and ownership gets warped aggressively, and even more so when it's done so in such a way that the leasee doesn't realize what they are until they get screwed somehow.
also, REMINDER: steam doesn't solve piracy, it helped to solve distribution. anti-piracy was sold (and lobbied to devs by Valve) far after the fact when it became clear that Valve had to have enough benefits to shove devs and customers into this style of non-ownership. Same reason why Steam also tries to be a half-assed discord/social media outlet.
Yes it's wildly successful. A lot of scummy shit is.
Steering the world that way (by example of business success) is sure to end well. Isn't that what FernGully was about?
Piracy is what makes games a viable business. Even now marketing budget for a game can exceed development costs. Each pirated copy is not a lost sale. It's marketing brain worm implanted in a person that you didn't have to pay for.
The fact that most pirated games become bestsellers is not an accident. And it's not the other way around.
It's the same thing as with Windows. It wouldn't be most used and best selling operating system if it wasn't amply pirated.
Apple, to have anyone use a copy of their OS, has to bundle a device with it. And Linux has to give it all for free to buy its mindshare. Piracy makes Windows business model viable.
It is about publishers putting an expiry date to a digital product, in order to not having to compete with their own products in the future.
It is about making sure that by the time your hypothetical FIFA 2026 release comes out, all the available existing copies of FIFA 2019-2023, which mostly differ for the squad roster, are unusable.
This is exactly the same reason for single player games requiring constant online support nowadays. The authorization servers for "The Crew", a mainly single player game by Ubisoft, went offline coinciding with the close release of "The Crew Motorfest". This didn't go unnoticed, and nearly ended up with the EU passing some specific legislation on the matter[1].
[1]https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/20...
I think mostly they don't because people already have steam installed, and creating a new account on some other website to buy 1 game is too much hassle.
See dwarf fortress that was free for decades, and got much more popular when it was released on steam (paid version).
Or see Vintage Story which is great, and should be much more popular, but it's only available on its own website.
I remember when Steam launched, it was rightfully met with hostility. Somehow Valve managed to completely win over gamers, and they do good work, but lets not forget that they are quickly approaching monopoly status. Just because someone could sell on some other store doesn't mean it would be profitable to do so because of Steam's userbase.
At this point the games I “own” on physical media like CDs have theoretically started to degrade before the threat of Valve revoking my ability to install or play has come to pass.
My GOG installers will never degrade though.
I’d put a controlling interest in a trust with ironclad instructions to have Valve do the opposite of Ubisoft/EA. That would buy it another half-century at least.
This is why I still keep a copy of the software I bought, and religiously backup that trove. Because someday that S3 bucket or SendOwl link or company server will go down.
Sometimes, a company will raise prices, so the publisher will have to kill the old links. C64Audio had to switch to BandCamp and invalidate SendOwl links because of that price hike.
I'm still bitter about not being able to reset my Test Drive Unlimited install count online just because I have updated my computer and transferred the whole Windows installation to the new system back in the day.
There are not many ways to battle the entropy of the universe.
Does it really matter if it's developer/publisher removing the game from Steam, not Valve? The end result is the same: one can't play.
E.g. I have Lord of the Rings: War in the North that is no longer available anywhere, yet I can still download install and play it on my devices through Steam (even on Linux, which it was not intended for)
That of course doesn't help if the game does not have an offline component, e.g. I also still have League of Legends in my Steam account, but that is unusable because the Riot servers don't allow updating/connecting from it.
The reason they also do this is because of copyright, the license allows games to forbid you from redistribution more copies
If Im wrong about this please let me know, I read some articles claiming this is the case but I am not sure if they truly were correct.
GOG giving you a standalone installer saves you some effort compared to that, but in neither case do you really "own" the game.
Well it makes it hard or impossible to sell your copy of the game to someone else after you are done with it like we used to be able to do with console game discs and cartridges?
Seems like a pretty big and practical difference to me.
If legislators want to do something good, they could force platforms to allow transfer of games between accounts.
I don't think people are so against DRM, because a disc like that was essentially a form of DRM. They are against an online DRM scheme which could change in the future. I know there were sone disc DRM that could like revoke the disc license, but let's go back before that was a thing to like the Xbox/360 and PS1/2/3 era style.
Just about every commercial software license says the software is licensed, not sold.
Of course the practical difference is in whether you can trust you'll be able to keep using the product indefinitely or have to rely on the publisher's goodwill.
(Also, whether the idea that a software product is only licensed and not sold is legally valid of course depends on the jurisdiction and legal interpretation. IIRC back in the day some people tried to argue that you couldn't resell a game or other piece of software you bought on physical media because the software was only licensed to you, not sold. That argument didn't necessarily fly.)
How do we re-sell our GOG games to someone else?
If I own it I should be able to sell it again, right? Like I used to sell old console game disks after I was done with them.
this buyer would rather buy off GOG than you, unless you give a significant discount (and even then, the trust is hard to establish).
Therefore, even if you might have a legal right to re-sell (which you really don't unfortunately), the actual sale won't happen.
For example, if you're on page X of a search, click on a game, and go back, guess where that takes you? Yup, page 0 baby, going to have to click next X times again (there is also only previous and next; you can't fast-jump.) There are many more examples like that, I have filed survey responses several times on issues like this.
The real goat would be if GOG Galaxy were available for Linux and integrated with Lutris/Proton so that you didn't have to worry about setup. Currently that relationship flows in the other direction, which I always found odd: Lutris integrates GOG (and Steam) games in its UI.
Heroic Launcher can download the game files for you and any dependencies, including Wine/Proton/etc. You basically install the launcher (can be available from your distro's repository), use your GOG login in the app and it shows your library. Then click install and it'll download the files locally and after that you play the game. The experience is more or less the same like in Steam, at least as far as downloading and playing games is concerned.
I normally download the offline installers and use them with UMU Launcher (which is Proton without Steam, mainly meant to be used as a backend for projects like Lutris, Heroic, etc but you can use it directly from the command-line) but i just tried Heroic Launcher and all i had to do was run it, enter my GOG login and after it downloaded my library info, i was able to download and play a game the same way as in Steam.
I'm not sure what official GOG Galaxy for Linux would add here TBH.
Two major things:
* Backend Galaxy support for Linux builds
* Multiplayer, achievements, cloud saves, etc. i.e. proper integration with optional GOG services for Linux versions.
You would need to install 12 front-ends like Steam that would be hot trash and have a handful of games and be the most miserable shit ever. You wouldn't have sales, reasonable game prices, or family library sharing (this would be absurd to any other company).
Steam is a prime example of when a monopoly ends up to be the best for the consumer.
My problem with Steam are the casino tactics Valve inject into their own games and the platform. That is an entire gaming industry problem however. At least Valve do some good things with the dirty money.
Of course I vastly prefer GOG and try to get all games there, but GOG still only has a tiny fraction of the games I want to play.
As an actual gamer... why? I mean of course I agree that if I buy a game I should play however I want (assuming it doesn't degrade the game for others, i.e. no online cheating in competitive settings but modding is fine, including online if other players agree to it) for whatever long the agreement priced was (e.g. I don't think it's OK to get a lower price for a 1-day trial then keep it forever but if I do pay full price, then I get to keep it)... and yet, when I play a game, I play it. I don't store it. Sure I might want to maybe play it again in 10 years but the actual likelihood of that is very VERY low. I say this owning few dedicated arcade hardware running MAME and similar emulators.
TL;DR : I go get the point, my behavior though is not that, namely I play, complete (or not) then move on.
As a matter of fact, in case the nostalgia itch really does hit, Steam actually enables a relatively easy 're-release' of old games that many publishers started doing - often with no further addition except the promise that it'll run on modern hardware/OS hassle-free.
I've re-bought games I've played in the 90s/2000s on Steam even though I already owned them and probably still have the CD lying around somewhere, but I just can't be arsed to go through the troubles of installing from them. Pay a few bucks, click a button and I'm up and running.
Supporting developers is a weak argument considering that GOG's claim to fame is that they're selling old games where the development studio no longer exists or has been bought out by a corporate entity like EA.
Revoking my license isn't a big deal? I paid real money for the game.
The offline installer is about as much of a guarantee of anything as a pirated ISO is.
Also Steam doesn't apply any DRM unless developers add it, so backing up your Steam library folder to an external drive should be fine for your personal preservation at a platform level.
Transferable licenses create a second hand market which keeps prices in check, which of course publishers don't like at all.
Again, don't let influencers give you the idea that just because they happen to know topic X well, they suddenly know all the areas and subjects that are slightly related to those areas well too.
Your money does not matter.
Vertigo...
This is the only line I was looking for. I stopped buying on Steam sometime ago because I realized I was just renting licenses. GOG is the only major storefront where I feel like I actually own the product. As long as offline installers remain a core tenet, I don't care who owns the company. That said, it helps that it's someone returning to their roots rather than a private equity firm looking to strip-mine the assets.