You’re talking Windows?

Who exactly are their core costumers?

Gaming cosplayers, of course.

Costumer oriented

Opposite problem:

I lament it, but I understand it. Last year’s reports showed that GoG was barely staying afloat. Their rival shows Linux is only 3% of current market, so GoG probably doesn’t want to spread themselves any thinner until they get some surplus cash to test the waters with.

Thank goodness for Heroic launcher.

Strawman recipe

Step 1 - Put up the strawman by stating that the other person was trying to do something they explicitly said they were not trying to do when they actually explained exactly what they were trying to do:

your metaphor is based on the premise that copy and paste is difficult.

(No. My methaphor is based on how in multiple domains “selling things which can be altered to do something else by those who know how to do such alterations is not the same as selling things for that specific purpose”, as I already explained before and you pointedly ignored. PS: anybody in doubt can just read my other posts here as they’re all consistently about how things are sold, not how things are hacked)

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Step 2 - Totally trash the very strawman you put up:

You can compare it to something ridiculous, but it doesn’t change that copying and pasting something is something actual children master.

(Absolutely right! I was doing totally wrong that which you claimed I was trying to do. In fact, so totally and completely wrong was the way I was trying to do what you claimed I was trying to do, that intelligent individuals might even suspect I was not in fact trying to do that which you claim, but something else for which what I wrote wasn’t such a mismatched comparison).

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PS: Loved in this latest post the throwing of vague aspersions about my education level as a counter whilst not in fact addressing my argument. Really shows the strength of your argument and depth of reasoning.

Zoom is good about promoting Linux and has DRM free games. https://www.zoom-platform.com/

My own negative experiences with Steam vs GOG were:

• Moving homes and having no landline Internet for a while and not being able to most install most of my Steam games on my desktop gaming PC because mobile Internet is slow and expensive so installing a big game literally costs money. With GOG I just downloaded the offline installer at work into a USB Flash Disk and then installed it on my desktop at home.
• Not being able to install perfectly functional games from Steam into a machine with an old Windows version because the Steam client didn’t support it anymore (even though the games were compatible with that version). Mind you, you that machine shouldn’t even be connected to the Internet for safety reasons, which again would stop me from installing games from Steam even if the client worked.

Beyond that with Steam you have the risk that Steam takes away one or more of your game for some reason (say, licensing problems or just Payment Processors pressuring them to do it), you lose access to your account and can’t recover it (unusual, but possible), your account is forcibly closed for an arbitrary reason with no appeal (not happened yet with Steam but did happen with others such as Google), the store goes bankrupt and closes (not happened yet with steam but has happened with sellers of music with DRM if I remember it correctly), games without DRM or with Steam’s light DRM (the one simply using steam_api.dll, for which there are implementations which just emulate the API without phoning home) get forcibly updated to hard DRM so whilst before you could run it offline, now you can’t.

(Mind you, you get some of these problems - such as risking the loss of your entire game collection if the store goes belly up - with GOG if you just use GOG Galaxy and don’t download the offline installers for all your games, but at least there it’s entirely down to you as the store does nothing to make it harder for you to eliminate those risks)

Steam makes a lot of effort to keep itself inside the loop of gamers playing the games, not forcibly so (as somebody pointed out, they don’t force developers to use DRM) but more with a soft sales push (they offer it for free to developers and publishers and purposefully a bunch of “easy to implement” online features such as Achievements to using the “phone home” Steam DRM to induce developers to use it). They also do not at all indicate before a purchase on the Steam store if a game has Steam DRM or not, so that consumers have to go out of their way to make an informed buying decision, if at all possible. Even for the games on Steam without any DRM one has to actually use an unsupported process to keep a copy of that game after installed from Steam (a simple copy & paste which those who know what a filesystem is can do, though maybe not the less tech literate, though gamers tend to be more tech literate), so people tend not to do it. The result is that most Steam games have DRM and most game playing done on games from Steam involves the phone-home check of the Steam DRM.

Meanwhile in GOG it’s the exact opposite - people have to really go crazily out of their way to run a game from GOG with DRM (apparently there are one or two which slipped the net, and for others I guess you could implement your own DRM around it by encrypting the binary or something )

Ultimately it boils down to weather one is comfortable or not with having for their games collection the risks I listed above.

Personally, with my almost 4 decades experience as a gamer (and almost that much as a Techie), I’m not at all comfortable with that since over the years I’ve seen multiple instances of people getting fucked by their software or even hardware being unnecessarily tied to a vendor for their normal usage loop.

That said, people going into this aware of the risks and still cool with them, then, hey, , you’re an adult, making a well informed decision and will only affect yourself it the risks do materialized into a problem, so you’ll get no criticism from me.

Moving homes and having no landline Internet for a while and not being able to most install most of my Steam games on my desktop gaming PC because mobile Internet is slow and expensive so installing a big game literally costs money. With GOG I just downloaded the offline installer at work into a USB Flash Disk and then installed it on my desktop at home.

You can do that with steam. Just needs steam to check the files and done.

Call me when GOG Galaxy supports Gnu/Linux.

I’m not trying to defend anyone here, though it might seem like that, but I’m not sure why valve is lumped in with this, especially since that’s the steam logo.

Steam, as a platform, hasn’t released much of anything, ever. Valve has been sitting mostly on the sidelines since half-life 2 episode 2 and HL:Alyx.

Steam itself is just a marketplace.

I get that a lot of publishers on steam will fall into the categories of games that are the subject of the meme, but I have a hard time piling steam with the games that are published on it.

And yes, corporations are not our friends, and all billionaires are bad billionaires, eat the rich and all that… I’m just saying. There’s a lot of bigger, much worse, fish to fry than gaben, valve, and steam in this discussion. That could have been EA’s logo, or the Xbox logo (or ms game studios or whatever) or any number of massive publishers that are relevant here. Using the steam logo is lazy at best.

Weird place to mention that. But thanks?

8 GB of RAM was a basic minimum standard to do anything on a computer 10 years ago

That’s called “privilege”.

No, that’s called basic. We’re not talking about a batmobile shaped RGB “gamer” mouse. We’re talking about the default requirement for a functional system.

Unofficial:

Minigalaxy and Heroic are both clients which support GoG

Well, steam isn’t just a marketplace. A marketplace would be just a place to buy keys, or similar. Steam is an ecosystem, with a market, and a launcher, and a community hub, and a modding platform. The multiplayer integration that many games rely on for matchmaking/lobbies. And every game on steam uses at least steam’s DRM, where you are required to connect to the Internet every now and then to verify ownership of your library.

They have been the only platform to really try to support Linux though, and have made huge strides in the last few years. Steam is a big enough influence on the games economy that some of their choices become industry standards. And the 30% cut is the price devs pay to get into their system.

GOG just localize your prices PLEASE.

I use steam, but I moved the files out for games that will still work, as well as buy games on gog and download installers. I dont use gog galaxy cause? wont I have to be online to use my games?

All my backups are on a drive

i mean you dont really need the launcher

Like the previous poster, I’m not defending steam. No good billionaires, fight for the proletariat, down with the elite, etc

Not all steam games use steam DRM. It’s opt in by the developer. Lots of steam games you can literally just copy out of steam onto a USB key and run it. No DRM at all.

Don’t get me wrong they are skeezy in other ways (charging I indie deva 30% and big publishers less) but if you’re going to criticize them, then at least criticize them for something real.