GOG has reportedly cut dozens of jobs recently. Here are new details about the situation at CD Projekt’s subsidiary and the shortcomings of its business strategy.
I’m really happy with my experience with GOG, but they put a lot of effort into their Windows app and i ws pretty blunt with my feedback, it is pretty useless to me and I find it unhelpful.
Heroic game launcher on Linux great and cost GOG $0.00. My thought is that they have been focusing on the wrong things, fundamentally I love their strong DRM stance and when I am travelling internationally,the games I bought off GOG work, unlike Steam😡😡😡😡. So if they have come to this realization, then nothing about these changes are disturbing as a customer, but sad to hear their employees taking the hit. 😢
They have allowed content protected by DRM into their store four times already, which is not surprising, given GOG is owned by CD Projekt Red who included DRM into their own DLC for Cyberpunk, including on GOG. That’s not “strong” in any sense of the word.
So in other words, they sell you the “feel good” anti-DRM narrative but quickly look the other way when it’s good for business. At that point, might as well purchase on Steam, where DRM is common but optional and Valve actually cares about making the games platform-agnostic, easy to backup, easy to share, etc.
EDIT: cool downvotes, doesn’t change the fact that GOG provides software protected by DRM on their “strongly anti-DRM platform”. There is no amount of downvotes in this world that can change this reality.
I don’t follow the logic here. You said it yourself – GoG has only allowed DRM onto their platform four times. This is a violation of their anti-DRM policy but it still means like 99% of games on GoG have no DRM. It’s good to be principled about these things but I don’t see how this merits a knee-jerk response to run to Steam (a platform where 99% of games do have DRM and no guarantee other than an informal promise that they’ll do “something” to make their games available if Steam were to shut down).
Not the person you’re replying to but there’s a big difference between: “We allow DRM, but don’t force it” to “We strongly oppose DRM, but allow it and even put it into our own games”. One is just business, the other makes you a hypocrite. And the issue with GOG is that they’re the latter.
See my other reply, they have allowed this much more than 4 times, and their own games have some form of DRM. Plus the amount of games with DRM on steam is much less than 99%, as a general rule if the game is on both platforms it has the same or equivalent DRM. So it’s essentially up to the publisher whether a game will have DRM or not, and because the vast majority of games have the same stance on DRM regardless of platform of purchase citing GOG stance against DRM becomes a moot point.
In short, games on GOG can have DRM and games on Steam can be DRM free. And as a general rule a game’s DRM stance will be the same regardless of store. So if you want to play game X and it’s available on both GOG and Steam, chances are pretty high that it is DRM-free on both, and if it has DRM on steam chances are pretty high it also has DRM on GOG.
What anti-DRM policy? They included DRM into their own game, what kind of policy is that?
“I have a strict, non negotiable anti-beer policy! Except every weekend when I drink a 12 pack! And sometimes in social events! And at night to take the edge off! Sometimes on Wednesdays too!”
If I understand this correctly, you value Steam’s honesty over a few instances in which GOG hypocritically violated their own DRM policy. That sucks, for sure, and GOG should be called out for it – but at the end of the day, the vast majority of games in my GOG library can be downloaded as offline installers that don’t need to contact a server, while the vast majority of the games I own on Steam can’t (barring, of course, circumventing Steam’s fairly weak DRM scheme, which is illegal).
the vast majority of the games I own on Steam can’t
People keep making this claim, but I don’t think this is true, I’ve made backups of lots of games, even played some in lan with some friends from just a single copy to convince them to buy the game. DRM has to be enabled by the developer, so the majority of games don’t do it, but also lots of games are badly coded and assume steam will be present so they fail to start without the steam library, but any game that’s released somewhere else besides steam probably will just work (and any game that’s only released on steam can’t be found anywhere else so they’re irrelevant).
Both are multi-millionaire if not billionaire companies. There’s no way to attribute virtues like “honesty” to corporate entities.
But GOG is a much worse store than Steam, lacking features Steam had a decade ago and, most importantly, being loudly indifferent to how the games work on platforms other than Windows. Any gaming thread gets flooded by GOG fans talking about how we should support them anyway, because they’re great and anti-DRM… Except I’m telling you they aren’t, if their own games are at risk of being pirated they add DRM, if somebody wants to publish games protected by DRM on their platform they allow it. That’s not anti-DRM.
Steam’s DRM is disabled by default, and Valve is aware it’s trivially easy to bypass and said multiple times they don’t care. That’s just as “anti-DRM” as GOG if we go by their actions, rather than their marketing claims.
Don’t fall for marketing claims when they themselves are using DRM, it’s ridiculous.
Which games from steam don’t work? I’ve never had any issues at all and I have traveled internationally for years while playing my whole library. I think that might be something specific to some game and that game wouldn’t be available on GOG anyways so it’s a moot point. In other words games work or don’t by their own stance on DRM, and I’m sorry to tell you but
Note, if you actually look at that list you’ll see it’s a very loose interpretation of DRM. All of the games on that list work without any kind of phone-home security check, or unlock code, or anything like that. The list is stuff like “getting the DLC requires a third party account”. It’s definitely a list of things people don’t like, but whether it is or isn’t ‘DRM’ is not so clear cut.
GOG’s official position is that the store doesn’t allow DRM at all. They describe what they mean by DRM on that same page, and it sounds fairly reasonable; but its certainly understandable that some people would prefer a stricter set of rules.
All of the games on that list work without any kind of phone-home security check, or unlock code, or anything like that.
You didn’t scroll down the linked forum post, did you?
DEFCON - Linux: Game contacts a key verification server as described here. Win and Mac have offline executables that skip the verification. But under Linux there is no DRM-free offline executable.
F.E.A.R. - arguably a bug that stays unfixed. Securom remnants weren’t removed and can cause the single player game not to start.
Not the person you asked, but one game I had problems with on Steam that I did not on GOG was the OG Riven. It was still playable, but the various animations associated with pressing buttons and suchlike were completely broken. Very rare experience though and I have played many retro games on Steam.
Yeah a lot of retro games on GOG were fixed up with patches and stuff like that (often by GOG themselves) and sometimes regardless of any fixes applied, there are version disparities between the two platforms where usually the Steam versions is a slightly older release of an old no longer updated game compared to the GOG version though I’ve seen it happen the other way around, too.
Never heard of that game, but I can definitely believe it, old games are where GOG really shines. But that doesn’t seem like a DRM thing, more like the game is abandoned on Steam but not on GOG, sometimes GOG patches some old games with their own runtime, curiously if that is the problem running the steam version on linux using proton (and especially proton-GE) is also very likely to work.
Well, that’s not true either. I hate this trend of developers only relying on the platform-provided servers for multiplayer, but you have to find a game with LAN. That limits your selection a lot, but I for sure played Star Wars: Episode I - Racer from GOG in LAN without talking to their servers at all.
I can’t say conclusively that every LAN game on GOG is DRM-free on Steam, but there are times where Steam’s DRM has caused annoyances for me when trying to play offline on Steam Deck that I would not run into with side loaded GOG games, which I detailed in another comment here.
You can’t also say conclusively that every LAN game on GOG is DRM-free on GOG either.
I read that other comment, that’s an issue with the specific game. I’ve played dozens of games without connection and not putting it on offline mode, if that specific game tries to phone home on login that game is wrong. I wished Steam would have a DRM-free tag to be able to differentiate them easily.
I’ve traveled domestically and had the Steam Deck randomly decide that the games I preloaded need to be authenticated again because I didn’t explicitly put the device in “offline mode” before traveling. A GOG game sideloaded through Heroic would just work.
This year I was in three foreign countries with my Steam Deck. Once per flight, the other two by car. On the plane I activated airplane mode because duh but outside the plane airplane mode was always off.
By default Steam downloads shader caches off Valve’s servers. So if Steam saw before that an update is available and you didn’t download it, Steam wants to be online to download them. You can disable shader cache downloads in desktop mode but then the games have to compile the shaders by themselves which takes time computing resources, and in turn wastes battery power.
Also, pretty recently there was a bug in Steam that messed up authentication in general. It required me to log in twice (!) on every power on. The bug is now gone. It wasn’t a feature.
Yeah, this is the gist of the problem. When a PC is connected to airplane WiFi, but it is limited, Steam decides it is online, but some sort of validation fails and then no games will play until I get back to a full internet connection and reboot. I don’t even try anymore, hence my comment about GOG, and yes, I know some games on GOG have DRM, but most don’t and they don’t hide the fact. The Steam DRM bootlicking combined with GOG hatred because they were forced to sell a few games with DRM is so bizarre. Are Steam fan boys a thing? What a weird hill to fight for.
DRM is the heart of most technology pain for paying customers since it’s inception. For pirates, the experience is much better since the DRM is removed.
Nope, this is something different. I booted up Metaphor: ReFantazio, and it just about made it to the main menu before telling me I needed to be in offline mode, but you can’t explicitly put the device in offline mode if you don’t have an internet connection, funny enough. Fortunately I was on an Amtrak with Wi-Fi, but I shouldn’t have needed to do that. As far as I can tell, the reason I needed to authenticate the game again is because the Deck ran a “validating install” step on boot, but I have no idea when that step is going to happen, and once again, I shouldn’t have to plan ahead for being offline.
I booted up Metaphor: ReFantazio, and it just about made it to the main menu before telling me I needed to be in offline mode
Sounds like a game bug.
but you can’t explicitly put the device in offline mode if you don’t have an internet connection, funny enough
“…” button --> Airplane mode.
the reason I needed to authenticate the game again is because the Deck ran a “validating install” step on boot, but I have no idea when that step is going to happen
When you do something to bork the game data. It’s either user error or a bug but definitively not regular behaviour.
Airplane mode is not offline mode. I found that out explicitly this year due to how Ubisoft’s launcher interacts with playing offline in Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. Offline mode is found from the Internet menu in the Steam Deck interface and is very much not the same thing as just not having an internet connection, as much as that would make sense.
I didn’t break any game data. This is an OS level feature, and it just does it sometimes on boot. I’m glad you’ve never been inconvenienced by these things yourself, but this is the intended functionality.
Funny how you got hit by that on an domestic train trip and I traveled abroad several times and not got that weird behaviour even once. I simply never use offline mode. On the plane I was in airplane mode and when not on the plane I was on hotel wifi, personal phone hotspot, or just not connected to any wifi. Steam also never just out of the blue validated my game data. Must be a problem on your end.
I’m really happy with my experience with GOG, but they put a lot of effort into their Windows app and i ws pretty blunt with my feedback, it is pretty useless to me and I find it unhelpful. Heroic game launcher on Linux great and cost GOG $0.00. My thought is that they have been focusing on the wrong things, fundamentally I love their strong DRM stance and when I am travelling internationally,the games I bought off GOG work, unlike Steam😡😡😡😡. So if they have come to this realization, then nothing about these changes are disturbing as a customer, but sad to hear their employees taking the hit. 😢
They have allowed content protected by DRM into their store four times already, which is not surprising, given GOG is owned by CD Projekt Red who included DRM into their own DLC for Cyberpunk, including on GOG. That’s not “strong” in any sense of the word.
So in other words, they sell you the “feel good” anti-DRM narrative but quickly look the other way when it’s good for business. At that point, might as well purchase on Steam, where DRM is common but optional and Valve actually cares about making the games platform-agnostic, easy to backup, easy to share, etc.
EDIT: cool downvotes, doesn’t change the fact that GOG provides software protected by DRM on their “strongly anti-DRM platform”. There is no amount of downvotes in this world that can change this reality.
I don’t follow the logic here. You said it yourself – GoG has only allowed DRM onto their platform four times. This is a violation of their anti-DRM policy but it still means like 99% of games on GoG have no DRM. It’s good to be principled about these things but I don’t see how this merits a knee-jerk response to run to Steam (a platform where 99% of games do have DRM and no guarantee other than an informal promise that they’ll do “something” to make their games available if Steam were to shut down).
Not the person you’re replying to but there’s a big difference between: “We allow DRM, but don’t force it” to “We strongly oppose DRM, but allow it and even put it into our own games”. One is just business, the other makes you a hypocrite. And the issue with GOG is that they’re the latter.
See my other reply, they have allowed this much more than 4 times, and their own games have some form of DRM. Plus the amount of games with DRM on steam is much less than 99%, as a general rule if the game is on both platforms it has the same or equivalent DRM. So it’s essentially up to the publisher whether a game will have DRM or not, and because the vast majority of games have the same stance on DRM regardless of platform of purchase citing GOG stance against DRM becomes a moot point.
In short, games on GOG can have DRM and games on Steam can be DRM free. And as a general rule a game’s DRM stance will be the same regardless of store. So if you want to play game X and it’s available on both GOG and Steam, chances are pretty high that it is DRM-free on both, and if it has DRM on steam chances are pretty high it also has DRM on GOG.
What anti-DRM policy? They included DRM into their own game, what kind of policy is that?
“I have a strict, non negotiable anti-beer policy! Except every weekend when I drink a 12 pack! And sometimes in social events! And at night to take the edge off! Sometimes on Wednesdays too!”
Four times? How many times has Steam allowed it? Trying to follow your argument, TIA!
Did I ever claim Steam is a “strongly DRM free platform”? Did Steam ever sell itself as the non evil alternative due to a quoted “lack of DRM?”
If you’re trying to follow my argument, you’re not doing a good job.
If I understand this correctly, you value Steam’s honesty over a few instances in which GOG hypocritically violated their own DRM policy. That sucks, for sure, and GOG should be called out for it – but at the end of the day, the vast majority of games in my GOG library can be downloaded as offline installers that don’t need to contact a server, while the vast majority of the games I own on Steam can’t (barring, of course, circumventing Steam’s fairly weak DRM scheme, which is illegal).
People keep making this claim, but I don’t think this is true, I’ve made backups of lots of games, even played some in lan with some friends from just a single copy to convince them to buy the game. DRM has to be enabled by the developer, so the majority of games don’t do it, but also lots of games are badly coded and assume steam will be present so they fail to start without the steam library, but any game that’s released somewhere else besides steam probably will just work (and any game that’s only released on steam can’t be found anywhere else so they’re irrelevant).
Both are multi-millionaire if not billionaire companies. There’s no way to attribute virtues like “honesty” to corporate entities.
But GOG is a much worse store than Steam, lacking features Steam had a decade ago and, most importantly, being loudly indifferent to how the games work on platforms other than Windows. Any gaming thread gets flooded by GOG fans talking about how we should support them anyway, because they’re great and anti-DRM… Except I’m telling you they aren’t, if their own games are at risk of being pirated they add DRM, if somebody wants to publish games protected by DRM on their platform they allow it. That’s not anti-DRM.
Steam’s DRM is disabled by default, and Valve is aware it’s trivially easy to bypass and said multiple times they don’t care. That’s just as “anti-DRM” as GOG if we go by their actions, rather than their marketing claims.
Don’t fall for marketing claims when they themselves are using DRM, it’s ridiculous.
The DRM:
Get a fucking grip man 😅
Ah yes, so we went from “no DRM whatsoeverr!” to “there’s DRM but on a DLC I don’t care about!”
I see. Sound logic, great argument. Sounds like GOG is amazing then, they’re probably doing great with their current business model! No, wait…
deleted by creator
Which games from steam don’t work? I’ve never had any issues at all and I have traveled internationally for years while playing my whole library. I think that might be something specific to some game and that game wouldn’t be available on GOG anyways so it’s a moot point. In other words games work or don’t by their own stance on DRM, and I’m sorry to tell you but
That’s a myth. They do allow DRM on their store, there’s a huge thread discussing which games have DRM: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/drm_on_gog_list_of_singleplayer_games_with_drm/page1
And that’s just focusing on SP, any MP game has DRM. So I’ll ask again, which game didn’t work on steam when traveling?
Note, if you actually look at that list you’ll see it’s a very loose interpretation of DRM. All of the games on that list work without any kind of phone-home security check, or unlock code, or anything like that. The list is stuff like “getting the DLC requires a third party account”. It’s definitely a list of things people don’t like, but whether it is or isn’t ‘DRM’ is not so clear cut.
GOG’s official position is that the store doesn’t allow DRM at all. They describe what they mean by DRM on that same page, and it sounds fairly reasonable; but its certainly understandable that some people would prefer a stricter set of rules.
Yeah, but if you follow that DRM definition almost no game on Steam has DRM either.
You didn’t scroll down the linked forum post, did you?
DEFCON - Linux: Game contacts a key verification server as described here. Win and Mac have offline executables that skip the verification. But under Linux there is no DRM-free offline executable.
F.E.A.R. - arguably a bug that stays unfixed. Securom remnants weren’t removed and can cause the single player game not to start.
That’s pretty DRM-y.
Not the person you asked, but one game I had problems with on Steam that I did not on GOG was the OG Riven. It was still playable, but the various animations associated with pressing buttons and suchlike were completely broken. Very rare experience though and I have played many retro games on Steam.
Yeah a lot of retro games on GOG were fixed up with patches and stuff like that (often by GOG themselves) and sometimes regardless of any fixes applied, there are version disparities between the two platforms where usually the Steam versions is a slightly older release of an old no longer updated game compared to the GOG version though I’ve seen it happen the other way around, too.
Never heard of that game, but I can definitely believe it, old games are where GOG really shines. But that doesn’t seem like a DRM thing, more like the game is abandoned on Steam but not on GOG, sometimes GOG patches some old games with their own runtime, curiously if that is the problem running the steam version on linux using proton (and especially proton-GE) is also very likely to work.
Well, that’s not true either. I hate this trend of developers only relying on the platform-provided servers for multiplayer, but you have to find a game with LAN. That limits your selection a lot, but I for sure played Star Wars: Episode I - Racer from GOG in LAN without talking to their servers at all.
Sure, but those also are DRM free on Steam, so my point remains.
I can’t say conclusively that every LAN game on GOG is DRM-free on Steam, but there are times where Steam’s DRM has caused annoyances for me when trying to play offline on Steam Deck that I would not run into with side loaded GOG games, which I detailed in another comment here.
You can’t also say conclusively that every LAN game on GOG is DRM-free on GOG either.
I read that other comment, that’s an issue with the specific game. I’ve played dozens of games without connection and not putting it on offline mode, if that specific game tries to phone home on login that game is wrong. I wished Steam would have a DRM-free tag to be able to differentiate them easily.
You must be doing something very wrong. I bring my Steam Deck on travels and it always works.
I’ve traveled domestically and had the Steam Deck randomly decide that the games I preloaded need to be authenticated again because I didn’t explicitly put the device in “offline mode” before traveling. A GOG game sideloaded through Heroic would just work.
This year I was in three foreign countries with my Steam Deck. Once per flight, the other two by car. On the plane I activated airplane mode because duh but outside the plane airplane mode was always off.
By default Steam downloads shader caches off Valve’s servers. So if Steam saw before that an update is available and you didn’t download it, Steam wants to be online to download them. You can disable shader cache downloads in desktop mode but then the games have to compile the shaders by themselves which takes time computing resources, and in turn wastes battery power.
Also, pretty recently there was a bug in Steam that messed up authentication in general. It required me to log in twice (!) on every power on. The bug is now gone. It wasn’t a feature.
Yeah, this is the gist of the problem. When a PC is connected to airplane WiFi, but it is limited, Steam decides it is online, but some sort of validation fails and then no games will play until I get back to a full internet connection and reboot. I don’t even try anymore, hence my comment about GOG, and yes, I know some games on GOG have DRM, but most don’t and they don’t hide the fact. The Steam DRM bootlicking combined with GOG hatred because they were forced to sell a few games with DRM is so bizarre. Are Steam fan boys a thing? What a weird hill to fight for.
DRM is the heart of most technology pain for paying customers since it’s inception. For pirates, the experience is much better since the DRM is removed.
Nope, this is something different. I booted up Metaphor: ReFantazio, and it just about made it to the main menu before telling me I needed to be in offline mode, but you can’t explicitly put the device in offline mode if you don’t have an internet connection, funny enough. Fortunately I was on an Amtrak with Wi-Fi, but I shouldn’t have needed to do that. As far as I can tell, the reason I needed to authenticate the game again is because the Deck ran a “validating install” step on boot, but I have no idea when that step is going to happen, and once again, I shouldn’t have to plan ahead for being offline.
Sounds like a game bug.
“…” button --> Airplane mode.
When you do something to bork the game data. It’s either user error or a bug but definitively not regular behaviour.
It’s not a game bug; that’s Steam’s DRM.
Airplane mode is not offline mode. I found that out explicitly this year due to how Ubisoft’s launcher interacts with playing offline in Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. Offline mode is found from the Internet menu in the Steam Deck interface and is very much not the same thing as just not having an internet connection, as much as that would make sense.
I didn’t break any game data. This is an OS level feature, and it just does it sometimes on boot. I’m glad you’ve never been inconvenienced by these things yourself, but this is the intended functionality.
Funny how you got hit by that on an domestic train trip and I traveled abroad several times and not got that weird behaviour even once. I simply never use offline mode. On the plane I was in airplane mode and when not on the plane I was on hotel wifi, personal phone hotspot, or just not connected to any wifi. Steam also never just out of the blue validated my game data. Must be a problem on your end.
No, it’s really just a luck of the draw thing on boot.
I didn’t even know they had a client. I do everything via their website.