MudMan
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I’m trying to be generic here. For these purposes I don’t particularly care about manufacturer customizations beyond "does it tensor math good and/or talk to DXR/Vulkan raytracing. I guess that accidentally includes actually useless CPU-baked NPUs, but I’ll accept that as being potentially part of it if someone actually used them for something.
For the record, even if I was wrong about or unaware of your kinda pedantic distinction, it’d still be irrelevant to the point.
I strongly disagree with that take, but also the actual alternative is not better for some of the people involved, so let that caveat be up front.
The alternative is a manually curated storefront, which is still being done in other platforms to some degree. You can absolutely sell entertainment or videogames without it being an entirely hands-off, algo-driven gig economy setup. Valve’s entire business model is cutting off all internal costs and automating the thing so it prints money by itself, but that’s not the only possible business model for media, as the previous century of media clearly shows.
Now, the caveat is that this doesn’t particularly help the small fry, which may be just gatekept out of the entire loop instead of being simply crushed by the soulless machine of making dream paste out of independent media. Whether that’s better or not I’m genuinely not sure.
Nostalgia tells me that the old industrial model where you only got to play in the pool if you could afford to do it right was more consistenly professional and less sloppy. Also that fewer things fell through the cracks, so if you wanted to make shovelware you at least had to put some work in to get it published, which was somebody’s paid job. Steam (and the similar mobile stores) have put all the cost and risk on the developers, especially since investment dried up and indie publishers have morphed from financers to service providers that come in after the job is done to sell you marketing and storefront SEO.
So I guess I personally would want Steam to hire a small army of content reviewers and moderators led by an editorial team that selects what to feature based on both business and creative considerations. But what I personally would want may not solve the problem the small indies this guy’s talking about have, just… maybe not allow them to get that deep into the hole by keeping them from being able to get started in the first place. Mileage may vary on whether that’s preferable. My personal choice is probably a side effect of being old.
Cool.
So, anyway…
(For the record, tensor cores don’t just accelerate calculations for raytracing, as is obvious from the entire AI bubble built on the technology, and I have no idea what GPU “performance boost” you’d want from additional raster graphics when you have RT-less stuff running at stupid framerates on current hardware and being consistently CPU-limited, but the Internet gets the memetic obsessions it gets. I suppose online nerds will pay for a 1080p 1000Hz monitor with no self-awareness as long as the two popular Youtube tech channels keep repeating the same memes and testing the same four games forever)
You need to clear the algo bars right away to make the New and Trending tab, and then you need to keep it up. If you drop off, you’re out.
So dropping to Mixed or starting soft gets you written off (barring viral late pickups or otherwise getting external promo to make your game blow up elsewhere). That means you need to hypermanage your launch and SEO the crap out of it to “own a tag” or keep above water with the trending tab.
I’ll say that at least that’s a tool for even a single person marketing owner to micromanage a Steam launch effectively, but it’s still SEO and algo gaming, which still leads to the same discoverability rat race mobile gaming has been stuck on for ages. And how survivable that process is depends a lot on what you need. I’d argue that very small devs that can make do with a few thousand copies sold may have an easier time there than slightly larger releases that need months of at least some sales to make their money back. Steam sales are either a flat line for a decade or a two week spike followed by zero engagement in your game forever.
It does not, in that I have a downloaded offline installer for the delisted games.
I mean, granted, when delisted from other platforms I can typically still download them, but on GOG I know I can keep them regardless. Which is the point.
I universally hate this rhetorical garbage, where anybody trying to try something other than the late capitalist status quo is then held to a higher standard, even when they are doing better than the default alternatives.
Turns out, it’s not a problem to be a left winger with a healthy income and you’re not obligated to never lose a license for a game just because you provide them DRM free. That’s why you provide them DRM free, in fact.
There are two ways to do this, as far as I’m concerned:
You can come up with an algorithm and let it cook, which is how Steam handles almost everything…
…or you can have an editorial team curate your storefront, negotiate sponsorships and marketing deals and manually set up promo slots based on their judgement.
Both have pros and cons, both prop up a certain type of game and hide others. Neither is particularly great if you’re a tiny dev with no budget, though, unless the storefront in question actively curates for that specific type of product (which no current first party really does outside Itch).
I don’t think you’re going to get fewer, bigger indies. The real problem the original corpo guy is forgetting to flag is that there is no longer speculative investment in gaming, so all that venture capital money went to AI.
Games are about cash now, so there’s no room to fail. Unless you have money in the bank to make many games, failure means you’re out. It doesn’t matter if your game is big or small. Gamedev costs what it costs if you need to pay for the devs’ salaries directly from your game’s sales with no investment cushion.
That leads to a mobile-like landscape. The big stay big forever, the small fry keep gaming the algo hoping to go viral. It’s a bit grim.
I’d argue that if Steam played kingmaker based on less math and a bit more discernment they are in the best position to split the difference. Instead, you weirdly get more of that from Sony, Nintendo and… well, what’s left of MS for as long as it exists as a gaming first party.
And that’s what I think is needed. If Steam wants to be the Google of gaming that’s fine… as long as someone else is competing with a different approach to split the difference. Just Steam’s approach by itself would be bad, I think.
Played in French. Wish that was the original version. Especially since my understanding is the performance capture was done by a French cast and the English cast that is getting all the press and accolades did the voice work exclusively.
I would have preferred if the voice and facial animation was targeted to the French language. I don’t know why European games are so afraid of not being in English. If Persona can do it so can E33. Or maybe not? Certainly the cast was a selling point, so what do I know.
I mean… I don’t disagree that it’s the best non-curated platform, but… that’s still not good.
I don’t disagree that many indies and even mid-sized studios should be more realistic about their potential, and I do agree that for a gig economy-style algorithm the crowdsourced tag system works pretty well on Steam and has more granularity than the jankier phone store app equivalent.
But it’s still 100% algo sorting and it’s still 100% driving ancient GaaS to the top and fossilizing it there. If you can’t muster a trailer at one of Keighley’s gigs or a massive influencer campaign you get exactly one shot at clearing the algorithm bars for Steam’s front page and then the algo will dump you all the way down to the pits. I know for a fact that a bunch of indies and AAs are playing the exact same sort of SEO games and algo reverse-engineering you see on phone shovelware. Steam plays in that league.
I think there are pros and cons of that against a fully curated front page, and it’s probably easier to at least have a chance here than back when first party certification was an actual investment, but I’m not sure I necessarily like what comes out the other end at scale.
I mean… yeah, have a good Steam page, for sure.
But while that may be “one” problem, it’s not “the” problem. Pleny of well presented games get trounced by missing the bar on week 1 of New and Trending, which is a death sentence without a massive marketing budget, or by narrowly missing out on the positive side of reviews, which is easy to do if your launch has any tech issues.
Steam is a better version of the phone stores, but it’s still one of those. It’s gamedev as gig economy and it’s yielding very similar results, with chart-topping games becoming decade-old fossils and new games struggling below.
Yeah, I’m mostly with you on that one. This creates some questions aobut their viability and there isn’t a particularly clear path from it to specific releases.
There was a bit of a mixed reception to this in their Discord server when they first revealed it and despite them taking the feedback quite graciously the final version hasn’t changed much at all.
It’s not a dealbreaker, and if you want to support them by all means, go nuts. I’d maybe politely suggest buying games instead of this, though.
Yeah, but nobody would argue that GameStop was dying in 2002, which is seven years into GameFAQs existing and very much the heyday of Prima and other dedicated print guide writers. Seriously, it just doesn’t line up. GameFAQs and print guides were servicing the same need.
Again, I’m not saying it didn’t have an impact. I’m saying if Prima guides existed as standalone publications in dedicated gaming stores it’s partly because GameFAQs had killed monthly print magazines as a viable way to acquire strategy guides for games, so you instead had dedicated guide publishers working directly with devs and game publishers to have print guides ready to go at day one, sometimes shipping directly bundled with the game.
And then you had an army of crowdsourcer guide writers online that were catching up to those print products almost immediately but offering something very different (namely a searchable text-only lightweight doc different from the high quality art-heavy print guides).
Those were both an alternative to how this worked in the 90s, which was by print magazines with no online competition deciding which game to feature with a map, guide or tricks and every now and then publishing a garbage compilation on toilet paper pulp they could bundle with a mag. I still have some of those crappy early guides. GameFAQs and collectible print guides are both counters to that filling two solutions to the equation and they both share a similar curve in time, from the Internet getting big and killing mag cheats to the enshittified Internet replacing text guides with video walkthroughs and paid editorial digital guides made in bulk.
Well, I’d argue if there was no money to be made, then CNET wouldn’t have purchased GameFAQs. At the very least it served to bring people over to their media ecosystem, and I wanna say they did serve ads and affiliate links on the site proper (but adblocker is also old, so it’s hard to tell).
Video contributed, for sure. This is a process of many years, the whole thing was evolving at once. But the clean break idea that print guides existed and then GameFAQs came along and killed guides just doesn’t fit the timeline at all. It’s off by 5-10 years, at least. Guides weren’t residual in the 00s when GameFAQs was at its peak and being bought as a company, they were doing alright. It’d take 10 years longer for them to struggle and 15 for them to disappear. You’re two console gens off there. That’s a lot. If guide makers like Prima were pivoting to collectible high end books out of desperation you’d expect that process to have failed faster than that.
Instead they failed at the same time GameFAQs started to struggle and get superseded, so I’m more inclined to read that as them both being part of the same thing and the whole thing struggling together as we move towards video on media and digital on game publishing. That fits the timeline better, I think.
In any case, it was what it was, and it’s more enshittified now. I’ve been looking up a couple details on Blake Manor (which is good but buggy and flaky in pieces, so you may need some help even if you don’t want to spoil yourself) and all you get is Steam forums and a couple of hard to navigate pages. The print guide/GameFAQs era was harder to search but more convenient, for sure.
It’s not a “even if some existed” thing, Prima operated until 2018. I personally remember preorder bundles with Prima guides for 360 era games and beyond. They published incredibly elaborate collector’s hardbook guides (that honestly doubled as artbooks) for stuff like Twilight Princess and Halo 3, all the way to the PS4 gen.
Even granting that “booming” is probably a bit hyperbolic, if GameFAQs being free in 1995 was going to kill them, bleeding out would probably not have taken 23 years. The death of retail, print and physical games probably hurt print guides way more than GameFAQs ever did. You didn’t buy those because you were in a hurry to solve a puzzle or look up a special move. They were collectibles and art books first and foremost.
FWIW, guides going back to paid professionals wasn’t as much due to video. Video is still crowdsourced for that stuff. It was visual guides in html with a bunch of images and reference, I think. At least that’s what IGN was doing, and they’re the ones that went hard on that front first. Also for the record, that probably had something to do with IGN and GameFAQs being affiliated for a while. GameFAQs was bought off by CNET in '03, it was definitely part of the big online gaming press ecosystem. I can see how IGN thought they could do better.
I don’t know that the timeline works out there. GameFAQs is, as this post reminds us, pretty old. Even assuming that it didn’t break out until the very late 90s or early 00s as THE destination for guides, there was certainly a booming editoral market for highly produced guides all the way into the Xbox 360 era.
I’d say it was responsible for the press not focusing on guides as much and instead refocusing on news and reviews. And then news and reviews died out and the press that was left refocused on guides again because by that point the text-only crowdsourced output of GameFAQs was less interesting than the more fully produced, visually-driven guides in professional outlets. And now… well, who knows, it’s a mess now. Mostly Reddit, I suppose?
I mean… MK1 predates it by what? 3-4 years? Which in 90s tech time is an eternity.
MK fatality guides were mostly in print. Magazines were all over that type of stuff at the time. But it wouldn’t have been strange to get a familiarly formatted ASCII guide for them with, say, your pirated floppies of the DOS or Amiga versions.
Hm… I’m a bit mixed on that, because GameFAQs became relevant a bit later than that, but at the same time that type of format for ASCII game guides predates GameFAQs being the main place you went to get them, so… it evens out?
I probably didn’t start going to GameFAQs for this stuff until like 2000, but I certainly was using text guides for games in the 90s.
I mean, convenience is a factor.
And while Steam doesn’t typically sign exclusive stuff they are known to use store positioning as a bargaining chip for preferential treatment. You’d think Konami would be above needing that, but who knows.
Anyway, good game, whatever the reason for the delay. Someone who is on the fence about getting it on Steam go get it on GOG instead to make up for them tricking me.
It’s come and gone a couple times. There was a period where a bunch of big games did simultaneous launches, then a big period of drought where a few large publishers withdrew entirely from new releases and recently a few isolated AA and AAA releases started popping back up. I wonder if it’s driven by how much effort they can put into outreach or something like that.
Yeah, it sucks for Silent Hill especially because a) it’s super expensive, at 80 bucks on PC, and b) I was on the fence about getting it at launch and only jumped in a few days ago. I’m just out of the refund window and… hey, I like it so far, but I don’t like it 160 bucks’ worth.
Whoever is screwing with GOG screwed them out of my purchase and I’m starting to think that not buying anything on Steam at all if I can help it may be the way to go.
Alright, this is great, but also people need to start confirming GOG drops before the Steam launch. I check for GOG launches whenever I buy a game, but just this month there’s been a couple of big games that got stealth GOG launches just after their Steam release and it’s been extremely frustrating. I don’t know if it’s a publisher thing to work around pirates waiting for DRM free versions or Steam being dicks about it, but it’s infuriating.
The hell does “piracy against big companies” even mean?
Man, pirate what you can’t afford if you must, just… you know, be honest about it. I’m always annoyed by people doing the thing they wanted to do anyway and presenting it as activism. That’s not how that works.
For the record, while I think there’s plenty to be critical about in modern gaming, “DLC”, “game has a launcher” and “game is ported from other platforms” are not that. “A game I played on the PS3 was too expensive when I wanted to rebuy it” is somebody giving you bad value up front, not some ideological stance you’re taking.
For the record, I also didn’t buy it because I also didn’t think their launch price was right. In fairness, it has since been on sale for 30 bucks multiple times, which is a lot more reasonable.
And again, I’m not saying don’t pirate it. Do what you want. Just don’t be weird about it.
I mean, all due respect, to the guy, but this doesn’t go down until 2027. At least give them a minute to get in the position where they could feasibly fuck up before you berate them for it.
If you look at the Internet they are apparently definitely dismantling the company to sell the pieces but also definitely continuing to make what they make but with MAGA politics but also as a muslim theocracy and trimming down and speeding up but also doubling down on live service at the same time somehow.
And man, one or multiple of those may happen, but almost certainly not all of them and none have happened yet. Given how much of a public-ass public company chasing short term gains they’ve been historically I can’t help but think there’s a fair amount of projection going on.
Here’s my stance: I have no idea what this means and I have no idea what they’re going to do. This is all weird and I have zero frame of reference for how the new owners are going to gel with that organization or what their new objectives are going to be when compared to the old “make more money this quarter than last quarter” thing.
“New” is a bit of a stretch, I already owned all of those on GoG. But hey, if them cherry picking which games they’ll vow to patch themselves helps them get a marketing hit I’m all for it.
Also, Expedition 33 launched in there, along with the newer Tomb Raider games. Am I a bit mad that they didn’t go for it at launch and made me get it on Steam instead? I am. Still glad there’s a DRM-free option, though.
But you’re not describing a loot box. That’s not how loot boxes work.
I mean, for one thing, 1 in 4 doesn’t mean you should get a payout in the fourth try. You could buy a hundred things with a 1 in 4 chances and never win. Random means random.
But precisely for that reason loot boxes sometimes implement “mercy rules” that increase the odds on repeated tries to prevent people being frustrated because squishy human brains are bad at understanding probability intuitively.
But the way look boxes work is by having a loot table, which associates a list of possible outcomes to a weight and runs a random check against that table each time. It’s how it worked on pen and paper Dungeons and Dragons in the 70s and it’s how it works in monetized loot boxes today. Different implementations can have different odds, each game can offer different box types with different probabilities, but if we’re talking about loot boxes we’re talking about that.
I don’t know what game you were playing. I suppose a loot table with 75% of nothing and 25% of a single hardcoded item is still a valid loot table, but it’s overly simplistic and now how it’d typically be implemented. If you’re playing some game that gives you an on-screen representation of a paid item under those rules and you can show that they are misrepresenting the odds you can and should go flag them in front of whatever body regulates advertising in your country, as well as to whatever platform is offering the game. It’s very likely that it’d be breaking multiple regulations entirely unrelated to gambling, both public and private. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen (mobile games in particular are full of really gross design people aren’t following up on enough), but that isn’t a typical implementation and not the base complaint people have.
And again, can’t stress this enough, it’s probably already illegal regardless of whether loot boxes run on gambling rules or not.
Sure, but this isn’t a digital version of a casino game. It’s a digital version of a blind box. And there is no rule to say that trading cards or collectible card games need to have equal possibilities of yielding a specific card. That is very much the opposite of how that works. Physical blind box offerings absolutely use different probabilities and different content rarities.
So yeah, if you make up the categorizations, the rules and the mechanics we can be talking about whatever you want, but in the real world that’s not even close to how this works in either physical or digital form, which I guess explains the confusion.
For the record, multiple games offer a readout of the possibilities of getting a particular type of thing. I, you may be surprised to know, haven’t checked the probabilities being accurate in all of them, but I’m gonna need some specific proof of someone fudging them, because that’s a problem of false advertising at that point, forget gambling rules that don’t even apply.
Also, 1% is a HUGE drop rate for rare items in loot boxes, both physical and digital. 1% is, as it turns out, 1 in 100. Lots of games, collectibles and other types of blind boxes feature way more than 100 tries at opening a loot box, even for fully unmonetized ones. If anything there’s a bit of a cognitive bias there, where people are very bad at instinctively understanding how percentages work, which makes disclosing loot box percentages a bit of a challenge.
Look, I’m not sure what games you play or your understanding of how any of this works but, respectfully, you’re misunderstanding it pretty deeply.
“Want” isn’t my concern. Presumably no developers want to give Google a piece of anything they generate, open source or not.
My concern was not understanding how this interferes with F-Droid and that has been explained above: F-Droid builds their own APKs for verification and this process potentially makes that a lot harder while not providing a replacement for their verification from Google.
That makes sense and it is indeed a dealbreaker. The other thing much less so.
Oooh, gotcha. That makes sense.
I guess it’d make sense to take that first option as far as it will go, at which point the issue becomes litigating this the first time Google has their own weird censorship issue in the Apple mold. I’d expect if they ban all of F-Droid explicitly that would at least make more ripples than going after a single torrent client app or whatever. It may play out different from a regulatory perspective, too, if the practical effect is they ban third party stores.
Side note, I’m really mad at the very deliberate choice Google made of categorizing all potential apps as either “apps meant for Google Play” or “student or hobbyist apps”. You know they know why that’s wrong, but it still makes you want to explain it to them.
I’m confused by this:
The F-Droid project cannot require that developers register their apps through Google, but at the same time, we cannot “take over” the application identifiers for the open-source apps we distribute, as that would effectively seize exclusive distribution rights to those applications.
If it were to be put into effect, the developer registration decree will end the F-Droid project and other free/open-source app distribution sources as we know them today, and the world will be deprived of the safety and security of the catalog of thousands of apps that can be trusted and verified by any and all. F-Droid’s myriad users5 will be left adrift, with no means to install — or even update their existing installed — applications.
My understanding is that developers need to sign up with Google and once they have an account they can sign their own apks.
How would this impact F-Droid in any way? Presumably by the time F-Droid enters the picture the developers of the apps they distribute would have already gone through that entire process, right? The apks will be tied to that new Google certificate, but after that they can still be distributed anywhere.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, this has genuine, very serious, dealbreaking issues, in that Google can just cancel the account of a developer making apps they don’t like, the same way Apple has done in the past. That’s not great. But from F-Droid’s perspective all of that has happened upstream, they are not anywhere in that loop, unless I’ve misunderstood the changes.
Hah. I like the witch trial logic there. “If you like this thing it proves the thing is evil brainwashing because nobody would like it otherwise”. May as well dunk them in water and see if they drown.
The thing is, this sort of online panic has absolutely had an influence. The industry has moved away from lootboxes, even in cases where they make sense (see the Marvel Snap example) because they’ve become terrible PR, and the panic has led to multiple countries exploring new regulations or applying existing gambling regulations, whether that makes sense or not.
So you don’t have a lot of influence, but you definitely have some, and the unintended consequences of that influence lead to things like Brazil being on track to roll out invasive age checking procedures in gaming spaces without getting much pushback from the wider international gaming public because they’re all too excited about the anti-loot box lip service they’ve added on the side.
So maybe don’t let yourself too off the hook. There was a slippery slope here and you are one of many gleefully going “weeee!” on the way down. Your aggressive stance here sure had more of an impact than all the “told you sos” I’m about to send if and when Steam starts requiring people provide some type of personal ID to log in.
All loot boxes are chance based, but first of all, I don’t know which laws you’re talking about. Brazil’s? Guessing the US because when somebody has a case of the default human it’s typically an American, but who knows.
But also, I’m not a US lawyer, but I seriously doubt US gambling laws requires all games to have a flat probability, mostly because… that’s not how games of chance work anywhere, and definitely not how blind boxes work anywhere and blind box products are not gambling anyway, which is the entire point.
It’s still a non sequitur and I still have no idea what you’re trying to say.
I did not say “less predatory”. I don’t agree that current trends on monetization are any more or less predatory than loot boxes. Hell, you don’t seem to think they’re any more or less predatory, either, given your assessment of grind.
I think you may have misread the point I was making. You should give that quote block another look.
But to reiterate, no, it’s not “wildly preferable” to grind through a battlepass than to have loot boxes. I prefer loot boxes, honestly. I know I’m not gonna grind to the end of a pass each season, even in the games I do pay regularly, so I would much rather have a randomized pull and get something fun every now and then.
And of course that’s all for incidental engagement reward nonsense, which is pointless anyway, paid loot boxes are fundamental to certain games. I liked CCGs when they were made with paper and I still do now. If you ask me I’d much rather have the randomized mishmash of decks you get from loot box-driven Hearthstone than the rigid meta you get in Marvel Snap because they are bending over backwards to still monetize just as hard while not having randomization because people keep whining about it.
And hey, you don’t have to play Hearthstone if you don’t want to, and if people are concerned about the effect on kids that’s what age ratings are for, doesn’t affect me. But I don’t think it should be banned and I sure as hell don’t think the alternative is “wildly preferable” at all. You don’t have to agree, but that cuts both ways, and I don’t appreciate people trying to make their preference a matter of law.
Yeah, but I actually like multiple games built around blind boxes, and I sure don’t like you telling me what I can like.
You’re just passing your own tastes as morality and I don’t care for that any more when it’s gamers pushing their preferences than when it was pearl-clutching moms and politicians trying to score cheap points.
I mean, there is plenty of justification for it in that blind boxes allow for a random distribution of items while still controlling rarity and allowing for balance, which is why every single videogame in existence that does any sort of randomized or widespread lootable equipment does loot tables. It’s not just a very useful technique, it’s a fundamental one you engage with constantly. If you want to make a case for monetization of randomized loot being beyond some line we can have that argument, but the method is useful and it won’t be “figured out”, it predates videogames altogether.
Frankly, it’s not even the worst option out there. The sad irony of the entire moral panic is that the part that got figured out is an alternative monetization-to-engagement pathway. Several, in fact. Overbearing regulation of loot boxes is no longer a dealbreaker because everybody knows how to do seasonal cosmetics and battlepasses now, so all the features of paid loot boxes can be done without the randomized elements people latch on to.
The part you can’t quite get is the outright advantage that loot boxes will sometimes give people decent stuff without having to grind, which all the current alternatives don’t do. I’d take randomized tables over mandatory grind any day, but I certainly don’t want to ban either.
It’s not easy to avoid unless you live in Vegas. I live right above a gambling establishment. Nobody bats an eye and it’s fully government-sanctioned.
Not every country is the US, friend. Including, you know… Brazil.
But hey, at least you have the intellectual honesty to include all the IRL blind boxes people actually like in your assessment. You still have this pretty much backwards, but at least it’s consistently backwards.
That’s not sarcasm, I do think that’s better than the baseline of “make the game mechanic I don’t like illegal, but keep all this 100% analogous stuff I do like” vibes-based approach to demanding regulation.
I still disagree super hard that “bad for our psyche” is the bar for banning stuff. Age ratings, sure. But I would very much prefer to keep tobacco, pot, alcohol, porn and yes, Magic the Gathering and Hearthstone available for anybody mature enough to make that choice by themselves.
You can want better. Wanting better is good, actually.
What you can’t do (and expect to be taken seriously, anyway) is to take the best you got and give them crap for stuff that’s not under their control in any way. They don’t own the games getting delisted, so they have zero control over the delisting itself and they have better mitigations for this scenario than anyone else that make the situation actually safe for buyers. They may be “out of stock” of these games going forward, but nobody who bought them has to worry about not getting to keep them, which isn’t true on most other platforms, Steam included.
For the record, I also disagree on how “we’re seeing Valve’s practices get better”. They have their own set of priorities and while I like a bunch of them I dislike a bunch of them also. I don’t need to pick sides here.
Case in point, I agree that asking for a patreon-style contribution is a bad move on GOG’s part. I don’t need to like that in order for me to like their choice to stick to DRM free content or to provide downloadable offline installers.