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Can you please give me some links to the fascism on their forums? I already know they sell fascist games like The Great Rebellion (GOG is guilty too), or that one asset flip where LGBTQ people somehow rule the US with an iron fist - I forget it’s name but I saw it in a video and it was genuinely bad and creepy.
I’d dare say they don’t do ANYTHING against fascism, so in my books they are just as much enablers of fascism as the companies actively lobbying for it. You know, Nazi bars and all that. Plus I’ve got a feeling those who insist they aren’t fash because they don’t spend their money on fash things are not aware of or even ignore things they’re actually doing, or benefiting from the current admin.
So now you’re just babbling for the sake of babbling, coming up with the most braindead takes possible, while ignoring practically everything i say because i don’t fall under the criteria of your tribe, thus inherently being a corpo billionaire shill. With this behaviour you’re only proving my words about your inability to see nuance. I hope you’re a kid, because that would at least mean some potential for intellectual development in the future.
Cool story bro. btw, buy a mirror instead of using me as yours. I hope Gabe gives you a dollar to buy that mirror.
define “unaccountable corporate master”, and explain to me how did you manage to put a game publisher under a term like this.
What a stupid question. See everything I have literally said directly to you. Read my replies and find out the answer. As someone once said, let’s stop before you embarrass yourself further.
It’s crazy to see people defending any of them but Gaben always gets defended.
Well I should’ve looked at the sub before deriding yacht owners. Of course it is pcgaming. He is their god. To criticize him or his company is sacrilege. Never mind that he is cut from the same cloth as every other CEO. But he did one good thing so clearly the two billion bad things don’t matter.
They certainly are paying tax money to the Trump-Epstein Administration, as is every other American company, further enabling all those things. You have GOG as the European option that won’t pay tax to the Epstein class. Also you don’t really get to be a billionaire without also having substantial political influence…
But no one actually uses anything but steam.
Skill issue. Literally. See, unlike US politics, you don’t have to choose between lesser evil and pure evil, because there are more options not vetted by two political parties and their donors. And in fairness to US politics, the lesser evil is recognized as a lesser evil, whereas here every single time I call out the pure evil, someone shows up and goes “they’re not pure evil, they’re GOOD GUYS”
Valve has done bad guy things, and I will call out the fact they’ve done things and their owner has been rewarded with seven yachts for it. You can come back to me when the hypotheticals with EA become reality.
Billionaires bad? Boo, get new better material!
Whatever. Go get your shilling paycheck from billionaire Gabe. Again, I hope it is more than $0, cause nobody deserves to defend a rich asshole for free, everyone deserves a paycheck for doing things well. <3
That said there’s one point I noticed that’s making me feel very icky.
How many artists and modelers started out from submitting their works for tf2/dota2/cs:go? How many animators started from SFM? How many people became indie devs thanks to the existence of the Steam greenlight? How many people switched over to linux thanks to proton?
Wow. You’re saying this as if level designers haven’t started their careers by making custom levels for Doom, literally one of the earlier indie games by creator id. Hell, you’re giving the discontinued popularity gate called greenlight more credit than it deserves. The truth is Valve wouldn’t be here today without the Quake engine that id themselves made - they’ve driven more innovation than valve’s regression and capitalism sold as innovation. Yes, indie games existed before Valve has, shocker I know.
And as for Linux, once again, *wine. Even then, I switched to Linux and stayed because the basic experience has been elevated, and all of that without using any Valve software. If the experience isn’t better than it was before, I’d just go back to Windows. Besides, what is the point of Linux if I end up changing my unaccountable corporate master for another unaccountable corporate master, Valve?
I know all of this will fly over your head. This is for everyone else in the room who thinks a little bit of “good things” absolve one of responsibility. I can totally say Microsoft Windows was a positive influence because it made computing easy to access and develop for, but understandably nobody’s going to forgive them for the billion bad things they’ve done in turn.
Valve paid a bunch of publishers to sell their game exclusively on steam
Fuck yes. Here’s Darwinia going steam exclusive back in the day. Pretty scummy Epic behavior isn’t it?
https://forums.introversion.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=40203
and refused to implement basic features (like a shopping cart) in their UI?
Fun fact: itch.io doesn’t have a shopping cart, Google Play doesn’t have a shopping cart either, and they’re both established (itch is even beloved despite that shortcoming, I personally like them). Only scummy Epic gets this complaint constantly lodged against them. Curious.
Then bitched about how everyone more successful than them was evil and wrong?
I don’t care about their word battles, sorry.
Dude, get over it. Your precious company has enabled all the industry illnesses I mentioned and more, and all the pushback that the company gets for it is the owner being rewarded with seven yachts. If it were EA or dare I say Epic, I’d find you on the other side of the fence. Because that’s what this is. Blind simping. For your short novel of a post, I hope you are getting paid $0.01? Cause your hero doesn’t really care as much as you do, so you better be paid for it than be a fool and do it for free.
calling proton a “wine fork” is akin to calling a linux distro a “kernel fork”
It is a wine fork, and wouldn’t exist without the initial contributions that made wine, the actual hero of this story, in the first place. Next.
Second, Valve never “fucked over game ownership”,
Explain Steam to me then. Literally launched as a DRM built-in to hardcopies of Half-Life 2, using an account based activation scheme with a one-time use code. Literally the CD key people deride but now with a bloatware launcher and an internet connection requirement, for a single player game. After you use the code, the game is now bound to your account, and your hardcopy can’t be resold in a legally playable form. Oh and now in our current day, they literally can decide to delete your whole library of “subscriptions” as they call it. I’m sure you’ll find some way to blame literally any other party but Valve for things that Valve has done.
And because people like you kept throwing tons of money at them so other companies are compelled to copy them, along with their model of not owning anything… We get to the territory of…
accusing Valve in The Crew shutdown incident
And many countless other games that were shutdown or killed because of their DRM failing.
Does that mean that without Valve there’d be no crates? I highly doubt that.
It doesn’t matter. Point is they’re the first to popularize the concept and poison the entire industry with it. I don’t care what “nicities” they might have compared to other companies, the fucking idea itself is predatory and Valve even more so for spawning it.
Valve is one of the few rare exceptions that don’t try to exploit their consumers
Yeah, same Valve that sells in-game diamond rings for $100 and lootbox keys for $5. Same Valve that created the “trading card” system just to profit off of thin air by milking their userbase. Same Valve that spent years opposing refunds until Australia forced them to offer them. Totally not exploitative.
developing a platform that becomes a de-facto monopolist purely by the virtue of being that good
Propaganda. It is monopolist because it is. Their APIs deliberately lock in devs to their own ecosystem, such that it becomes harder to integrate into other ecosystems, therefore adding an artificial barrier to their competitors as they have to develop their own solutions and devs must also weigh whether they want to even bother with all this stuff. The recent lawsuits as well show they actually threaten devs when they have different prices in other locations. Plenty of reasons for their monopoly, and this rose-tinted “they’re just that good” is nonsense.
by sponsoring and promoting FOSS
Microsoft contributes to FOSS too. Tell me about how Bill Gates or Satya Nadella are cool people then.
If every corporate CEO was more like him, i think the world would be a better place.
Oh I’d be terrified of this world alright. The world where CEOs do all sorts of bad stuff and they get praised for it even as we lose ownership rights or more.
Now try to turn on your head and oppose me without trying to demean anything i say in your head by calling me a simp
I’ve played the game by your own rules and I regret it already. You’re so deep into believing the bull you’re spewing, I don’t think anyone will pull you out of it.
You don’t become a billionaire by “”“offering good services”“”. The only way you can do that is by exploiting people and hoarding money - the methods to achieving that are all laid down above. All billionaires should not have this wealth while other people don’t even have a roof above them. End of.
You know there’s more than two game companies, right? You know that unlike the presidency in the United States of Fascism, there can be more than one game distribution platform, and those can be run by multiple companies, yes? While you’re at it, buying games from Steam means your tax dollars go to the Trump Administration.
Oh, I should’ve clarified. My bad. By the same shit I meant their launchers are pretty similar in their origin stories, purpose, and how they get there.
I condemn all mass layoffs no matter who does it. Admittedly I haven’t heard about any mass layoffs at Valve in recent history, so I’ll give them they’re better on that front (unless proven otherwise).
Forking Wine and invoking XKCD #927 with Linux does not a hero create. Especially when said “”“hero”“” has fucked over game ownership and introduced the wider world to the original lootbox, the Mann Co. Crate that can only be opened with $4.99 keys. Funny how nobody mentions that, when it is even more useless and predatory than the Oblivion horse armor that people keep bringing up to this day (which I wouldn’t have forked over $2.5 but somehow even that low bar had more value to it). Gee whiz, no wonder we got The Crew’s shutdown and tons of in-game economies.
Stop simping for a fucking billionaire. Treat them all equally.
So this is how I learn that the Tim asshole ALSO has yachts. TIL. Thank you.
Also the fucking yacht owner owns multiple of these, for your information.
But i always thought GOG’S refund policy is more generous
Not to mention it they had it way before steam ever heard of refunds.
I wonder if people ever homebrew’d it to circumvent it (idk if this is even legal)
People have! Homebrewing it for piracy is definitely not legal, but you can hack it like any other PSP (okay technically you can get original homebrew for it kinda but not really legally). But if you’re a law abiding citizen, you can’t buy new digital games for it.
I think the only non-NSFW/NSFW-adjacent Game GOG gave out was Postal 2
Postal 2 was one of the games in the bundle I mentioned. HuniePop was included IIRC along other games like Fetish Locator. It was given away just after the other two stores caved in.
IIRC Didnt Visa and Mastercard pressure them
If they did, then they caved to them despite their wealth and resources. Meanwhile GOG gave away a bundle full of NSFW games and they’re also served by Visa and MC. AFAIK only they and itch.io publicly shot themselves here.
Paid mods?
A long while ago, they thought it was an okay idea and they actually sold mods for a short while before taking it out due to backlash. Skyrim was one of the games to have paid mods. I heard a year or two ago they were reconsidering the idea but I don’t remember the details. On that note, their mod store is locked to their own versions of most games, meaning that if Skyrim still had workshop mods (free or paid), you likely wouldn’t be able to download them for the GOG version of the game. I’m sure if Epic did this, I’ll be hearing all sorts of bloody murder all day.
i heard a government pressured them to doing this,yeah that sucks though
IIRC that was Australia. But even their refund policy now is shit. Two hours after you click launch on a game? GOG back then had a 14 day money back guarantee, now extended to a full 30 days refund policy.
Yeah that sucks to,but for me its fine for F2P Video games and if its not P2W
Worth noting P2W is a direct result of the F2P model that Valve has popularized in full fat PC games. Minecraft’s first April Fool’s joke is a parody of the TF2 store, long before its Bedrock Edition had a similar store for itself. It’s not a stretch to say they planted the seeds for games like Star Wars Battlefront 2017 which had you grind for too long of a time just to play the iconic Darth Vader.
and used games well i think the digital switch killed it
The killing started very slowly with HL2, which was the first physical game to require using steam keys to even be able to play it. Selling your copy of HL2 with a used key means the other person can’t legally play it. This practice really sped up with 2011’s PC physical version of Skyrim which did the same, and at that time many more games did it. Before long, we started seeing discs that don’t even have the game files. Microsoft tried to track and limit used games for the X1 console, but backtracked due to backlash. Bethesda continued “innovating” with the Fallout 76 cardboard disc. Now the practice has bled over to current gen consoles.
Tangentially related
The PSP Go was the first digital only console and since the PS Store was discontinued for it, yep, no more buying games for it.
i think for non-DRM Games you can Still own it on Steam???
There are very few of these games and the only way to know about them is a community-made spreadsheet compiled through trial and error. Unlike GOG, they’re not guaranteed to stay DRM-free - they can suddenly become DRM’d at any moment.
but today no one even owns a disc drive, steam just won on convenience
Few people own disc drives because of the constant attacks on physical media and ability to own things, especially games. It’s not that they “won on convenience,” but rather they “won” by making it so physical games slowly become just a more expensive one time redeem key for digital copies… which you can spend money on right now with Humble and the likes without moving an inch or waiting for the order to arrive. If it wasn’t for them, we would own more of our games.
They are responsible. They planted the seeds with HL2 as early as 2004. Then they essentially made it not only feasible but also popular to make the physical games of even third parties be just glorified one use digital codes, and all of this waaaaay before 2013’s Xbox One attempted to do similar things and got booed very hard.
Caving in to the anti-NSFW demands is “doing nothing”? Paid mods? Not offering refunds for more than a decade? Being one of the first to popularize loot boxes and with it “marketplaces” of items that don’t exist, where you aren’t even guaranteed the horse armor you want to buy? Literally destroying physical media, used games, and game ownership in one fell swoop so we have to rely on GOG to get the latter back in some form? Damn, their logo must really have the same memetic effects the Apple one has.
As a GOG user, I don’t give a toss if they don’t offer even 1% of the features others may or may not offer. They promise I get a game, and I do get a game. It’s up to me to get those other features for my games provided they’re possible.
But I get it, there have been the cases like that Hitman game you mentioned, which shouldn’t have made it to the store at all. There’s a game where the news copy literally says that the DRM-free version is missing features. Ultimately though these instances are few and far, but they did have a lot of backlash to them before something happened. That’s something I agree with you on and they could do better. No signs of that getting better if their response to the LLM thing has been… Lackluster.
Also Valve did not create their fork of Wine. They just forked Wine, an already existing project. If Wine didn’t exist, Valve would have nothing. (Come to think about it, even their precious HL’s engine was IIRC a rewrite or fork of the one for Quake).
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What, for questioning the mental gymnastics over the number for the price tag? 3 is 5 and 8 is 10 or whatever? Just say your game is worth $8 and leave it at that. All this feels like the rationale used to explain not rounding up the prices of everything, $2.99 instead of $3 - something I’d like to see gone too.
I once saw someone somewhere comment that HL2 is actually a tech demo meant to show off the physics stuff. Which I wholeheartedly agree with, and even that didn’t win me over. The game doesn’t feel like a shooter meant to be enjoyed, rather it feels like Valve flexing its muscles only because they can.
I played this game twice, and tried to get to the end twice, and in both times I just WALKED AWAY. The original was actually playable and beatable in comparison.
One moment it’s a shooter, then it becomes a driving game, then it becomes one of the earliest walking sims with long stretches of nothing, then a horror game, then a tactical shooter, and it wasn’t good at any of them - it was all just cobbled together. Valve would have had a much better game if they sold just Ravenholm, the only part that actually evoked strong feelings in me.
And by this point in time I can’t help but think the funny letter G guy is just a Mary Sue to glue the game together with very little character or substance besides “man in black”.
I firmly believe the only reason this game is “beloved” is the same reason that iPhones sell just because of the logo of the company that made them. (And also because of this game every fucking company that breathes has an online DRM launcher)
Fear by Monolith and its expansions on the other hand, they were so much better despite the aiming system being unintuitive in comparison to HL the 2. Everything just clicks. I just loved Fear. But I’m sure this won’t save me from “Ubisoft target audience” allegations.
I saw the mastodon post about ad traction. Strange that they would redirect to a middle service like that, considering GOG itself supports affiliate links. I think you can see these sorts of links on PCGW too. Still, it’s good that they addressed it, but the ad tracker thing remains iffy.
I am under the impression that even if GOG doesn’t support them to some official capacity, that they are still cool with them, and for all intents and purposes we basically can treat them like that no problem. And needless to say, it’s a great thing that it is open source - if it were Galaxy or Steam or Epic or whatever we’d find out about this stuff way too late, get even slower turnaround and the damage would be already done. Not to mention we can fork the project if someone’s dedicated enough. Like I’d definitely appreciate a simpler option making use of Comet for one.
This is real iffy. Do you know when that change was made?
Fortunately the thing about GOG is I can drop those launchers anytime I want, I’m not stuck with anything unlike some others. Since Heroic relies on another open source project (I believe) called Comet it’s also not hard for an alternative to pop up.
GOG’s installers work great with Wine as do the games themselves. If you desperately need a launcher before you can even consider them, you can use Heroic Games Launcher - in fact I’d prefer if they throw their weight behind it than on Galaxy. A match made in heaven.
I guess the other good thing is GOG is not a US company, they’re based in Poland. No tax money going to the American regime and their shenanigans I never asked for.
It uninstalled AnkiConnect for me. No warning first to tell me the app was malicious (it isn’t), no prompt of whether or not it’s OK to remove it. Just yeeted.
I had to disable Play Protect from Google Play’s settings, and that wasn’t enough as notifications would now pop up saying the app is malicious after I brought it back, so then I shut off those notifications.
When the warranty on my phone runs out or it’s under threat of not being able to unlock the bootloader, I’ll unlock the bootloader and put on a custom ROM without Gapps. Fuck this bullshit. And Google wants to make installing apps harder to feed its ego. Fuck billionaires.