Games
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
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That's why I love gog, and it's the only store that gets my gaming money. The games are mine, as long as I keep a backup of the installer. I can do with them what I want.
I see why the newest AAA games are a must have for younger gamers, but as an older one I now have the patience to simply wait until it releases on gog if I actually have the urge to play it.
Digital is fantastic, I miss the boxes and handbooks and feelies, but I don't miss the discs.
Other stores have DRM free games too. For example Cyberpunk 2077 is DRM free on Steam. DRM, for the most part, is forced by publishers rather than stores.
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games
You can do that with Steam games too. The ones without DRM.
And it's the developer that chooses if they want DRM.
Well can you see beforehand which game uses Steam DRM? And I still need the client installed to download anything, and even then I only archive the actual game, not any dependency.
The steam store itself doesn't show if a game uses Steam-DRM (which is a buncha bullshit if you ask me) but the PCGamingWiki usually has that information.
You are sufficiently old. Good job.
I always wanted Wishbringer SO BAD because it came with that damn rock.
Hell yeah. Love GOG.
But for me, while I love old games, I need my new shit lol.
Like bf6 has been a gem for me. Some bugs and bullshit, but I do like it. Which, call me stupid for this but bf6 and modern battle/war games are a bit of therapy for me. I joined the Marines, got to last week of basic training, came back from team(?) Week and was told to get my shit on the front deck or whatever. Ended up I had hep c. Paperwork fell through and it wasn't caught till I was almost done
And grant you, I wanted to "fight for America and the people in it" since I was like 7. I was 20 just outta h.s. It tore my world apart. Had to do meds and all that. Pills and injection.
Anyways. Games like battlefield or even the more serious ones like Insurgency helped me use some of the stuff I learned on my own over the years and stuff in basic to not feel like it was all a huge waste of my life.
Tl"dr I enjoy modern fps games because they help me deal with my trauma in life.
99% of games will never release on GoG no matter how old they get though, because once they’re on GoG they’re essentially free.
GoG is great, but GoG is fundamentally never going to be a competitive storefront. It will always be niche and missing most games people want to buy.
Also people don’t seem to realize but you can “back up” digital Xbox and (I believe) PS5 games too. Download them, transfer them to an external HDD or 10 if you want, and then at any stage you can plug them back in to your console, transfer them over to the internal drive, and they work. Even without internet. It just has to be on your console that is marked as “home console”.
Unlike all the ones on Steam that never get pirated? Steam DRM is so easy to bypass it may as well not exist. Also, unlike GoG, you can add your pirated game to Steam and play multiplayer.
There's no way Steam don't know this is happening which means there's no way it's not intended (especially given Gaben's stance on piracy).
There’s a huge difference between no drm and “easily” bypassed drm.
That might work for some games, but there's an increasing number of games requiring you to establish some sort of connection to the internet even for single player or mostly single player games (Lego Horizon for instance).
Try to transfer one of those and load it up on a new console without an internet connection.
Sure, your "home console" might work for some games for now. But in 10-15 years when Sony is trying to sell you the PS8, they're going to be cutting off service to the PS5. What happens when you have to take that device in for maintenance and they need to do a factory reset? You need to log in again to activate it, except now it's a brick that might only be able to play a few games on physical media. Anything downloaded/backed up would likely require that specific account.
By that time I’d be more worried about finding a working PS5 than their auth servers being taken down. That’s also assuming that they have completely removed backwards compatibility, which in an x86 world is highly unlikely.
The fact is that to preserve games forever, digital distribution is actually much better. These consoles will be emulated at some stage, and they won’t be playing physical games.
More games release on GOG when customers show there's money to be made there. If you make it important to you that your games are DRM-free and spend more money on GOG than Steam, you help tip those scales. It's not fundamental. If DRM is poison for making money, then fewer games will employ it.
But the games people want to buy on steam aren’t on GoG, and there’s no Steam vs GoG sales charts for people to point publishers to and say “look! Look how much money we will spend if you go drm free on GoG!”.
Also there’s just no denying it, and even trying is disingenuous - a game like GTA 6 releasing on GoG without DRM would sell significantly less than it would on a platform with DRM. It’s just the truth. It would be on torrents and every download site the minute it’s released, and millions and millions and millions of people who were going to buy it would get it for free instead.
In the terrible state that the video game industry is in for developers, releasing a big AAA game DRM-free would be the last game they ever release.
Last I looked into it video game piracy actually had a net benefit on sales. Any advantage DRM has from a sales point of view is null after about 3 months post launch anyway. It can and does kill small indie devs but any big boy in the industry, piracy usually benefits sales.
Piracy never has a benefit on sales. Where are you getting that from?
Don't be so sure. Apparently they publishers don't make hard numbers publicly available anymore so there's no good data but there was a survey of denuvo games.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/10/the-true-cost-of-game-piracy-20-percent-of-revenue-according-to-a-new-study/
Unfortunately that still doesn't answer the question but until publishers post honest numbers we'll never have the proper metrics to measure the actual impact piracy has. But in the day freeware like Doom basically relied entirely on piracy for sales so it's not an out of pocket take that piracy could benefit sales. It is an old take though. I'm old.
Edit - Also found this which looks at how piracy can help outside of direct sale conversions: https://jier.org/index.php/journal/article/view/3453/2764
That right there says that piracy hurts gaming. A game with drm cracked in the first week can expect to lose 20% of total revenue. That’s a gigantic loss.
Software sales are heavily front loaded. Releasing with no DRM would absolutely annihilate game sales.
Cyberpunk sold well. Kingdom Come Deliverance sold well. Launching without DRM does not absolutely annihilate sales.
And how much better would they have sold if they weren’t DRM free?
And how much worse would they have sold if they weren't DRM free? You can't assert they would have sold better without actual data, and there isn't any available. But in the case of cyberpunk specifically, made by cdpr, the company behind gog, I can safely say that if they had DRM they would have instantly alienated a significant portion of their fan base.
That's not exactly what it's saying. It's specific to denuvo games which generally means AAA publishers, it's a small sample size, and it's about the impact DRM has on sales, not piracy. It's not an arbitrary distinction. I'll grant it definitely implies piracy has a net negative effect on sales but that's not at all what it's actually saying.
That’s 100% what it’s saying though. If the drm is cracked within a week they lose 20% of their revenue……because of piracy. 20% of total revenue they miss out on because those people pirate the game instead of buying it.
DRM fights against piracy. Without it, piracy runs rampant and costs developers and publishers massive amounts of money.
That's not how data works. It doesn't say anything but what it says. You're making inferences, which sure fair but until there's data specific to your inferences (there isn't) you can't say that. You can say denuvo cracks in the first week in the case of some 90 games resulted in up to a maximum of twenty percent loss of sales. It is an important distinction. And the massive success of DRM free titles also goes against your assertion.
Plenty of the games people want to buy are on GOG. Definitely not all of them, but you can find GOTY winners like Clair Obscur and Baldur's Gate 3, games that should have won more awards like Kingdom Come: Deliverance II and The Alters, awesome indie games like Mina the Hollower and Escape from Ever After, plus the old stuff that GOG restores like Dino Crisis and Alpha Protocol that had pent-up demand. There's no chart to compare sales, but developers talk, and they know their own sales data. Firms like Circana buy sales data and then sell the analysis back to help companies figure out what will help them make more money, including where people are buying video games.
That's easy to claim and impossible to prove. Baldur's Gate 3 released day 1 without DRM and still went on to sell over 20M copies; how many people do you think pirated it? Millions and millions? There are some people who are always going to pirate, but I think most prefer the experience of just buying the damn thing and getting better service out of it, not the least of which is quick and easy patching. We also now live in a world where Denuvo is fully broken open. There's no difference in one's ability to pirate once the game has been cracked at all. Piracy is going to happen one way or another, and GTA6 is basically guaranteed to make more money than any other video game that came before it.
This is demonstrably false, given the AAA games that release on GOG all the time.
Why could you only name like 3 then? Which 2026 AAA games have released on GOG?
Which GOG release bankrupted a company by way of piracy?
Which AAA developers released their AAA game on GOG day 1 in 2026?
You've already moved the goalposts so far, what does it matter? If Kingdom Come: Deliverance II just last year doesn't show that DRM-free won't just invite piracy, or Baldur's Gate 3 just two years before that, no answer will be good enough for you. Few AAA companies choose to release their games on GOG. More will choose to if that's where the money is. Indiana Jones didn't come to GOG less than a year after its initial release because they just wanted pirates to have it, finally. When Divinity, The Witcher 4, and the new Cyberpunk games come out, a few things will happen: they will sell in the tens of millions of copies and make a boatload of money; they will be available DRM-free on GOG; they will still sell most of their copies on Steam anyway; people will pirate it (but they would have even if the games were only on Steam anyway). Mina the Hollower was make or break for Yacht Club, but they put the game on GOG because they wanted to make money from those customers as well. If they were so sure that people would have just pirated it, surely they would have opted not to release it there.
So “none” is your answer.
Yeah, so far, the same as the number of games that bankrupted their studios by releasing DRM-free. Maybe the new Silent Hill this year will be the first, but the last two released on GOG just fine, so it's not looking good for your thesis.