There are way too many people lining up to fellate Gabe for this to be accurate.
People might get pissed off when DRM is buggy enough for them to notice, but most gamers don’t realise that they don’t actually own a single game in their Steam library.
Steam games do not need DRM to be sold there - the publishers chose to have it if it exists. Many can be run from the .exe without going through Steam.
I take some sense of ownership over my Steam library in that I can and will immediately pirate the game with the DRM stripped out if Valve ever decides to revoke my access to it.
On the other hand, this – and buying from a better company – is why I actively prefer GOG, even in cases when the price is higher. (But pssst, hey, Beyond a Steel Sky is $3.50 on GOG right now compared to Steam’s $35.) The fact I have to launch the Steam client to play a game I paid for is absurd, and I regret every purchase I made, like Stardew ValleyTerraria, before I knew GOG existed. The main outstanding issue to me now is that GOG refuses to port its Galaxy client to Linux.
Heroic is an impressive achievement. It just isn’t a full replacement – and most of these points I’m about to list aren’t things it’s trying to or should necessarily do as a games launcher. Off the top of my head:
It doesn’t work for social aspects like friends, statuses, etc.
It doesn’t work for monitoring achievements.
The storefront is just the actual gog.com webpage rendered as a surface. GOG Galaxy’s store UI, by contrast, flows with everything else.
I don’t think games auto-update, although I could be wrong.
It’s bloated by nature of also being a launcher for Epic and Amazon – platforms I will never use. GOG Galaxy allows crossplatform stuff, but it’s not a full-on multilauncher.
The UI is pretty ass. I sympathize a lot with this one as someone who works on the (often disastrously undercoordinated) UI of a similar-profile project.
Rectangular UI elements’ corner rounding is all over the place (from sharp 90° to Material 3 and everything inbetween).
Themes are extremely samey with an enormous bias toward dark themes (I say this as someone who exclusively uses dark themes: a single light theme and thirteen dark themes means you don’t give a shit).
You can’t hide the left-hand menu bar to actually center the page you’re viewing.
Actions like toolbar dropdowns have no animations (I understand not wanting these; that’s accommodated with a “Disable Animations” option).
There’s absolutely zero compatibility with Orca (screen reader) that I can find.
Etc.
Again, all of these except the UI aren’t things Heroic is doing wrong or even supposed to be doing at all.
Side note: in Heroic, the GOG storefront opens with UTM parameters in the URL for “adtraction”. Wonder what that’s about.
Me too, but there’s a chicken egg problem of the studios not putting games there because it doesn’t have a big market share, and gamers not using it because it doesn’t have all the games.
Yeah, thats where it needs the support of gamers. But it’s not practical without big games and to buy indie games there, even I do care about my library of games in the same place.
People from poor countries were not buying games because the prices were expensive compared to their income. For that regional pricing was introduced to combat piracy. Some revenue is better than no revenue.
The underlying scam is the concept of a “cost of living” that’s somehow different in different places, and a minimum wage that can be different for two people who nonetheless might be expected to buy the same thing.
Anything that touches this concept and tries to accommodate instead of destroy it is going to inherit its foolishness.
I saw another source that claimed ~25% of the top-rated games are DRM-free, so it seems to be quite lopsided. And even moreso if you happen to like indie games I imagine
I happen to like Open source games the most, with some exceptions :D but OpenTTD is one of my most favourite games. I wish games were made open-source like decade after release.
There are way too many people lining up to fellate Gabe for this to be accurate.
People might get pissed off when DRM is buggy enough for them to notice, but most gamers don’t realise that they don’t actually own a single game in their Steam library.
Steam games do not need DRM to be sold there - the publishers chose to have it if it exists. Many can be run from the .exe without going through Steam.
I take some sense of ownership over my Steam library in that I can and will immediately pirate the game with the DRM stripped out if Valve ever decides to revoke my access to it.
On the other hand, this – and buying from a better company – is why I actively prefer GOG, even in cases when the price is higher. (But pssst, hey, Beyond a Steel Sky is $3.50 on GOG right now compared to Steam’s $35.) The fact I have to launch the Steam client to play a game I paid for is absurd, and I regret every purchase I made, like
Stardew ValleyTerraria, before I knew GOG existed. The main outstanding issue to me now is that GOG refuses to port its Galaxy client to Linux.Heroic launcher can manage your GOG games on linux
Heroic is an impressive achievement. It just isn’t a full replacement – and most of these points I’m about to list aren’t things it’s trying to or should necessarily do as a games launcher. Off the top of my head:
Again, all of these except the UI aren’t things Heroic is doing wrong or even supposed to be doing at all.
Side note: in Heroic, the GOG storefront opens with UTM parameters in the URL for “adtraction”. Wonder what that’s about.
I hope GOG will get big like steam. Only if people care about DRM.
Me too, but there’s a chicken egg problem of the studios not putting games there because it doesn’t have a big market share, and gamers not using it because it doesn’t have all the games.
Yeah, thats where it needs the support of gamers. But it’s not practical without big games and to buy indie games there, even I do care about my library of games in the same place.
GOG doesn’t have DRM. But for the same reason it doesn’t have regional pricing. And I ain’t spending that much on games. 🤷♂️
GoG does have regional pricing in some countries. It’s very limited but saying they don’t have it at all is false.
Regional pricing is a fucking scam driven by unstoppable greed.
Lol.
Lmao.
Privileged and ignorant take.
If you can sell your product to someone for X amount, it is pure greed to sell if for 10X to someone else.
It’s the other way around.
People from poor countries were not buying games because the prices were expensive compared to their income. For that regional pricing was introduced to combat piracy. Some revenue is better than no revenue.
The underlying scam is the concept of a “cost of living” that’s somehow different in different places, and a minimum wage that can be different for two people who nonetheless might be expected to buy the same thing.
Anything that touches this concept and tries to accommodate instead of destroy it is going to inherit its foolishness.
…cool
Most games on Steam are DRM-free and you can start them without a launcher (meaning Steam).
So you can buy a game, download it, copy game files, refund, keep playing.
Most? Try 4%.
OK, I stand corrected.
It seems that I’m just a fan of the DRM-free games.
I saw another source that claimed ~25% of the top-rated games are DRM-free, so it seems to be quite lopsided. And even moreso if you happen to like indie games I imagine
I happen to like Open source games the most, with some exceptions :D but OpenTTD is one of my most favourite games. I wish games were made open-source like decade after release.
Can you give some more examples? I’m interested
Absolutely recommend if you like Red Alert or RTS - OpenRA.
Turn-based strategy Battle for Wesnoth. It’s old, I played it first 16 years ago, but I returned to it recently and it’s OK.
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead I have not played, only saw reviews, but it has its fans.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon for some roguelike action.
0AD is another RTS, I’ve heard good things about it, but haven’t played it myself yet.
I like Mindustry (automation/RTS/Tower Defense) and Unciv (performant Civ 5 clone with quality of life improvements) too.
* DRM free except for steam itself