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GOG Announces Open Beta For New Game Distribution Platform
New submitter Donaithnen writes: Like many geeks, I'm against the idea of DRM in general and have championed GOG.com's DRM-free approach to selling games online. Yet like many geeks, I've also often succumbed to the temptation of Steam because of the convenience of tracking, installing, and playing my PC game purchases through the launcher (not to mention the compulsion of collecting achievements, and watching the total playtime for my favorite games (to my occasional dismay). Now, GOG has announced the open beta for GOG Galaxy, an entirely optional launcher to allow those who want (and only those who want) to have all the same features when playing GOG games.
'Cause Steam integration for multiplayer is a pretty serious upgrade from the days of the good old Gamespy server search program.
I haven't had the chance to try it yet, but multiplayer is one of the features listed in the FAQ. They also have "Game inviting & joining" listed as coming soon, but i'm not sure what exactly the difference is between that and regular multiplayer is.
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Crossplay-enabled games offer online play between GOG and Steam. Because where you buy your games shouldn't prevent you from playing with friends.
Cross-play doesn't require any setup or configuration. Steam users won't need to create GOG.com accounts or install GOG Galaxy, while GOG.com users won't need to create Steam accounts. Just log in, launch your game, and start playing online!
That is the killer feature, IMHO. I was scrolling through expecting to just ignore this like I did the downloader, but that actually provides something of value above what you can do with the website.
Troll cleanup requested in aisle 5, please.
It was an acronym at first. However after they started releasing newer games (first among those being their own "Witcher" games) they stopped using the old name and just go by "GOG" or "GOG.com" now.
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I'm guessing that much like KFC trying to avoid the stigma of "Fried", GOG is trying to dodge the stigma of "Old" for a big market segment out there.
Did you somehow miss this part of the summary? "an entirely optional launcher"
Really? You're upset that they're releasing an _optional_ tool? If they were dropping the ability to download DRM-free installers for the games and forcing you to use the the launcher instead then i would be upset too. But that's not what's happening at all, so i'm confused as to why you're in such a bother.
While I don't have many games from GOG (I have no qualms with Steam and a huge backlog already), this could be worthwhile, especially if they beat out Origin and UPlay in the quality department. Doubly so if they can match Steam Sales. I put my name in for a beta invite and hope it goes well.
I can't find it in the announcement, but I read somewhere else that part of GOG Galaxy will be downloading the installers for games to your computer, so you can install them outside Galaxy or if the service ever terminates.
They can drop the 'optional' part at any time without warning.
If you care, then make sure to save the installers for posterity. If they ever do institute DRM, which I doubt will happen but hey whatever, you'll still have the DRM-free installers.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And any other company could stop providing whatever it is you want at any time without warning as well. I'm not sure how switching from one company that could potentially screw you over (but isn't doing so right now and promises they won't in the future) to another company that could potentially screw you over (but isn't doing so right now and promises they won't in the future) is going to accomplish anything.
I've paid five bucks for a game I already physically own so that I don't need to dig the CD out of the garage more times than I'd like to admit, and probably a lot of old CDs and low quality CDRs don't even work anymore, it's not like I've checked them in a decade or two. Used to pirate them (surely it's ethical if I still have the box?) but that's even more of a hassle. Convenience can be worth one hell of a premium, and who cares if I could have dug up a working wrapper or working DosBox configuration somewhere thirty pages down on a forum thread on archive.org? That's something those millenials have time for. Hell yes I'm willing to pay to not waste that kind of time.
You don't have to use the launcher. Even with Steam you don't need their crappy launcher (you can't use the launcher for things like Skyrim if you want to use the script extender).
True, GOG can't retroactively add DRM to games you already have purchased and downloaded.
There are some serious stinkers on GOG.
Daikatana, for instance.
Someone actually put forth the effort to repackage Daikatana.
Some men just want to watch the world burn.
Steam overlay is the first thing I turn off. I don't see the point of it at all.
Yes, I've used it for that purpose. Though I tend to go for the $2.50 titles for things that tend to grind the DVD a lot while trying to install a game.
I did for awhile. Then I went and bought a physical copy of a game, from a series that never had DRM or even really serious copy protection, only to find out when it showed up in the mail that it required Steam...
Since then I've gotten a few more. Usually when there's a really cheap summer sale and the price is low enough that the DRM is ok, because $3 for a game that is only "rented" and with forced upgrades seems a reasonable price.
In particular, Portal and especially Portal 2 are worth selling a pound of your soul. Skip Half Life 2 though, it will only destroy your fond nostalgia for Half Life 1.
I did pay full price for Wasteland 2 on Steam, pre-release. But I was foolishly thinking that it was not available on GOG.com, and maybe I was drinking a bit too. I still kick myself over that. There's no DRM for Wasteland 2 at least, but any patches have to come through Steam.
I have some games I would like to return, or at least give away for free, but I'm stuck with them. Oh well. (lego harry potter, someone said it was fun, but I can't figure it out, it's like it's designed for a minimum of 2 players and a console controller)
The older DOS games and many of the indie games are all on GOG anyway, usually for the same sales price as each other. So the line that Steam has the best sales and is the best supporter of indie is just wrong.
Daikatana needed repackaging?
Seems to work fine over here, Windows 7, original install CD.
What got fucked up that it needed a repackage (besides the entire game being a nerfed piece of shit?)
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
"The DRM passed to Gabe, who had this one chance to destroy evil forever, but the hearts of men are easily corrupted. And the power of DRM has a will of its own. It betrayed Gabe, to the death of consumer rights. And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And from the year two thousand and three, consumer freedoms passed on only to GoG. Until, when chance came, DRM ensnared a new bearer. DRM came to the creators of GoG, who took it and swore it would be optional, and but as with all others it will inevitably consume them. DRM will give to GoG unnatural power over consumers. For as long as they hold such power it will poison their minds; and in the gloom of an admin's cave, it waits. Darkness creeps back into the filefolders of the world. Rumor grows of a shadow in the C:\, whispers of a nameless fear, and one day DRM will perceive: Its time has now come. "
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
The Game Boy Color version of Daikatana actually didn't suck. So perhaps what they needed to do was repackage the GBC game and wrap it up in one of those newfangled hi-res emulators that replaces each of the game's 8x8 pixel tiles with a redrawn high-res 32x32 pixel tile. (See "HiSMS".) This would blow the game up to a 640x576 window.
There are some serious stinkers on GOG.
Daikatana, for instance.
Daikatana seems to be the "Ribbon interface" of games. It's the game everyone has learned to whine about, but in reality there is not anything terribly bad about it.
Daikatana has overly bad reputation. SiN has overly good reputation. They both are on the same line. Not best shooters on the planet, but still quite nice snacks. There are waaay worse games than those.
And you can always keep the original installers on an external hard drive that only gets plugged in when you want to install the game. They "flick the switch", you say "fuck off", uninstall their shite, and go back to playing the game how it was meant to played.
I think your tinfoil hat is on too tight, it's giving you comprehension problems.
But they could issue an update through their new updater launcher which adds DRM.
One of their core ideologies is to be DRM-free. Breaking that promise would upset a lot of customers, so it's unlikely that they are going to do it.
I've been avoiding GOG for purchases simply because their downloader was/is horrible. I had a Witcher update that required me to download the entire game install all over again in multiple installer files. No proper launcher, no proper game library, just a mess.
Maybe it's time to look into GOG again.
The main fail with Diakatana was expectation management. Prior to launch it had so much hype about how it would totally redefine gaming. And then they released a game that was... okay. Not particularly good, not particularly bad, and with a few issues that, if fixed, could have made it much better.
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And - to be honest - I do not expect they would make that 90 degrees U-turn.
That's pretty hard to do, unless you're driving on a hypercube.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
DRM-free is one of the fundamentals that people buy on G.O.G. for.
To play devil's advocate, so was the absence of regional pricing, and yeah, when they went back on that, there was a hell of a shitstorm.
Magog is an unofficial search engine for the gog.com catalog.
Games have screenshot capabilities. I don't know the last time I played a game that didn't. And modern nvidia cards paired with even vaguely modern CPUs let you use Shadowplay to record video, to boot. I haven't tried it because I'm not currently so good at any games that I think anyone would want to watch me play them, but allegedly if you have a bundle of cores you don't even notice.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Even those issues have mostly been fixed in subsequent patches.
They *still* haven't implemented compressed downloads. During the Alpha, that was understandable, but come on now.