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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.
Invitations are absolutely an awesome feature, but you know what would blow my socks off? If the GOG launcher handled all the bullshit firewall crap.
I still get games where the authors have failed to bother to document the port(s) their server uses or where they think it's awesome to have the server start up on a random port from 1024 to 65534. Usually 30 pages deep in the game forum there's a thread where you find posts like "i forwarded UDP 19228 and the server showed up on the browser for 30 seconds but nobody could connect and I couldn't get it to show up again after a restart". If, along with all the other brilliant work GOG has done to get the games working in current versions of windows, GOG's launcher popped up a window like steams cdkey window that said
I think my socks loosened a bit just thinking about it.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
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.
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.'"