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.

I considered not responding to this for a bit. I’ll just cave in, if not for you then for everyone else in the room.

If you haven’t watched the video, GOG has been dabbling in genAI for two years now, thanks to their Head of Product, who unironically replied to a tweet that said something along the lines of “I made 30k USD with Instagram AI girls, here’s how you can do it.” (Also he really likes the Nazi called Musk). They’ve generated banners with questionable to outright sloppy quality as well as other images.

It’s not farfetched to assume the next step will be to “start using AI tools to revitalize old games or use AI code to make old games compatible to work on modern OSes.”

So the best time to get mad is now, not later.

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.

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.

I hear of lgogdownloader. There’s plenty of projects like this. I second the notion to download all your stuff, or as much as you can now.

He’s essentially just Steve Jobs. Remix existing things, get all the credit for it. Literally create all the service problems by normalizing launcher DRM, and still gets credited for that stupid quote.

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).

If only any of them defended those who can’t defend themselves from evil. But the suffering and the cruelty is sadly the point.

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.

Even in Cyberpunk lore, there’s a former husk of what the USA used to be! But not here. Damn.

It doesn’t matter. He’s clearly saying the only outcome he’ll accept is one that benefits him. Dictators don’t have to be smart or persuasive to be dictators.

What a horrible workplace this was. I’m really sorry to hear about that. May all of these terrible workplaces go bankrupt!

So it wasn’t just me then.

Yeah, martyring yourself for the cause is the greatest honor and gets you into the door of heavens. Opportunistic stuff like that.

Good thing I didn’t buy this game. Or continue to buy anything from steam. I got lost trying to figure out what this is even talking about, other than money money money.

You did it!

If by last week you mean the last month, and if by read you mean like not even getting past introducing the main characters-

ハイスクールＤｘＤ

I know, ooooooold.

No, I’m not going to translate it for you. That’s how I’m reading it. Learn Japanese or something, it’s very fun and rewarding.

Which reminds me. Hotline Miami has a native Linux build, yet I had to install a few more libs to get it to work. The funniest part is that this was a GOG installer, so it should have had the libs built in. If I downloaded the Windows installer and used it with Wine, I wouldn’t have ran into this problem.

Another problem is with some but not all Unity games. I don’t remember what the other one was, but HuniePop’s Linux build would be skipping frames, and the Windows build would run just as intended.

It’s then I learned to stick to Windows versions of games even if they got a Linux version. Besides, I can send these installers to actual Windows devices.