cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/shit/p/1237508/everyone-wants-to-own-their-games-yet-gog-remains-niche-store

Are they? I'm at about 300 owned on GOG vs about 2 dozen on steam that where mostly via humble bundle.

gog make it pretty hard to like them, like putting AI slop on storefront and the recent email controversy they didn't really apologise for.

i like how its dogs

GOG needs a Linux app. Hero launcher is ok but I don't like needing another app to get to another app, it's like needing a car to get to my other car.

Yes. Their market share is not even remotely close to Steam. You are not representative.

I’m willing to bet that email was helped out by AI.

What I suspect happened was they had AI write the email, AI is notoriously emoji happy, and the AI saw Slavic mysticism stuff and entered into a nazi rhetoric informed mode and added those Unicode characters.

LLMs are trained on the internet, that includes the racist nazi parts.

And of course nobody bothered looking it over.

Wait what? I've not heard about this

My 4 most recently bought games are from gog.

Why? I like not needing an app and just downloading an installer that is mine to keep.

But the people complaining are also a minority, most are just bending over for DRM

What do you mean needing an app to get to another app?

Heroic literally just downloads the game installer and installs the game. Heroic is the single app.

If I could launch Gog just as easly as Steam games in big picture/game mode on Bazzite that would be so good

The problem with this defence is that they did notice it because they removed it from the German version of the email, they said as such.

They sent out an email with Nazi symbols: see https://lemmyverse.link/feddit.uk/post/50278677

The problem with GOG is that most developers don't release on there. They are afraid of letting people buy their games without DRM.

Another problem with GOG is that their site is super broken on Firefox for some reason.

That said, whenever I'm looking to buy a game, I look on GOG first.

Should also be noted that it's basically impossible to get into gog as a small indie dev

It is essentially a "don't call us, we call you" situation

https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/gog-moves-toward-native-linux-support-major-shift-drm-free-gaming

It's stated to be a thing in the works

So what you're saying is I don't need Heroic to get to GoG?

This was the case a decade ago, but it's absolutely not the case anymore. If the "Becoming a DIK" creator can do it, anyone can do it.

You get Itch.io for that.

This isn't a know against small devs, but I do get it a bit becsuse there is a LOT of questionable nonsense on the indie dev circuit. Like, I have played a lot of them too. But Steam is kind of bad with letting too much garbage in and frankly, I stopped using Steam as much over the years for it.

I mean, Becoming a DIK is kind of a complete game though. Steam has some stuff that feels like someone stuck stickman art in a GODOT tutorial and called it good.

Nope, still is.

Source: a friend has a couple (not-slop) games , and if you reach out to them, they basically tell you that they will contact you, if they want you in their store

Part of the issue is GoG still doesn’t do gift cards. You can easily send people there if they allow gift cards.

Another year of Steam for the nieces and nephews…I’ll inquire again next year.

You use heroic to login to your gog account directly. It manages your library from the launcher.

It is a single application. I don’t understand why you think you need two applications to install and launch gog games.

Market share is one thing but to call them niche is another. Yeah, there are a fair number of games I would like to get that are only on DRM laden platforms, but I still have a solid library well beyond what's needed to keep entertained.

That's hilarious that there's basically an employee addicted to trash hentai games at GOG.

They have stated that for like 10 years lol

Small market share is literally what niche means here. According to various sources online, GOG currently has a 2-3% market share. It’s smaller than Epic, and smaller even than the Microsoft Store. That is niche, whichever way you slice it.

More broadly it's a term used for to denote something fitting a very specific purpose or suitable to a small subset of people, animals or things.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/simple/niche

GOG is not a system meant specifically for people looking for some specific thing, it's a general purpose market with a wide variety of offerings that happens to have a smaller user base.

Their main customers might be called a niche market in that they're largely a specific group looking for DRM free games, but the platform isn't limited to them.

Anyhow, enough pedantics for one morning...

I didn’t say it was a defence.

It’s sheer incompetence. Just speculating into how the fuck this happened at all.

I thought they did apologize for it?

The apology was "I'm sorry you such a stupid babies you don't know that SS rune is used by slavics actually (not true btw, who cares)"

Yes. You are part of the niche.

Maybe because AI said it was safer to remove them? It's not a great defense but basically every company has gone ape shit over AI now. I actually am being actively pushed to use it at work even though I don't want to.

Probably reliable revenue.

Bad news, Steam is dropping gift cards as a measure against scammers.

I thought they were still doing ecards.

Do you need Steam to get to Steam?

Disappointing lack of devs putting their games on GOG these days. I feel like it used to be way more common, and that devs used to care more about computing history and culture.

Don't let perfect become the enemy of good

We can't ignore the preservation efforts GOG has done including spending resources themselves on updating and improving games like Alpha Protocol and Dino Crisis

If "the good" is dog whistles for fascism, I rather not.

Their casual dismissal of this is one of their many red flags over the years.

Funny that they were so terrified of sending it in Germany because it would have broken Germany laws about Nazi signs, so they excluded Germany from the email while sending it everywhere else.

It's not the first time they used AI for their marketing either. They've been caught before.

Yeaaaah that's definitely a red flag though.

Fuck man

They market it roughly like that, but without explicitly saying that you buy any more ownership than you would elsewhere. That's because you buy the exact same license rights, the difference is that they deliberately forgo an enforcement mechanism.

I think it's the best they can do, because otherwise the publishers wouldn't play ball. But still this licensing deal is not really what we want when we ask to own our copies.

I love GoG. It's my go to after Steam.

10 years ago they intended to, then dropped it. Starting this year, they looked at it with renewed interest, hired a senior dev for it, and have actually been working on it.

GOG works absolutely fine on Firefox for me. You might have some broken script stored in cache or somesuch. Try a hard reload (ctrl-shift-R).

That tone-deaf non-apology was only on reddit, by a new-on-the-job "community specialist". They did a (slightly) better apology an hour later on twitter and the GOG forum:

Nope. Still broken.

Before, it used to be the pages were really slow. Couldn't get past one page of results. Now the main screen doesn't load at all. Endless loading spinners.