4d ago

GOG reportedly suffering from staff turnover and poor management: “Current business model is likely running out of steam”

gameworldobserver.com GOG reportedly suffering from staff turnover and poor management: “Current business model is likely running out of steam” | Game World Observer

GOG has reportedly cut dozens of jobs recently. Here are new details about the situation at CD Projekt’s subsidiary and the shortcomings of its business strategy.

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but your pedantry is making you miss the forest for the trees, basically.
No. People here claim, that just because GOG cannot remote wipe your drive, people buying off GOG have a perpetual right to the games they've bought. But they don't because that's not how copyright works. If a game's license is revoked, to keep playing the game is copyright violation.
Not only do so many people not grasp basic concepts of copyright, they claim Valve could take away all downloaded games. No, Valve cannot remote wipe my drive either. I can back up my Steam folder. Many games on Steam don't have DRM at all. It's opt-in and the actual Steam documentation outright says not to rely on Steam DRM because "it is easily removed by a motivated attacker." If games rely on crap like Denuvo, 3rd party launchers, or invasive anti-cheat, the publishers are required to clearly state so on the store page in one of those orange boxes. Users can make an informed decision on a per-game basis even with Steam. And those games that ship crap like Denuvo aren't on GOG in the first place.
So in the end GOG is a store that stretches the truth about game ownership in their marketing and despite all their Witcher and Cyberpunk money, they don't care about users of platforms competing against Windows at all.
- People here claim, that just because GOG cannot remote wipe your drive, people buying off GOG have a perpetual right to the games they've bought.
  I think it's pretty clear from context that they mean they have the ability to perpetually play the games because of the lack of DRM, not the right.
  
  Again, the same is true for Steam as well, so it's a moot point.
  
  Nobody is saying otherwise.
  
  This is a thread where someone claimed that you don't own the games on Steam but you do on GOG, this is the comment the person was replying to:
  In case of Steam.
  With GOG I get an actual license key & terms that state my ownership.
  So yes, that's exactly what the person is saying. So the fact that GOG can't remotely wipe your drive is a strawman fallacy, because neither can Steam, and the differences between GOG and Steam is what's being discussed, so anything that is the same has no bearing on the discussion.
  
  GOG is the only big option if you want to own the games you purchase.
  I think it's pretty clear from context that they mean they have the ability to perpetually play the games because of the lack of DRM, not the right.
  
  Again, the same is true for Steam, so that's a moot point when comparing GOG to Steam which is what this thread is about.
  
  No it's not. If Steam goes down you cannot keep playing your games without using a crack to get around the DRM.
  
  If you backed up your game folder yes you can. Most games on Steam have no DRM, so just copying the folder is enough to play it on another computer. Then there are badly implemented games which you would need to replace the steam library with an open implementation (which doesn't involve cracking the game). And finally there are games with DRM which are not available on GOG so they're irrelevant to the discussion.
  
  I think it’s pretty clear from context that they mean they have the ability to perpetually play the games because of the lack of DRM, not the right.
  Plenty claim it's their right and with much ferocity while as vehemently ignoring that there are plenty of games on GOG that offer reduced content when playing offline (an extensive list was posted by someone). Also, because games on Steam must disclose their use of DRM (and anti-cheat), people can just buy DRM-free games which can be backed up just as well. Goldberg is a drop-in library for games that use Steam APIs. So everything is fine there as well for people who actually make informed buying decisions.

283 comments