3w 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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Thankfully if GOG goes down I don't lose anything.
Now if Steam goes down, I lose my entire library
- Gabe Newell has promised that if Steam goes down you won't lose your library, but we only have his word as assurance.
  
  No doubt the corporate drones that take over after his death will shit all over his legacy.
  
  It's one of my biggest fears, but I guess there's always piracy especially for old games.
  
  Gabe Newell is much more likely to go down before steam does. his words mean nothing for the future.
  
  As great as Gaben and Valve are his word doesn't mean anything (it's not a personal attack either, it's just that it isn't anything binding). Luckily if they fail to keep their promises (or legally cannot) then the crack community will step in. I'm pretty sure they cracked Steam DRM ages ago. I remember a friend using it for Left 4 Dead back in the day.
  
  Anything that uses steam apis and services won't work without steam and steam offers a lot of that to game devs
  
  But the APIs are public, so they can be reimplemented in open source. There just hasn't been any reason for it since currently that would only be used for piracy (in fact some "cracked" games have a mockup of the steam API that just returns the expected things as if it had contacted the servers). But the moment steam goes away I give it a couple of weeks until there's a GitHub implementing most of the basic stuff.
  
  But the APIs are public, so they can be reimplemented in open source.
  And have been since years: https://mr_goldberg.gitlab.io/goldberg_emulator/
  
  Do you have a source for this? People like to repeat this rumour but I've never found out where he promises anything like that.
  
  https://web.archive.org/web/20170521113731/http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showpost.php?p=16095809&postcount=7
  There's this, the original comment lost to time, but a link to an alleged direct quote from GabeN.
  
  In addition to that forum archive, here's a Steam support response via Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/18mzcn/i_asked_steam_support_what_happens_to_my_games_if/
- If steam goes down I'm sailing the high seas from then on.
- A lot of steam games dont have drm
  You would lose only most of your library, not all of it
  
  I would lose some of my library, but I think most of it would still work.
  
  If a game has multiplayer, it most likely has DRM
  Terraria and Cuphead are games i know dont work because of that
  
  It depends on the game and how they handle steam, if they see steam as a requirement then the game is choosing to use steam as a very rudimentary (and easily bypassed) DRM. But this is more about lazy development than DRM, essentially they're not expecting the steam APIs to fail, which is ridiculous considering they have non-steam versions, so a simple if statement would solve this issue. Also this paints those games in a very bad light to me, because if they're doing that with some API call on steam they might be doing it with another and now the game needs to be online always.
  There are plenty of multiplayer games that don't require steam, iirc all of the paradox games you can just copy the folder to a different computer without steam and run the binaries.
  And while not ideal, someone else pointed in another comment that there's an open source implementation of the steam API, so worst case scenario you just replace the library in your backup and you're done.
  
  Can you not connect by IP in Terraria? I had though I had multiplayer running without even starting steam at one point...
  
  Because steam multiplayer is implemented into the game, you cant open the app if steam is not installed
  
  I thought I had it running without starting steam before... That was pre-1.4 and the windows version though, so things may have changed. I know there used to be a wrapper that would start the game outside of steam, but that was ages ago.
  I don't think this is because of multiplayer though, as you can just not use steam services for multiplayer and connect directly to IPs. In my case trying to run without steam started causing crashes with windows forms, so steam linux runtime is probably being used for at least a few things.
  Copying terraria to a windows VM (which was far more work that it needed to be) results in something similar, with a TypeInitializationException, so Steam is needed for what looks to be some social API, maybe for grabbing social links? It's quite possible that there are more things, but I don't think Terraria requires steam multiplayer services, especially as the GOG version runs without steam.
  I don't think that counts as DRM, but the end effect is similar: steam needs to be running. If steam ever dies, I'm certain a simple wrapper will be made to run Terraria and probably many similarly integrated games, but it is not ideal.
- You have it backwards.
  If GOG goes down, you actually lose what you own.
  If Steam goes down, you lose your privileges.

275 comments