Humble sells mostly Steam keys these days according to a lot of people here so in that sense they're certainly competition for Steam. In case where it's DRM-Free they actually tend to offer DRM-Free as well as a Steam key (if available) in most cases. I'd certainly say they're competition. Though the nature of Steam keys being what they are, even that competition still helps Steam since it leads people to their platform.

There's no royalties for selling Steam keys. Devs who use Steamworks are free to create and sell keys for their games on other platforms and it's entirely free for them to do so. This basically cuts out the need for developer/publishers to provide versions of their games to different stores. All they have to do is keep their Steam version uptodate, and provide keys to sell to all the other store. Humble's cut is no doubt around the industry average, which is ~30% of sale price, same as on GOG and Steam.

Steam doesn't have to offer royalties for places to sell Steam keys. The devs themselves promote it because doing it that way saves them money and manpower better spent elsewhere.

IMO GOG would do well to do the same. Imagine all those games on other platforms that are currently selling with a Steam key *and* a Drm-free version, if instead GOG would've become the standard offering for the DRM-free Variant. If every place sold a Steam + GOG key. That's the best position I could've imagined them. The DRM-free Alternative, with eventually moving to GOG/DRM-free becoming a standard across the industry for games after ~5+ years of 'shelf-life' or something like that.

Instead they appear to have been quite reluctant allowing devs to sell GOG keys elsewhere. Perhaps they're worried for the extra strain it would be on their current infrastructure to have an influx of short term clients without seeing a full return on those in the direct future. Long term I can only see it benefiting them though. Although the biggest risk is probably the secondary 'out of region' market which will grow larger the larger GOG gets. That will be a bigger issue the more propagated keys get.

GOG can also be used to deliver Humble Bundle Deals, but that may require some "sacrifices" to GoG.com's current policies.

Devs? What devs? You do realize that the people who originally made those games will see exactly zero of that. All money not going to charity will simply be funneled to ye ole Disney megacorp.

I never understood this.... even if only 1 single game is delivered DRM free via Steam - it means that games can be delivered DRM free via Steam. Not sure what 'majority' has to do with it. Is the majority of games DRM'd on Steam, yes. But even saying so means that there is a minority which are not.

The difference between Steam and gOg in this regards is that gOg claims to be 100% DRM free, Steam have made no claims what-so-ever regarding DRM. So if even 1 game on gOg is DRM'd, gOg fails to deliver its promise of being 100% DRM free. For Steam, there is no such considerations, as they promise nothing either way.

Here you are. Feel free to make additions/corrections to the list, if you find any errors or omissions. For example, Carmageddon 2 is missing from the list.

You all say you want Gog to grow (and I wish it too), but you tend to forget they already have enough of "growing pains",
namely Galaxy still a long way from offering Developers Integration Kits, Quite some changes in Policies still to be put in motion, Quite a large number of LA titles still being worked on before they could be released, Not to mention an entire forum overhaul with numerous issues still being worked on...
You forget we as a community tend to be major advocates for Gog and DRM-Free and could easily forgive,
but newer crowds that come with no loyalty, might expect more and wouldn't be so forgiving, especially when not that into DRM-Free and know the benefits of services like Origin that give you top notch games for free and has a much looser return policy then Gog does.

We see this Humble Bundle and it feels wrong to us because we are heavily invested emotionally, but putting those aside, Now is clearly not the time for Gog to pursue enlarging its market span. But once most of those are on the Go...

Easy, don't buy from steam. Problem. Reaction. Solution! :-]

ah, but they are not baying from Steam, they are buying from Humble. Wrong solution?

Humble is just the middle man. Games are ssteam keys

Money goes to Humble, Charity and Developers. Steam gets no money.
Steam is the middle man (distributor), Humble is the store. Similar if you buy something from me and I send it with FedEx, you don't buy from FedEx, you buy from me.

Right, forgot about ssteam not getting dough.
Anyway, devs dont get any money either, corporations do. At least in this one where disney gets the honey.
And regarding charity ... who knows what and how humble gives away.

Triple, if you count the cost of supporting those titles. Given that gOg offer a higher level of technical support, that's not a factor they can brush aside.


My guess - a complete guess because they don't release the data - is that gOg would get a better result when offering a free game in conjunction with a new release or some sale. That action gets a mention on just about every game site and blog out there, draws people in for the free game(s), and those new visitors see the sale / release and maybe stick around to check out the other offerings. Redeeming a Humble key can be done at any time so gOg won't necessarily be making any further tie-ins for those new customers, whereas those giveaways are designed as part of an organized promotion.

Speculation, of course.

Not charging royalties is a brilliant strategy and whoever at Valve insisted on it deserves all the money they can get. It has helped make most of the online game store fronts into over glorified Steam Key vendors.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/humble-bundle-raises-50m-for-charity-developers-gross-100m/0143027

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-12-16-humble-bundle-has-raised-over-usd50-million

That's completely besides the point. Celton88 said that Humble kills profitability and hurts developers. That's not necessarily true, and I just pointed out that the bundle is making lots of money and even divided between devs that's a significant sum. See this post by the Monaco dev.

In this case, yes, the money goes to Disney, although I don't know if Aspyr or some others don't get a thing. And even if the money just goes to Disney and goes back to the games division, and ends up getting more games released, that's fine by me.