Gog is still doind plenty they just rolled back on one commitment, in the end we are a consumer and everything including games have a shelf life. Ask yourself this you think devs should also keep the games up to date with the latest hardware/software decades after release as well?

Probably a bigger risk that the AAA games and bigger games (including single players) become streaming/cloud only at some point in the future (few decades or so) because publishers would love that kind of control. It just needs to become economically feasible first.

There'd still be games that are local ofcourse but I think there's an increasing chance it'll largely be the indie/small dev market, with the bigger games moving to online infra/publishers. In that scenario GOG would be relegated to an indie game style service.

One of the sides in this I wasn't expecting is the increasing costs of GPU's lately and the probably scarier part where AI is currently pushing out the gaming GPU industry focus, where Nvidia in recent years gaming is only about 10% of their sales and the bulk now being for datacenters, whereas a couple of years ago gaming was still over 50-60% for them.

Well, GTA V did just that and managed to make a buck or two in the process.
Is the exception rathan than the rule but they may have created a new precedent/paradigm shift that may happen sooner than later. Wasn't Cybepunk planned to have a similar multiplayer setup?

Think of what would GOG look like if they supported an initiative where the figure head says DRM is fine as long as the game is still supported. For me, DRM is not fine at all no matter when in a game's life. I'd bet it's the same for the rest of GOG's audience.

I'm all for using the power of legislation to fix things the masses refuse to even think about, but I'd prefer an initiative that actually and directly advocates for less DRM.

I’ve made this thread to express my disappointment in how gog acted in this matter. Only things you care about can disappoint you, if I would had not care about this marketplace I would had not been disappointed. In fact I don’t care about Heineken so I would not go to them to tell them what I’ve said to gog. Because I have no expectation from Heineken to start defending gamer rights.

But this become a thread about opinions about the issues. I want to express my point of view of the various arguments that showed up here. I hope who has these arguments will stop for a few minutes and think about what I will say here.

What stopkillinggames is about

You have paid for a game, then one month (or years) later is removed from your game library (they don’t even give you a refund). There was no information about this “we will delete the game but keep the money” when you bough it. This is not ok under consumer laws in Europe. You can’t sell something to someone then break his door down and take it away. That is practically theft. Maybe in US that is ok, but here in Europe is not (for now). stopkillinggames is not about creating new laws is about asking the government, police whatever, to either start enforcing the law about private property, or recognize that our entire economic system is broken.


DRM

The stopkillinggames was never about the DRM. That because this DRM technology is part of a product that you are free to buy or not buy. I know that DRM can destroy games years later so it kinda appears to be related with the stopkillingames campaign, but diverting discussion from “you do not take my game away that I’ve paid for” to “is ok or not to have drm in games” is not an intelligent way to deal with governments. In fact if this trend of “taking your software that you paid from” continues it will not matter if you have drm or not. I will give you a example: A dystopic scenario that can happen at any moment in the future with the technology that we have now.

The trend for the operating systems like windows is to stop doing what the user what and just ignore the user and do what the OS creator want. This means that you could have your precious gog drm free games on your computer and the OS will DELETE them because someone decided that you don’t own them anymore. If you start thinking that you will have a computer offline and you will be careful then I have bad news for you. You have already lost. You need to eradicate the issue at the roots. You can’t have this mentality of accepting someone deleting your games. And once your precious offline machine breaks down? And you are forced to buy CPUs that will nto work if they don’t have the government approved OS? What you will do then? So DRM is not the main issue here.

If “is not possible to take the game from the buyer” becomes clear and enforceable by the government then the DRM issue will be resolved also. Saying that Ross “doesn’t want to deal with DRM and is a bad guy because of this” is just wrong. By dealing with the big issue you resolve this secondary issue also. So Ross IS trying to solve your precious DRM problem.

GOG pick their battle argument

that is not how it works, it doesn’t take months to figure out if you want to be involved with stopkillinggames or not. Using this “we will promote you” carrot on a stick for nine months is despicable. Because instead of actively promoting the campaign they were waiting for gog so they can ride the popularity of that announcement. AN announcement that never happened

The Market decides argument.

This is something that you were taught in school but you never stopped to think if is true or not. For the market to decide it needs to be free. The market is not free, there are lobby and interests that create laws to protect the interests of various power groups. These groups now got the idea that they can sell you something, then take it away, then sell the same thing again to you. And is what they are already doing.

LAWS

I don’t want laws to do this and that. I don’t know what world you are living in but we have hundred of thousands of laws one likes it or not. The issue is to have just and fair laws. Is common sense that I can’t sell you a book then at night come into your house, get the book away then like nothing happen sell it to you the next morning. If we allow this type of law to become reality (which already happens just watch Louis Rossmann youtube channel) then we are in big trouble.

Smaller CREATORS will suffer.

I don’t know any indie game that killed his game, only big corporations. They already building games that will live forever. They would not had to change anything.

I'm sure that's what Blockbuster leadership though right up to the point of being too late. Same with AOL and Yahoo. Maybe those extremes aren't as likely to occur here, but we're seeing some early warnings.

Guess I haven't kept up with what SKG was doing lately, but I thought he was essentially trying to make it so online-only DRM type of games don't get killed off permanently by either forcing their owners to disclose a minimum support time/date and/or releasing server-side code so everyone else can attempt to pick up the slack after the game dies.

In the case of the latter, GOG or any other platform can attempt to bring the game back to life using their own in-house resources and that code.

Sure, it'll still be DRM, but I don't believe that was his argument. I wanna say Ross is actually all for always online and DRM function and whatnot, so long as the game itself isn't gone from the world forever. That list is ever growing.

Unless you're saying that I misinterpreted Ross' direction here, only watched and read stuff online when he was just picking up some traction. Not much since then.

I... don't even know where to start.

The mechanism that's available for "taking your software that you paid from" is clear cut, and it's also called DRM. It takes many forms, including designing your game to be online only but without sharing the server software so you can run it on your machine when the official servers are online and also when they're down.

If the publisher makes the game available DRM-free, we would not worry about when the game would be killed, simple as. And once the game is DRM-free, it's yours like your copy of a book.

We can walk into the dystopian future where your computer decides what you can and can't do, but we're talking strictly about games. To use your own metaphors, if you live in a state where you can't read your own copy of a book because the government took it from you, you are living in an authoritarian or even a totalitarian regime - your problem is now with the government taking fundamental human rights away from you, not the corporation providing the DRM-free game (or book).

Precisely. The DRM that is built into the game is why/how they are able to take the game away from the purchaser. It is the very mechanism that facilitates the corporate theft. To ignore it or try to pretend it isn't a huge part of the problem is grossly ignorant.

Yes, it is about DRM. Because the presence of DRM is how the games are able to be killed. It is fundamentally related and interwoven.

Yes, and by choosing a DRMed product, you are making a choice to rent a video game, which will at some point in the future be taken away from you. You chose to forfeit ownership of the game at the moment of purchase. (quite literally, according to the T&Cs)

Then no-one should be surprised to find that many people here are not sympathetic to Ross' initiative, given that his position on DRM directly opposes what GOG stands for.

How much blame should be placed on the customer? The average, perhaps technologically illiterate customer who is either intentionally deceived or unwittingly makes a purchase under the false and misguided assumption that they have a right to own the product they bought, that they have "purchased" it in the traditional sense. Well, they share at least some of the blame, but is the amount of blame meted out here really appropriate? In my eyes, simply being present here makes one a part of an aware minority. Does every poor sod who slumps home from work, just wanting to relax and play game for a few hours; who doesn't read the many pages of legal text outlining their ownership deserving of this treatment?
*(Treatment from being denied access to a game they reasonably thought to own, not the words from this thread)

I'm curious how heineken even got invovled, unless its not the beer company why would Ross want there backing let alone be shocked they backed away. Honestly having not followed the whole movement I can see why it hasn't. Even stranger why he bothers playing old game maybe with DRM they would be fixed right?

Ross has mentioned developers being too myopically focused on the present way of doing things and not future games (and that an end-of-life-plan or repair instructions for customers for future games can be a trivial ask) to be supportive of the Initiative, and it seems people are doing the same here but from the reverse direction. It's a weird values clash where people value DRM-free over GAME DESTRUCTION
HOW DOES IT GET WORSE THAN PUBLISHERS DESTROYING YOUR GAMES?!!??!

FOR GOD'S SAKE PEOPLE, SIGN!!!

https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/702074

I ALREADY HAVE!!!

HOWEVER, AS MENTIONED ALREADY, WE SEEM TO HAVE HIT THE CEILING OF WHAT EUROPE & THE UK CAN DRUM UP IN SUPPORT OF THE INITIATIVE!!!

NOT IN NON-ENGLISH CIRCLES!!!

THE FIRST UK PETITION GOT 27K SIGNS!

Okay I'll stop. Yelling in all caps can be fun, but obnoxious lol

No such game exists. A game (single or multi-player) that relies on a private server for its gameplay is employing a form of DRM. That model is included within the DRM umbrella.

A game is only DRM-free if the purchaser owns it 100%, has full control of it, and it can be installed and run independently, with no reliance on an external server.

Then I disagree with their definition of 'DRM'.

It is, and he is wrong. He clearly misunderstands what the term 'DRM' means.

To many members of this community, if a game can be 'discontinued' and taken away from you by the publisher, then you never really owned it in the first place, and the game, by definition, should be considered to be 'DRMed'. The purchase/ownership arrangement was an illusion.

Those are all forms of DRM.