Downtown_Special: I know, I know, it seems like a dumb question to ask, but CD Projekt sells The Witcher series on Steam. Half-Life and Portal have been out long enough that there would be no real downside for Valve. No one is going to abandon their service if those two game series are no longer exclusives.
https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games#order=votes_total&search=halflife https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games#order=votes_total&search=portal Companies in general make business decisions on what is good for them from their own views/metrics/demographics and business models and methodologies. Everything a company does such as a game project consumes manpower resources and has a certain amount of financial commitment to pay for those man-hours and other resource costs. Likewise whenever they commit resources to a given project, those resources are not available for other projects which might be a much better return on investment for them.
It helps to picture it as "what is best for Valve from *Valve's* own perspective rather than what is best for Valve from one of many gamer/customer's perspectives which are biased to some degree on wanting a particular thing to happen.
As it stands, those games have been available for a very very long time on their Steam platform and the majority of people who want to play them bad enough have made a Steam account (or will) and buy them and play them. Spending manpower and other resources on making special builds of their games for GOG their business department would have to be convinced of a seriously large return on investment for the time and effort involved that would make it greatly worthwhile to them. Personally I don't think they'd ever see such a return on investment for the resources they'd expend (although I'd love to see Valve's entire catalogue here personally).
Additionally, they would more or less be spending that money and not only acknowledging an up and coming competitor, but giving them a booster shot in the arm. People would expect too that the rest of Valve's games would be to follow in the future, if not demanding it.
So despite it being great for GOG and for us GOG fans, I don't think that Valve would in any way see it as being good for Valve at all.
<insert copy of entire reply with the word Valve changed to Blizzard also>
I think Linko90 more or less said the same thing in less words in
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/would_valve_ever_allow_gog_to_sell_drm_free_versions_of_the_halflife_and_portal_games/post3 too though.
In the end, it is about what makes the most business sense. Not from my opinion or yours or any other consumer, but from the people trying to run the business.
Linko90: Not an official statement by any means, just my views -
' No one is going to abandon their service if those two game series are no longer exclusives. '
That's true, but it also makes no sense for Valve, who built steam on Half-life 2's release, to then sell it on a 3rd party site such as ours. The games are updated to run on current systems and are always on sale for next to nothing
andysheets1975: I'm wondering how people would react if CDPR decided to make Cyberpunk exclusive to GOG. Would it drive a ton of customers to GOG, or just lose a ton of money and put the developer out of business because NO STEAM NO BUY?
Depends on who the people are. CDP SA shareholders would probably start selling their shares of CDP SA's stock, because releasing your brand new AAA game title only on your own gaming platform and not releasing it on the most popular PC gaming platform would result in a loss in sales as well as angering a lot of existing fans and customers that want to buy the game on Steam.
I'd say it is very highly unlikely we'll see them do that for Cyberpunk 2077. CDP SA is a growing company, but they're nowhere near as big as they'd need to be yet to make an exclusive release on their own platform without throwing money away.
andysheets1975: I'm wondering how people would react if CDPR decided to make Cyberpunk exclusive to GOG. Would it drive a ton of customers to GOG, or just lose a ton of money and put the developer out of business because NO STEAM NO BUY?
CharlesGrey: Not gonna happen. I think most would then simply use that as an excuse to pirate the game. A more likely scenario is that they will sell the game on both distribution platforms, but offer some extra incentives for GOG users. I think they already did that with Witcher 3? The GOG version probably had more bonus content... ?
No, The Witcher 3 is identical on both GOG and Steam. No extra bonus content on GOG.