Firtst of all they put lootboxes in their own games, also they gain money when ingame currency is bought through steam.

And they show little to no ambition to ban games using gambling mechanics from their store and therefore allowing them access to the biggest playerbase worldwide. If I got a percentage of all sales, I would probably not ban them either.

It's explained in the video, and neumi5694 also wrote it, but it's also easy to understand it logically.
Those sites, whatever you want to call them, still operate on Valve game skins, and to unlock the skins you have to pay Valve in the first place. More players addicted to betting buy more skins that lead to more betting, in a continuous cycle that makes Valve money, which can also pretend to have clean hands.

I can, but I can guarantee you it's not what he thinks it is.

Edit: Deleted, but saved somewhere else in case amok and/or paladin181 need it

I can kind of relate with developers who experienced REAL setbacks due to the situation in Ukraine or due to general hardship (ie, the dev is going broke and has to stop and find gainful employment elsewhere), but to me, this is insufficient as an excuse and a reason for me to really stop purchasing games that are "in development".

The dev did well enough to have 2243 reviews on Steam, he's not going broke and yet he's backing away from an agreement (the game was advertised as incomplete and an ongoing process of completion was implied when the game was bought) because "it is inconvenient".

Hey, let's just all stop fulfilling our obligations when "it is inconvenient" and see how well that will work out for society.

If he's smart enough to make this game, he's smart enough to figure out GOG's release process and if it is a hassle, then he doesn't have to release every single update here. He can wait until the game is completed and then do one update.

As someone who has to automate the setup of and maintain the stable operation of a dizzying amount of software for a living with varying qualities of documentation (coredns, etcd in ha with encryption, postgres in ha with patroni and encryption, elasticsearch in ha with encryption, opensearch in ha with encryption, mongodb in ha with encryption, prometheus in ha, kubernetes in ha, fluxcd, terraform, zeppelin, 30+ kubernetes services and more), I have enough context to have zero sympathy for any smart person who claims that "figuring out one platform is just too darn hard". Try harder.

Blacklisting both the developer and publisher .

first of all - your post did not really make much sense, sorry. i could not follow it. I don;t know how to responf to it.

Secondly- i am not a native English speaker, far from it.

It would help if that developer explained why he hates GOG so much.

After all, it doesn't seem he hated it from the experience, but he objected releasing the game on GOG from the very beginning. Also he seems to go overboard with things like "GOG shouldn't exist at all" etc.

So if he wants to be constructive, he should point out the things that annoy him in GOG. Or is it only because it is not Steam, and he wants Steam to be the only PC platform because it is simpler that way for him?

He could be constructive, but instead he is just an useless fucktard.

EDIT: So in one of the later messages it was revealed one of his issues is that GOG doesn't have Steam Workshop support? Errr, maybe because GOG is not Steam, and not selling Steam games?

However, the critique to delivering updates and lack of communication is certainly something GOG should improve, if those are issues.

However, I am on GOG mostly for semi-new AA and AAA titles, more than indie games. So I hope GOG does its best to secure such games to GOG. Sure, if some indie game turns out to be good, I'll probably buy it too; just not interested that much for yet another pixel-art platformer or a retro 3D FPS with Duke Nukem3D flat graphics... (not sure what kind of game this was)

This video has just validated my decision to quit online gaming nearly a decade ago, except for some GTA Online here and there.

All these 3rd party sites are just the symptoms and the cause are the loot boxes though. Valve is far from the only one profiting from loot boxes. Even CDPR sells those GWENT kegs. Loot boxes should be straight up banned, at least for under-18-year-olds, because the game industry certainly has no incentive to regulate itself when it comes to loot boxes.

I have no issue with cosmetics being sold, but you should know exactly what you're getting, not some chance, regardless of whether it can then also be exploited by a 3rd party or not. It's inherently exploitative on its own already.

Thankfully, as a DRM-Free advocate, I have this "inherent" protection against loot box addiction, due to an understanding that the moment the servers go off, all those "highly-valuable" skins will go poof. The only things of value to me are the ones which do not rely on external services, beyond basic electricity. I can see how it seduces many other people and kids though.

Anyway, I already prioritise GOG and all the other DRM-Free stores over Steam, using it only as a last resort, so this video does nothing to change my behaviour.


Now to try and put this train back on its rails, I will say that the developer should consider re-releasing this game on GOG, once it reaches 1.0 or the end of life (no more patching). This will negate any pains with submitting updates to GOG. If not, there are other DRM-Free alternatives out there.

I would actually prefer if GOG offline installers were just zip files that you decompress to a folder of your choice, and run an executable to start playing. Hopefully it wouldn't make any changes to the system (Windows registry etc.) on its own, though.

Then the installers would probably be smaller too, than what they are today. It would also be much simpler to archive them, test their integrity etc.

However, that is not what the Steam DRM-free games are. You can't easily just download 1000 Steam games as zip files from Steam servers; instead, you'd have to install them one by one, compress the folders to zip files, and uninstall each game. Much less convenient that the GOG way, especially with 3rd party tools like gogrepo.

I have 2370 games on GOG, and I'd hate to think about the amount of work trying to install + compress each of them one by one from Steam, AND doing that same whenever some of those games receive updates.

With GOG, no sweat, I have almost all those games' offline installers on my hard drive, except for a couple that I just bought this week, and if there have been any updates since last week.

I actually had the opportunity to chat with the developer in private, so I might be able to lend some insight. Here's what he said:

* There was next to no communication from GOG, and when there was, it was unsatisfying. The developer asked GOG for help on getting sales for their game and got no helpful response, while the same inquiry at Steam got him a response from Gabe Newell himself offering advice on how to increase sales, such as setting up a flash sale.

* He views GOG as a terrible platform for newer games as it's missing many features that would be useful for those. One prominent example would be a game-specific news channel/news page like Steam has. On GOG web as well as Galaxy, there's no way for you to see why your game was updated just now, unless the developer goes through the effort of updating their store listing. And keep in mind, they can't do that in self-service.

* Supporting multiple storefronts is difficult, as you have to package your game and set build settings for each storefront individually. The developer didn't get many sales on GOG to the point where they weren't even able to cash it out, so there way no payoff for the additional build step.

* From a developer's perspective, GOG offers nothing special that makes all this worth it. It has no unique standout features for a developer, and all the features it shares with Steam are generally worse implemented.

You really can't blame this developer for backing off from an endeavor that literally had no positive outcome for him.

It is unfortunate you do not realize
the valuable gift your reply gave to me, thank you for that

It forces me to improve,
starting with the easy act of hidding immediately the "From" field
Done, www.gog.com##.b_u_rep_h
(Proven useless as other ones like rep, account age, stars...)
plus others non-IT related & way more effective
that will need significant talent and effort from me to achieve

Anyway, sorry to interrupt your conversation, I am out

But someone's actually paying for you to do all of that, right? I bet your salary is nothing to scoff at.

Meanwhile the dev here said their sales on GOG are so low they don't receive any money at all in months. Hard to give a fuck if it's not your passion and nobody's paying. I'm sure they could figure it out if they really wanted to..

You could argue that you get out what you put in - and if you're not prepared to update your game here, then you're not going to sell it.

Anyway, ultimately, it's up to the Dev (as long as his contract with his publisher allows him to pull it from the store).

The only other thing I'd say is that I doubt that the response came from Gabe Newell himself. I suspect Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V and "Add e-signature" may have been involved. But I'm just a cynical lawyer.

I don't see how this applies here. GTTOD on GOG was on the same patch as the Steam build:
https://steamdb.info/app/541200/patchnotes/
https://www.gogdb.org/product/1775694272#builds

It's actually a very known fact that Gabe Newell replies to most if not all emails sent to his valvesoftware.com address:
https://www.gamesreviews.com/news/10/gabe-newell-emails/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/kbuwyt/

I guess there's no video proof of him composing these replies himself, but I have no reason to be overly cynical about this.

Either way, Valve helped this developer out with tips on how to increase sales when GOG wouldn't.