Hello. I am a little confused about the whole DRM-Free policy (Not that I am against it at all, GOG is certainly doing the right thing.) But the thing that confuses me is that, if a user can just go in buy a game from their distribution, download the offline installer, and then refund the game, essentially getting the game for free, isn't that illegal?

I was wondering. How exactly does GOG deal with this? More impotently, doesn’t GOG need the money to pay the taxes for selling products, like any business?

Like any other platform. Majority of the Steam games that aren't protected by the likes of Denuvo etc are available to torrent on day one.

DRM-free gaming is based on a mutual respect between the developer/publisher/store and the players. Players are trusted and in return they do the right thing. Of course we don't live in an ideal world and abuses happen (which happen as well with DRMed games).

Regarding the matter of refunds, GOG does monitor them and can reject a refund if it is detected that a user is abusing the policy.

As for the refund policy, they just trust people not to misuse it. An entirely alien concept these days, I know. But they will investigate cases if an account does it in a suspiciously large volume.

And regarding piracy, history has taught us that fighting it is mostly pointless as pirates weren't going to buy your game anyway. GOG focuses on added value. All games you buy here are guaranteed to work, DRM-free and are fully portable with offline installers. Whereas on Steam for example, you first have to do research whether that's even possible and it's an unofficial way requiring bypassing the usual Steam rules/ToS, not guaranteed to work with every game.

If a user does this repeatedly, GOG will eventually stop honoring refund requests. Beyond that, GOG operates on the belief that most people are basically good, and that if they provide a good service, giving people what they want, that trust won't be abused.
DRM doesn't actually stop piracy and effectively only inconveniences legitimate users. If the sale was reverted, then there aren't any taxes to be paid over it. GOG is still losing a small amount of money due to having to pay the payment processor - possibly twice, even, once for the initial sale, once for the refund (if not refunded to the wallet), but they figure that having a good refund policy will ultimately gain them more benefit through customer loyalty and sales which aren't refunded, then it costs them through those fees.

>facepalm<

Firstly Denuvo (malware) isn't as almighty as you think, in fact there are many, even among legitimate buyers, who just pirate games with Denuvo, why? because performance is better without that crap!

Secondly torrents have nothing to do with piracy! GoG could have easily implemented a torrent download option, i mean you would still have to buy the game to get download access. It wouldn't be any different then it was with the retired GoG downloader (the download speed would probably be faster though).

Why would one insert the extra steps of buying and refunding and not go to the piracy part directly? That just doesn't make sense.

Piracy is just an excuse to put DRM on games and control how you use them, most of games are pirated first day even those with DRM, some take a little longer but they eventualy get cracked later and let's be honnest, peoples who pirate games will not buy them anyway so no money lost for publisher

People are dumb man, what else is there to say. Many think that 'if you get away with it', that that makes it legal. It isn't, obviously, but people try really hard to justify their own crimes.

As another example of what stupid things people do: there are 'cracked' games that are DRM free to begin with. So people download that so called cracked version (with the usual 'scene' files, nfo, boasting of their release and how fast they are) and install and copy over a 'crack' that does completely nothing. Those releases are always downloaded many, many more times than a simple upload of the DRM free installer.

To my knowledge piracy is mainly a problem for games that target teenagers, who after all have limited money. Specifically if those games have short playtimes and no replayability. So teenagers are motivated to get them, if nothing else simply so they can talk about them with their peers, to avoid social stigma, but they often cannot actually afford the heap of games they would like to have but could easily manage to play and are motivated to play.

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For my prefered genre, roleplaying games, piracy to my knowledge is no actual problem at all. The players are generally older, so they have money, and a roleplaying game that lasts like 40 hours in the first walkthrough, such as Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines (VtMB), is short for this genre.

Or a single walkthrough of Baldurs Gate 3 (BG3) easily takes around 150 hours for the first walkthrough, maybe even 200. And the game has very high replayability. So, unless you are enormously short on money - why would anyone want to pirate BG3 ? Granted, BG3 is probably one of the longest roleplaying games ever. The base game BG3 is easily as long as its two predecessors including their respective addon (Baldur's Gate with Tales of the Sword coast, Baldurs Gate II: Shadows of Amn with Throne of Bhaal).

And despite its by comparison to BG3 very, very simple rulesystem VtMB the later also offers quite a lot replayability. Especially Malkavians have their very own dialogues, which are much harder to follow than regular dialogues, and Nosferatu have to be played a lot different than other clans, for they cannot be seen by regular humans (except prostitutes and questgivers). Additionally everyone installs Wesp5's Unofficial Plus Patch and then gets for example histories, which make the individual clans even more unique to play.

Its even "worse" for others of my favorite games, such as Baldurs Gate 1+2, or Vampire Bloodlines, or Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. These games hardly cost anything now anymore, far from a full price that BG3 demands. So why would I ever not want a DRM free legal copy of them ?

And when there was a MMORPG that actually had me as the target market, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, I played it for the full time of its runtime, for seven years. Which means I spent about 1,500€ on that game alone - more than on all other games ever combined. Though obviously with a MMORPG like that

Plus of course you want to support that game developers develop more such games that you love.

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And by the way, IMHO piracy shouldnt be a problem for other types of games either. PlayerUnknowns BattleGrounds (PUBG) for example basically can be played exclusively for years, because your opponents are other players, so unlike offline games the challenge is always high.

PUBG is nevertheless free to play. Personally I think they could easily run that game as a paid game with monthly subscription, kind of like a MMO, and this would massively discourage cheaters, too, so it would be worthwhile for more than one reason, too.

The only problem with that approach is of course teenagers. Thats after all the target market for games like PUBG. To the point that people of my age (over 50) dont have much point in playing these, because these young kids just slaughter you with their superior reaction times from their young brains.

Piracy, and here's the big secret: Isn't actually a problem. There's no such thing as a "lost sale", when there was never a currency exchange in the first place.

Piracy first and foremost is a service problem.

PUBG used to be a paid game, they made it free well after the launch. Be it to maintain the playerbase or to get parity with the mobile version, don't know but for the first years the game costed something like 30 eurobuckeroos.

Discouraging cheaters may not be desired as it boot engagement and boost skin trading. CSGO made a fine exemple at that. Wan't to play without cheaters? Give us you juicy, juicy personal data and perhaps a paid premium membership.
SAme with piracy, just ask Microsoft.

Yes I'm aware that PUBG was originally a paid game.

From my experience from Vanguard: Saga of Heroes and the Sonly Online Entertainment concept of "Freemium", I cant help but wonder if PUBG would benefit from having a subscription alternative to free to play, too.

This way you could play PUBG free to play, or you could play it with subscription, and in the later case pick subscription only games, which of course take longer to start, but are much less likely to contain cheaters.

(This isnt exactly equivalent to SOE's freemium. In VSoH you could play free to play to a point, but then you would have to pay for example to be able to use raid drops etc. I dont remember too precisely because I exclusively played with subscription alone).

As I understand it, PUBG isnt popular enough in the americas, but both Europe and Asia have high enough population that such a split would be practical.

Yes, it's illegal.

As ConsulCaesar, idbeholdME, gogtrial34987, and 00063 said, GOG monitors for piracy. But just because there are bad actors out there doesn't mean legitimate customers like us should be punished for their actions.

I don't know how EU or Polish business taxes work in detail. But if you get a refund, you also get your taxes paid back to you. So they have no funds to remit to your gov't and also don't owe it since it wasn't a committed sale in the first place.