Spot on. It is all about the DRM.

There is something we can do, but it is very hard. Don't buy anything ever again, unless it is offered DRM-FREE (at gog or any other REALLY DRM-FREE place). It needs a mass movement, though (one or two geezers won't cut it). And loud noise, too. Requires patience, determination, sacrifice, PASSION. Most people care only about playing a game quickly and forget all about it everafter, so they are not viable to follow. Us, old timers and collectors, are waning in number, too. Almost pointless, since DRM-pro-services' fanboys are always on the rise; aggressive and relentless, as well.

Had i been a pirate as of yet still, i would say my good old motto: "You either give us a DRM-FREE version to buy, or i pirate it and freeshare it the web all over"!

DRM and client hounds, renting games, not owning your legit bought staff and not being allowed to copy and preserve it for personal use (in the old days you were allowed to and this was something like a law even, concerning software), is what turned me into a pirate, nearly 12 years ago. Discovering DRM-FREE services, on the contrary, is what made me start buying again and support their cause... If things remain as they are now, i might as well grab me dusty gear and set sail to open sea, again...

Extreme conditions require extreme solutions.

Denuvo isn't nearly as bad and draconian as SecuROM and it's install limits or always online in primarily singleplayer games (Like Diablo 3.Multiplayer games are excused for obvious reasons.). It's possible to not even notice it is there. Now, I'd rather it didn't exist, sure but it's nowhere near as draconian as those two.

The AoW 3 are a bad example to quote. First of all there are no Dll's in Linux and any experienced Linux user will tell you that. Secondly their so called SDK they are referring to is the Steam-Runtime which can be used out of Steam is freely distributable. And the last thing - other smaller devs manage to release a GOG and Steam version on all 3 platforms.

The AOW3 people are rather unprofessional, if you look closely they didn't mention anything about Mac and Steam SDK and yet they aren't offerinf the Mac version on GOG either. As I said a bad example to quote.

The DRM-free policy must certainly be the main reason for it.

However, having bigger or more famous titles on GOG adds credibility to distributing a game through GOG.

For example, I would never have imagined games like No Man's Sky and Dying Light ending up on GOG, yet it seems we are getting increasingly more of these bigger titles on GOG with each year. In this respect things are looking good for GOG in the future, if you happen to be into modern games that is.

The 'consumer base' is a factor people often mention. The vast majority of PC gamers are Steam gamers, at least it feels that way. However, why would you ever ignore another distribution channel for your product ? The answer is that they don't recognize GOG as a valid channel, in following their company's policy, ... which leads back to the whole DRM-free argument.

Part of the issue though, in the bigger picture, is that GOG is not getting a fair mention in our gaming media. Some, like RPS, are quite good at continuously reminding people of GOG's existence and validity. The rest of our media though is all about Steam: 'buy this on Steam, buy this on Steam, buy this on Steam'. They become part of Steam's machinery, an appendage of it's business. Is it not dubious of our gaming media to represent a single distributor in this way ?

I don't expect reviewers and journalists to mention every single site that sells a particular game, but at least they should acknowledge that a DRM-free version exists and that you can buy it somewhere. I don't think that is an unreasonable request. If they don't know whether it's DRM-free or not, it's lazy journalism.

How far apart are the roles of a Windows dynamically loaded library (.dll) and a Linux/BSD/Unix shared object (.so)?

Sure, they may not be very experienced in the Linux world, but I would assume that most devs treat an .so and a .dll fairly similarly, and devs more experienced with Windows may use "dll" as a common name for both.

No Man's Sky was not a 'big' title. It was an indie game that Sony picked up and promoted the hell out of + raised the price to AAA level for no good reason.

I would think a "commercial failure" (yes this is sarcasm) like Witcher 3 would make companies think about the necessity of DRM.

It seems many people in the industry have their head up their ass and refuse to see the numbers and continue to convince themselves that people in general pirate game and steal from them. I think the ballpark 10% of bad apples applies to game piracy as well just like crimes for the general population. I states that no matter what you do, there is 10% of the people that will commit crimes and there is nothing you can do about it. When you see more than 10%, it means that access is really easy and without consequence and people don't see value in the product to put their hard earned money into. The solution is very easy, unlike lowering crime, you need to have a product that is view as valuable to the people. I think that if we ever see a Witcher 4, most people who played 3 will buy without even thinking about it.

Think rocket science for most software company and most decision makers in the gaming industry can't wrap their head around that. Repression never accomplished anything in all of human history.

NMS was still one of the most hyped games of the quarter, if not the year.

Most hyped I'll easily agree

Yep, TotalBiscuit made a nice video about the media created and supported hype for the game for which most people knew it can't be at the level that it was advertised. I mean for a small indie company to develop a game at a scope that even AAA developers can't reach couldn't really be expected.

Yes, it started out as a small one (and probably should have stayed that way), ... but it sure ended up as a really big one, with some people even expecting and wishing it to be the next Minecraft.

Most of the promotion came from the gaming media in my opinion, from over-enthusiastic journalists and YT & Twitch gamers, not from the publishers themselves. In terms of trailers and gameplay footage, provided by the publishers and developers, I don't think the game's promotion was more noticeable than that of other major titles. If anything I felt the promotion of the game close to release was rather low-key for a game of this reputation.

It's good to be excited for a game but our media has a strong tendency to push it to the extreme in order to pull views.

To me 'hype' is not generated by publishers, it's their job to market their product in order to sell as many copies as possible, as with any other business. However it is not the job of our gaming media to leap to completely unwarranted conclusions and expectations and encourage or induce people to pre-order games by creating this kind of hype, which is what I think our gaming media is doing.

That is what I thought as well. The media planted their own idea of the game into people's minds; 'this is what the game will be' ... repeated over and over, for years. Much of what the media folk was expecting and saying, in podcasts and such, was not supported by what the developers themselves were saying:'this is what the devs are saying .. now listen to our interpretation of it'.

This does not excuse the technical problems the game had, but it does expect some rationality and responsibility from the consumers and the media, something nobody really wants to hear since it's far easier to blame everybody else for your troubles.

I don't do a whole lot of graphics which is a big part of the portability block, but in terms of programming languages: the main 100% dynamic languages are cross-platform (Node, Python, PHP and many others), a couple of statically-typed/compiled languages are cross-platform (Java, Go, C++11 or whatever its called now and even in C, platform-specific low-level calls can be isolated via macros).

Also, if you're not AAA-bleeding edge, many cross-platform graphics libraries are quite serviceable.

As previously mentioned, Indie Devs who can't do Wndows/Mac/Linux without spending an insane number of hours re-writing code nowadays need to re-assess either their technological choices, their coding style or both.

I really don't understand why so many devs are adamant about locking themselves up in a specific platform in this day and age. I get why commercial platform providers would want them to do it, I just don't get why the devs fall for it. I don't even know why they are wasting their time learning that sh*t. You are wasting valuable man-hours of your life learning something that is not portable...