Maybe off topic , but :

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/11041384892?page=10#189

Only time will tell what effects, good or bad, this partnership will have on GOG. Watch and see for yourself.

I didn't feel the announcement was unclear at all. Yes, they are going to promote Curse memberships because both businesses have to gain something from a partnership in the first place. Of course they're not going to spell everything out for you, as a previous user said it's basic marketing. I don't think a PR person should have to point that out for you. That's like saying that someone should follow you around a grocery store pointing out that the prices are high.

Haha, good ole BlackAdder. <3 *Insert joke about Brian Blessed always getting Edmund's name wrong here.*

I think it says something that I looked at Curse.com for a good 5 minutes and couldn't figure out what it actually does/offers. Either about me being ancient and out of the loop, or Curse just completely speaking a different language. Yes, I then looked up the wiki entry, but I'm still a bit in the dark. An online games portal? I guess it's like an online magazine that caters to MMO players and Minecrafters, and sometimes has add-on game content? I'm not complaining, I was just befuddled and finally realized Curse is purely devoted to a gaming sector that has nothing to do with me. I hope GOG gets some good cross-traffic out of it, but yo no hablo MMO.

Next month: Have Mr. Clean and Green Lantern got a crossover deal for you...!

UPDATE: I mentioned this whole uproar to my husband and he tells me he has been using Curse's free version for years, to get useful WoW plugins that automatically install and update. I get it now, but still not for me. :D

There's no reason for GOG users to be spooked. All that indicates is that too many people aren't willing to educate themselves before jumping to conclusions.

Curse is primarily a mod-management tool for a growing list of games, primarily MMO-RPG's. Mods can be downloaded and easily installed through it, much like the Skyrim Mod Manager, etc., for those that don't like the hassle of doing it manually. The premium service they offer provides simple quality-of-life improvements, mostly automatic update of your mods when new versions are released and cloud-synching so you can don't have to manually re-download and apply everything yourself if you're playing on a new machine.

As far as Curse being a closed site? That's a bit nonsensical. Maybe it seems foreign to you if you aren't much of an MMO player, but it's very well known and open to those who are. I haven't personally used curse in around a year or so (not currently playing supported games), but as far as I know, they don't even produce any content on their own, and any mod maker for a supported game is free to provide a curse-enabled version that can be automatically installed and managed via their software, be it premium version or free version. The core functionality is there for everyone.

This is just another cross-marketing feature for them, like the beta key giveaways. There's no downside for anyone involved. Curse gets another bullet point for their premium membership, GOG gets some marketing.

I would if I still played WoW and Skyrim didn't have Workshop and the Nexus community.

That's really all it amounts to, I can't see a huge volume of GOG.com members jumping onto a curse account that aren't already using it, it has limited appeal to many of us beyond mod management, and that's a feature of some of the perceived competition.

Part of why I use Desura is the moddb (same company) integration, makes installation that little simpler along with running if I really want to run a mod, also the indie support (supported a few alphas for example) and way more money spent on various bundles than I can calculate easily. Though admittedly I have my concerns regarding the acquisition by Linden Lab back in July.

I should note while I'm really disgusted with copy protection in general (and I've been around to still have code wheels and original goldbox adventurer's journals) and the route DRM has taken us I am a Steam user with a considerable library. The annoyance of this pains me, even while I accept the companies and even some individuals aren't wising up, and wasting huge amounts of time and money on trying to stop pirates which could be better spent polishing a product to appeal to the market in the first place and break the cycle

Now watch the TFH brigade jump me for using the evil of Steam and uplay.

Personally I don't feel Steam's DRM is all that bad. Valve doesn't mandate the use of Steamworks DRM on any product in their catalog, the decision is all up to the publishers themselves, and even if they did opt for Steamworks DRM it does allow me to play offline whenever I want to, they offer me plenty of actually terrific, useful features in return for buying games off of them and so on. Many of the games in my collection work even without Steam running if I launch them manually. The only thing is that you can't sell the games you've already bought, but then again, the same thing applies to GOG,too.

Of course I would like for all games to be without DRM whatsoever, but the way Valve does it is so far the best DRM'ed approach I've experienced.

i guess, partership with home of the underdogs (http://homeoftheunderdogs.net/) would be more thematic.

there´s no reason to consider typical goger as eager fan of online gaming ...

Yeah Valve by and large have gone the right way in making it (usually) unintrusive which while far from the unblemished releases we'd like shouldn't be sneered at in an industry where DRM methods seem to now have more money shunted into it than some of the individual development costs of the games that use the crap.
There's definitely issues with the client (even today after years of attempting to fix it offline mode can still be dicey) and even some implementations that are totally messed up like the classic example of games using 2-3 different DRM systems, or fail to detect Steam is even running despite launching from the client, or a slew of other developer side bugs that in some cases never get fixed (not typically Valve's fault but it looks bad for Steam, same as GOG.com when there's games that in some cases were just always broken).

Tacking more stuff on top of games like the curse.com client also won't impress some people consider this possibility (which is legit) you use curse for Red Faction: Guerrilla, which works on Steam AND includes GFWL (something we're praying changes before GFWL is completely offline this year anyway). That's 3 clients plus the DRM involved in that process.
More recent Ubisoft titles like AC2 that launch uplay from steam also qualify (and at least at one point your steam purchased version wouldn't just show up in uplay for a launch otherwise so no skipping that step), on this note it's why I bought AC via GOG originally, I can honestly say it runs so much better on my systems without the damn DRM on other it's releases. And I believe one of the GTA series also had Steam and GFWL for the game, along with Rockstar's own attempt at a social environment (but this is hearsay as I've not played a PC GTA title since 3).

Desura itself is DRM agnostic, and would prefer any people releasing via that at most have only a key, but then they aim for indie devs mostly so releases are more likely DRM free anyway.

Still the people jumping up and down over a advertising partnership with curse need to chill a bit, it's not the end of the world, nor the end of GOG.com prophesied by Sir T.F. Hat so many times.

For anybody going "What is Curse, and how does it benefit anybody on GOG enough to put it on the front page?" It's just to let anybody with a Curse premium account know that they can access any free game on offer. It's not necessarily for everyone, or at least, that's the vibe I'm getting.

For anybody going "Stop complaining everyone, if it doesn't affect you why are you whining over it so much?" From what I've gained, several people are alarmed at the fact that GOG seems to be advertising to those who don't know about Curse, hence putting it on the front page and saying that they "highly recommend" their services. Especially given Curse's less-than-stellar reputation, from what I've gathered from folks like Pheace, as well as GOG and Curse having completely different values and goals.

GOG:
- No single-player DRM for games
- Quality games like Freespace available nowhere else
- Low prices at great games for usually $5.99 or $9.99 a pop
Curse:
- Connecting to fellow gamers in the large Curse community
- Access to addons and synced content for games like Minecraft, WoW and Starcraft 2
- Browsing a wide variety of useful websites, like wikis or forums

GOG doesn't endorse or recommend MMOs or MOBAs like Curse does, and Curse doesn't have addons for any games sold from GOG as well as not giving two craps about DRM. While I do feel there is no real need for worry or anger right now just because of GOG partnering up with them, I think that many people feel the need to speak their minds because they don't want GOG to lose their honesty, integrity and goodwill by doing things like this again, not that there is anything wrong with it, but that it kind of feels like GOG is turning into a sellout. Again, from what I've gained, many people think this is either a direct advertisement, or something along the lines of that. Just wanted to make another attempt at clearing up the confusion here :)

Oh well, back to Sacrifice.

So I think I've figured out that this announcement isn't really aimed at me. That's fine, as long as I can quickly discern this when reading so I can put in my "ignore" memory bank anyway. I think where a lot people's confusion comes from is that it feels like it is aimed at us when we read it though, that there is some benefit for gog.com customers to buy a premium subscription when really there isn't unless you're playing one of the supported MMOs, but then you would probably already know about Curse's client. So the benefit I see is for people already using Curse to be enticed to come to gog.com for a free game and hopefully stay for a while to buy a few games. Sounds good for gog.com, especially so since it seems Curse gets a lot of visitors. I suppose gog.com had to word this announcement this way to get any kind of deal with Curse in the first place.

Anyway, this is the first announcement where I had to spend a lot of time just to try to figure out what the announcement actually was and what benefit it would be to me to buy a subscription like they're suggesting for me to do. When I've read past announcements, I can quickly discern what it's about. "Oh, I'm not interested in this game/giveaway/etc. Ignore." I hope there's not many more that read like this one does because it might get to be too much noise that doesn't have anything to do with why a lot of the people are here and we don't want to spend a bunch of time trying to decipher the message (at least I don't anyway, unless it's a classics trivia game or something). I would be less inclined to continue checking front page announcements if I keep finding ones like this.

"About 3 weeks ago, widely popular MMORPG ‘World of Warcraft’ made cybersecurity headlines as leaked reports revealed that the NSA was using the gaming platform as way to spy on potential terrorist activities. This week, it’s huge news for creators Blizzard Entertainment yet again.

As of January 2nd, administrators on WoW’s support forum, Battle.net, announced that a dangerous Trojan targeting WoW players is circulating the web. Known as Disker or Disker64, the Trojan is spreading by posing as a World of Warcraft add-on from the game’s add-on manager, Curse Client. The Trojan is being distributed via a fake Curse Client website that has been showing up when gamers search for it on most major search engines.

Disker has been created to steal gamer’s account information and their Battle.net authenticator password. So far, WoW is the only Blizzard game the Trojan has infected and Windows is the only operating system the Trojan has been designed for.

Manual solutions to Disker continue be posted for affected gamers on WoW’s support forum.

Those running Emsisoft are automatically protected as of Thursday evening.

Along with the NSA monitoring development, this new Trojan represents what’s certainly becoming an interesting trend in malware. Once little more than a subcultural hobby, WoW has grown into something much, much larger than it used to be. Today, the MMORPG sustains nearly 8 million active users worldwide, and all of them pay to play using financial accounts. For hackers, the incentive to break into the Blizzard account database – such as was recently done with Target – is now extremely high.

Trojans like Disker that target individual users prove yet again that hackers can and will target any available source of personal information they can find. As the amount of sources continues to grow, those in the business of developing anti-malware protection will need to remain vigilant to ensure comprehensive protection."

http://blog.emsisoft.com/2014/01/04/emsisoft-leads-the-charge-against-wow-malware-engineering/

I don't see why I should disclose my email address for yet another service I don't really need or want. And I don't see what Curse should have in common with gog.com.

@ gog.com: Your introductory text is far too vague and lacks most of the essential details like "You have to create a Curse account" etc. I've come to expect much better from this site.

Acording to Valve you dont own the games on steam, you are just renting them for lifetime.

Yea i know im nitpicking here since there are games you can backup from steam but
it woud certinly be interesting the day if steam went offline for good to see if they really coud keep their promise about
finding a way to give people their games or if they woud come up with another excuse.