Latest 30 Comments

Quoting: TheSHEEEPEveryone who would actually give these things consideration would realize that the publisher's talking points are entirely wrong, with no basis in reality - because they are almost entirely strawmen.
Opinions are not equal - they can be right, and they can be wrong, and they can be in-between.

That's your opinion (one that I happen to agree with, mind you) but that doesn't make it right or wrong -- which is, after all, a value judgement. You may see the issue differently, but it does not follow that @Mountain Man not viewing the issue the same way is wrong. He may feel strongly that their strawmen have validity. Can you show him how those strawmen are not valid?

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: dren

Quoting: Frawo

Quoting: drenI love GOG because I can actually buy and own games, but they are still a corporation and corporate track records are pretty shitty these days.

You don't ever own games, neither on GOG, Steam, Epic or physical disk. You only buy the licence to use them. GOGs offline installers might give you the illusion of ownership, but you can more or less achieve the same thing by backing up your Steam common folder.

These are in no way remotely equivalent. GOG provides DRM free portable, self-contained installation packages designed to be backed up and installation can be configured. Steam backups are essentially snapshots of an already-installed, DRM-locked game directory. You don't have the freedom to install it where you want. Games used to be completey DRM free on installation media. Companies tried adding DRM to physical media but that met with issues for the end user. Steam made it easier for devs to lock down our software. GoG is the antithesis of Steam when it comes to ownership and user rights.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

The "you can back up your Steam games after they're installed" argument is spurious at best. It overlooks the fact that the game still requires the Steam client to install those games in first place. GOG's offline installers do not.

If it's an "illusion of ownership", I'll take it.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

. . . There are things that still use OpenGL?

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: ArehandoroMadrid isn't a city usually depicted in games, and lately Spanish studios are chucking a fair amount of point & click adventures of decent quality. It's on my wishlist 😊

Oh, Madrid, huh? I like Madrid.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

The version with the better CPU might be borderline usable. I have an ARM SBC with a A55 x 4 core + 4gb ram board and that is a bit slow but usable as a desktop. So a more modern A55 x 6 core with 8GB ram should be somewhat ok, although not great. Of course that top end version isn't exactly cheap anymore.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: Mountain ManWatering down milk and adding thickeners without disclosing this to the consumer is fraudulent, so of course it's illegal. That's not at all the same as a developer using existing cloud services rather than expending the resources to create their own online infrastructure.

There is certainly an ethical difference, but in terms of justification for regulation, an externality is an externality.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: pb

Quoting: drenThe amount of corporate bootlicking happening here is crazy. We are talking about a company that effectively has a monopoly on game sales

A natural monopoly is not inherently a bad thing and does not make the company evil. As a rule of thumb, if the general public would be better after the monopolist disappears, then it's beneficial to try and bring them down. Would it be the case with Valve? I very much doubt it. The games would not get any cheaper, and nobody - for years - would provide players with the ecosystem on par with what Valve has built. That in itself is worth putting up with some idiosyncrasies. Which means that anyone suing Valve does not represent the interest of the consumers - ever.

I quite like Valve, as companies go, but there are some real issues with this.

So, first, a natural monopoly is one where most of the costs of a product are associated with the infrastructure required to provide it, and so multiple concerns providing the same product need to build multiple redundant infrastructure, making it far cheaper overall to just have one provider of the product. Internet service provision is a natural monopoly; so are utilities like electrical, water and so forth; so are roads. Natural monopolies are best dealt with through public provision, second best by aggressive regulation of the monopolist, to among other things control their profits.

Now, first, Valve's business is not a natural monopoly. Valve does not build the wires the games are transmitted to your house over. Sure, there are some capital costs involved in Valve's operation, but no more than most businesses that are not natural monopolies. Valve's business model takes advantage of significant network effects, but that's not the same thing.

But if Valve were a natural monopoly, or if it is a monopoly of any kind that is not going to get broken up, it is best for the public for it to be heavily regulated and its profits limited.

Moving on, your argument is that Valve's continued existence is good, therefore lawsuits against it are bad. But this does not follow in any way. Lawsuits against Valve, even if they succeed, are unlikely to lead to its destruction. The basic question is whether the 30% cut generates windfall profits. If it does, then lawsuits that successfully reduce that cut will leave Valve in place but reduce costs for the consumer.

It might be better if, instead of a lawsuit, the determination was made by direct government action, imposing an auditor and going over the books with a fine toothed comb and deciding what cut was appropriate to leave Valve solvent but with a modest profit. But that is unlikely to happen, so the law is what remains.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

The endgame of people putting AI everywhere actual creation could have occurred will always be, to me, "why would I give you money when I can just generate it myself". Even for this; people were already wary of GoG, and although I really really want to support their initiative to archive old games and keep them available, I can't really put money in a structure that's likely to support infamous tech. Promises of "doing the right thing" be damned.

If someone felt they needed an image to describe their sale, they should have put some effort into it. Just look at how Steam handled this. People are still attached to a random sales mascot character way after it ended. If you can't be bothered to make something, as other pointed out, a collage of game art or a plain text message will do the job just fine. And won't attract the ire of people that are seriously getting tired of this shit.

If the goal is to pander to people that absolutely *crave* AI slop content, then, sorry to burst GoG's bubble, but these people don't care where it's from or what it is. That's not a great goal to run after.

As I see it, it's either "harmless" but normalizing such abuse of the tech, or downright disrespectful to people that wanted to support GoG.

Bad move.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: eggroleAs everyone has said, I see no issue with the 30% cut, but I think the more important part, that has a bit of merit IMHO, is the off-platform competition restriction. If my game is for sale on steam for $50, why can't I sell it direct on my website (or any other platform for that matter) for $40?

This *feels* very anti-competitive, but what do I know.

I dunno, I've seen a bunch of games for which Valve isn't enforcing any kind of price parity clause on non-Steam versions, with some of those non-Steam versions being free while the Steam versions are paid, so I doubt such a clause actually exists.

And if there was such a clause, I think it's weird the various lawsuits against Valve are somehow unable to quote the relevant passages from the Steam Distribution Agreement.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: Frawo

Quoting: drenI love GOG because I can actually buy and own games, but they are still a corporation and corporate track records are pretty shitty these days.

You don't ever own games, neither on GOG, Steam, Epic or physical disk. You only buy the licence to use them. GOGs offline installers might give you the illusion of ownership, but you can more or less achieve the same thing by backing up your Steam common folder.

These are in no way remotely equivalent. GOG provides DRM free portable, self-contained installation packages designed to be backed up and installation can be configured. Steam backups are essentially snapshots of an already-installed, DRM-locked game directory. You don't have the freedom to install it where you want. Games used to be completey DRM free on installation media. Companies tried adding DRM to physical media but that met with issues for the end user. Steam made it easier for devs to lock down our software. GoG is the antithesis of Steam when it comes to ownership and user rights.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

I have a soft spot for Xfce, so I'm very excited to see where this goes! I ran Xfce on Linux Mint many years ago, in a few years I could be toying around with xfwl4 on some older hardware I no longer use :-)

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: suchI disagree in that not paying for a few pieces of art isn't a proper saving, just one you report to particularly... challenged management to get them off your back. That goes triple if you're generating this much negative sentiment. That can have more of a sales impact than your sales banner.

Oh sure, I was honestly more referring to the other indications that they're going all-in on AI (such as that quote from the job posting that I'd pasted above). Having generative images as banners on the site is, I'm guessing, just the tip of the iceberg.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: msmafraKyle Gospodnetich made things clearer today https://universal-blue.discourse.group/t/correction-regarding-gpd-win5-support-for-bazzite/11574

I find the following absolutely reasonable and correct though?

A GPD representative appears to be directing their users to a discord other than our own for support as well.

They shouldn't direct the users to the Bazzite people to do the support for GPD, right?!?

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Just when you thought GOG was done shitting itself...

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: apocalyptech

Quoting: suchIt's GOG. What profits?

I mean honestly it's possible that's at the root of the issue here. I actually have no idea what GOG's financials are like, but if they have historically struggled to turn a profit, latching onto the "AI" bandwagon is an unsurprising move, at least. The suits tend to see modern generative systems as a shortcut to Increased Productivity™ and they might just be assuming that this is the magical tech that's gonna turn a struggling company into a thriving one.

Whether that's true or not in either the short or long term is another question entirely, but if that's the thought process over there, then it's at least an understandable pivot.

I disagree in that not paying for a few pieces of art isn't a proper saving, just one you report to particularly... challenged management to get them off your back. That goes triple if you're generating this much negative sentiment. That can have more of a sales impact than your sales banner.

Unless GOG are playing 5D chess and doing this as part of a coordinated effort to boost visibility. Who knows anymore. I'll take my tinfoil hat off now.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

you-were-the-chosen-one-anakin-dot-gif

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

GOG, here's a freebie: Have passionate nerds and community members do some simple artwork for you. Announce the dimensions, pick the best, or even have voting among the community, and then promote each artist who wins with their banner/artwork. No other gaming store does it, and it would probably instill a lot of good will.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

This has to be some kind of miscommunication, GPD is a Chinese company right? Something has to be getting lost in translation because this situation is too weird.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: suchIt's GOG. What profits?

I mean honestly it's possible that's at the root of the issue here. I actually have no idea what GOG's financials are like, but if they have historically struggled to turn a profit, latching onto the "AI" bandwagon is an unsurprising move, at least. The suits tend to see modern generative systems as a shortcut to Increased Productivity™ and they might just be assuming that this is the magical tech that's gonna turn a struggling company into a thriving one.

Whether that's true or not in either the short or long term is another question entirely, but if that's the thought process over there, then it's at least an understandable pivot.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

I really hope they improve gamepad support, the lack of it makes it not particularly playable on Android handheldds which is a shame since it runs way better than Minecraft onnsaid platforms

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Well that's highly disappointing. I was considering becoming a gog patron but now I'm not sure knowing my money may not be going to actual artists or developers.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

My feelings on that are clear: As long as people find it acceptable to use AI for coding (and they seem to), it must be okay to use it for everything else, too.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

This wasn't a good move. I'm sure they will lose some Patrons after that.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: eggroleWhile pretending to be affiliated somehow is shady, I find it amusing that FOSS (built on other FOSS no less) is talking about IP and asking to stop using their logo and name.

There's nothing weird about it. You can create FOSS, and want to protect your name and your project reputation. Don't confuse open source code with IP and trademarks - they're separate things.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: eggroleWhile pretending to be affiliated somehow is shady, I find it amusing that FOSS (built on other FOSS no less) is talking about IP and asking to stop using their logo and name.

Being FOSS and protecting IP is normal. Look at OBS with the Fedora Flatpak situation.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: eev

Regardless of any thoughts on it one thing remains clear - the more AI generation is used for the little things "it's just this, it's just that!" - the more it will be accepted, and the more it will replace actual people. We'll see less actual art, less real intentional character in what we see - and more slop with melting consoles.

Gotta be real with you, this sounds hollow when you constantly promote ARC Raiders. Regardless of wether or not the actors signed off on it, there's nothing in there that needed it and it's just a severe cost cutting measure that'll lead to lower quality voice work the more accepted it is.

I'm still going to report on things as they evolve with generative AI, regardless of my feelings - that's the point of that.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

good for them

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Absolutely rad viewing angle on that TV. Maybe that's why the console is melting.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Regardless of any thoughts on it one thing remains clear - the more AI generation is used for the little things "it's just this, it's just that!" - the more it will be accepted, and the more it will replace actual people. We'll see less actual art, less real intentional character in what we see - and more slop with melting consoles.

Gotta be real with you, this sounds hollow when you constantly promote ARC Raiders. Regardless of wether or not the actors signed off on it, there's nothing in there that needed it and it's just a severe cost cutting measure that'll lead to lower quality voice work the more accepted it is.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: eggroleWhile pretending to be affiliated somehow is shady, I find it amusing that FOSS (built on other FOSS no less) is talking about IP and asking to stop using their logo and name.

I truly fail to see the irony in here?
You can develop FOSS but still have trademarks for Name and Logo?

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment