Gosh, whenever you hear of a PC game being released only on a particular storefront, it's usually the Epic Games Store, because they are known to bribe game developers and publishers with exclusivity deals. Makes you wonder why they decided to release only on GOG.

Even though GOG is a more established storefront which has been around longer, and offers more features than the Epic Games Store, IIRC GOG doesn't really offer any benefits over Steam. For example, AFAIK both Steam and GOG take a 30% cut from the developers' earnings from their sales. In addition, one of the requirements for releasing on GOG is to be "DRM-Free".

To help GOG grow? Or is there something else going on behind the scenes between Argonaut and GOG?

And maybe the game will come to Steam in the future. For example, the Kingdom Hearts PC releases are now available on Steam, but that's only after Square Enix decided to change their strategy because they weren't earning enough from selling on the Epic Store.

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I think a big reason developers choose non-free licenses for their video game source code releases is that they don't want other developers releasing cheap knockoff titles, whilst putting in little effort to make their own derivative/knockoff substantially different from the original.

We also cannot ignore the elephant in the room [External Link]. Most people don't want their code, writing, or artwork being used as AI training data.

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Bullshit like this is one reason I consider myself a proud member of the PC master race. Some of my other reasons include video game preservation, video game ownership, lack of "generations" (AKA backwards incompatibility), and modding.

Microsoft doesn't have total control over MS-DOS game development, and MS-DOS games can be found in places other than the Microsoft Store. In fact, many classic DOS games are available on GOG and Steam, and there are even some newfangled DOS games on itch.io.

Emulating MS-DOS requires DOSBox or a fork of it. No illegally-ripped console firmware, cartridge ROMs, or keys from a TPM are needed to run DOS games with DOSBox.

Microsoft doesn't restrict Windows game developers either. I believe that's a significant attraction for independent game developers, since they don't have to pay a fee or sign a non-disclosure agreement to develop for Windows.

The organizations and companies that support individual Linux distributions don't place restrictions on third-party developers either. However, most proprietary software developers don't release for Linux because the market share and fragmentation of Linux is generally not profitable.

In addition, emulation and API copying is 100% legal under United States law.

PC game developers can still sell their old games on modern digital storefronts, and many do! And even if players experience some technical issues playing the game on modern hardware, that doesn't make the game unplayable.

I don't have a Switch, but I've heard Nintendo is now making their beloved retro classics only available through the Nintendo Switch Online subscription service. In addition, console game developers generally have to re-release their games for each new console generation, due to the backwards incompatibility.

Furthermore, while some companies like Capcom may try to stop modders from making mods for their games, that doesn't make game mods as a whole illegal, and some very cool companies like id Software actually encourage it!

Modding a console game entails getting access to the game data from whatever storage medium the console uses. The act of ripping a game from a console disc or cartridge may be illegal under the laws of your country, and I've also heard that devices that rip game data from console cartridges are illegal.

I wish video games were easier to preserve! Unfortunately, the interactive nature of video games means that most video games are going to be tightly coupled to one computer hardware/software platform or another, unless the game in question has a public source code release (most do not).

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To me, this serves as a good example for why I wouldn't trust game developers to support Linux with a native build, unless the game and/or engine is Open Source.

Even if a certain game developer uses a FOSS game engine that supports Linux, that doesn't necessarily mean the game will support Linux.

Also, it's incredibly hard for game developers to release their source code in this day and age.

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There's also Piccu Engine [External Link], a fork of the Descent 3 open source engine, with several QOL improvements over the original.

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Sort of. Maybe I'm just fearmongering, but don't forget that other game industry companies have been making lots of shitty, greedy decisions lately.

Games like Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora have microtransactions and lots of bugs, thanks to Ubisoft.
Some of the studios eaten (bought) by Microsoft were shut down in May.
Good independent game studios like Mimimi are going to shut down in the near future.
As for other indie games.. There's quite a few of them, and many of them are good, but the reason the game industry crashed in the 80s is because the market was oversaturated with half-baked games. With so much competition in the market, it's already very difficult for an indie developer to find a significant audience and earn enough money to live.

Also, I haven't heard of any other indie studios hiring the recent layoffs. I do remember some former Ubisoft employees forming their own studio and developing the game Stray.

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For me, the kicker about all of this is that Nintendo has been hiring many of the people who were fired from other companies [External Link] in the game industry.

This is concerning to me because Nintendo is very aggressive with their lawsuits against fan projects, and because Nintendo never releases any games for any platforms other than their own consoles. At this rate, will PC and other platforms cease to exist as gaming platforms in a few years?

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Fast forward to July 1, 2024, and the Steam store page is still up.

I tried taking a quick look for more information about who won (without joining their Discord server), but I couldn't find anything. No forum post announcing the tournament, no link to a source code repo, nothing...

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Quoting: robvvDenuvo malware, always-online, in-game purchases and numerous bugs. Add to that a hefty price tag of £114.99 (without discount) if you want the Ultimate Edition (or £59.99 otherwise).

And this is on top of the fact that Ubisoft is one of those studios that uses shitty AI tools to replace their good, albeit low-ranking, human workers.

All of this, in addition to the fact that AAA games aren't fun any more, is why some people are expecting the game industry to crash. These big names in the game industry have become too greedy and controlling. It's like they've forgot what makes video games enjoyable, and as a result they're creating products for an offshoot market which exists merely because the proprietors are famous, and capable of putting out products which have the appearance of being the apex of quality.

Game developers who focus on making enjoyable, non-enshittified games should be able to survive this game industry crash. For example: Larian, FromSoftware, id Software. And IMHO it would serve these big greedy craporations right to get knocked down a peg or two.

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Quoting: Garry NewmanWhen a company lets you get away with using their IP in UGC in another game they're a cool company. When they don't, they're a normal company.

Wow, that means id Software (or rather, id Software before they were purchased by Bethesda) is a really cool company. Their games are, by far, some of the most heavily modded video games of all time, with incredibly vivid and diverse modding scenes, and each with an enormous collection of mods built up over 20+ years.

And this is by design: when John Carmack noticed people were making mods for Wolfenstein 3D, he liked what he saw, and he decided to be generous to the fans. He designed the Doom WAD file format to be easy to modify. He even released all the source code for Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3, and Doom 3, expecting devout fans to do amazing things with them. And they did, but that's a story for another day.

I can't imagine what the Doom modding scene (or video game modding in general) would be like if id Software had acted like a "normal" company by shutting down modders at every opportunity. There is an enormous collection of mods and fan works for Doom and Quake, but many of these mods re-use most of the sprites, models, and textures from the original game, and/or include "new" assets derived from the originals by id Software, or taken from other games by other studios.

On the flip side, there's also plenty of other character models from other games and franchises on the Garry's Mod workshop as well. For example, you can easily find Hyperdimension Neptunia or Kancolle character models on the workshop for Garry's Mod and L4D2. I guess the IP rights owners behind those games and franchises are also "cool" with this, they haven't noticed fans doing these sorts of things yet, or maybe they've just decided hunting down fans for these sorts of things isn't worthwhile for various reasons.

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