Is that a serious question? Because the obvious answer is Steam killed off disc games towards the latter half of the 2010's and now there's zero disc (non store account) choice for newer games...

My comment though was it's always been completely unnecessary to lock open mods behind store-locked clients even if you do want to make it more convenient. See Vortex (Nexus Mod Manager) or Playnite. That could have easily been done in a way that any store can hook into it and seamlessly download a mod and Steam could have supported such a common API. Instead the persistent habit of Steam of constantly gate-keeping and locking content to the Steam client in a way that makes it intentionally difficult for every minor store to replicate by essentially forcing the developers to code per store (instead of just once for all stores) is absolutely no accident and stuff like Creation Club and Steam Workshop 100% benefits Valve more than gamers who buy from more than one store vs how else they could have gone about it.

yeah mods should be platform free , dlc-s too

CDPR released a massive multi million seller game last year that has provided them a huge amount of money. They absolutely have the option to invest that in GoG if they want to and they can absolutely fund a mod workshop program if that's a priority. They have two options here, either invest in new innovations that will attract more customers, or downsize and slim down operations to reduce costs. If you don't want them to do the latter, then GoG needs to innovate.

And you're twisting my words here, I said that they can provide a premium service to customers by providing high quality releases and a mod workshop which has already shown great success on Steam. But catering to a niche market of old games.
You are essentially complaining other people are liking Steam's features so much that they're putting other websites out of business. That's sad for those other business but good for Steam because it's driving commitment and attachment from users. If GoG adds additional features that are well liked by customers it will also drive commitment and attachment at the expense of others companies that provide similar services, but it will make GoG a sustainable business. And that is exactly what GoG isn't right now, they're not sustainable.

And saying everyone is "No Steam No Buy" and giving up is just stupid, if every company would give up immediately in the face of competition we would have monopoly's everywhere. And Steam isn't even playing it that hard, they're not forcing themselves like Intel and Microsoft did in the 90's.

You do realise most money CDPR earns stays with CDPR to fund the next CDPR game (ie, Witcher 3 money funded Cyberpunk 2077 which in turn will fund their next game) and isn't "GOG's money" to spend on the store?

Who says I "don't want them to do the latter"? To be honest GOG was at its best when it did keep things simple and didn't try and be Steam Junior with a fraction of the money, staff and catalogue size. Reading through the report the issue is "increased Operating Costs". Spending even more on new projects that further fragment the modding community and unnecessarily duplicate Nexus is no solution to that.

Steam users refused to buy GOG games because of lack of Achievements & cloud saves. GOG added the infrastructure via Galaxy. Can you guess what happened next? It got largely ignored. Why? For the same reason repeatedly explained to you - developers do not want to keep having to go back and recode their games per store, half the GOG customer base using offline installers don't benefit from it, and Steam gamers just continued to use Steam. Modders are no real different. If a modder is so lazy they can only be bothered now to upload to Steam "because it's con-veeee-nient" and can't be bothered with Nexus, they certainly won't be bothered to upload to an even smaller GOG workshop. And if it's made a Galaxy-only feature then half the GOG community using offline installers will continue to use Nexus anyway...

Likewise exactly what does "high quality release of old games" mean vs now? Adding DOSBox & ScummVM to games? NewDark to Thief 1-2? They already do. Games either work or they don't. Most games in general are non-moddable and GOG doesn't have the source code so there's nothing significant to add to most releases. Games that are moddable aren't always desirable by users to be pre-modded by default, so GOG will have to manage both an official GOG modded version plus unmodded version, increasing rather than decreasing their workload. That's completely the wrong direction to go in...

No I'm saying there's positive improvements and negative ones, and a large chunk of what generated Steam's "captive audience" has definitely been on the negative side. You saying "anti-competitive behaviour that worked for Steam is fine if it's popular so GOG should copy that and become successful too" doesn't help GOG either because it won't work the same way. It's like a small OS developer trying to be the new Windows by copying "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish", it simply won't have the same effect. No-one who wants to mod their game but doesn't want to use Steam Workshop now is "waiting" for GOG, we just go to Nexus. Really you are way overestimating the effect a Mod Workshop would have in attracting any new customers.

And let's get real here. Many people didn't choose Steam because of "store features" or the "Steam experience". They started using it in 2004 due to being a required DRM wrapper for "must have" Game of the Year (Half Life 2), then got used to it out of habit / DRM requirements. Many Steam features people like to quote took +8-9 years post launch to appear (Steam Workshop = 2012, Steam reviews = 2013, 2hr refunds = 2015, etc). Early days it was barren and feature-less as hell yet people used it and the stuff they added post 2010 wasn't the core reason why people "switched to Steam". It was "AAA publishers want DRM + Steam provides DRM + disc games got phased out between 2005-2010 = Steam ended up with a virtual monopoly on all the popular AAA games" and things followed on out of habit with "all my games in one place". There was very little "platform choice" at all for many gamers during the same period Steam developed its "captive audience".

It doesn't though. As people explained above, GOG have added features "due to popular demand" that have accomplished nothing to draw Steam's entrenched users in any noticeable numbers because whether you want to admit it or not, most Steam users don't actually choose stores based on minor features. They just use Steam out of familiarity / "it was first" / "all my games in one place" / AAA games. The "all GOG has to do is add x feature and a Steam exodus will occur" is just massively naive wishful thinking. We've already been there with Galaxy (achievements, cloud saves, game time tracking, "Bring together and chat with your friends on any platform", leaderboards, etc) that has done next to nothing to "convert" anyone en masse. GOG is naturally a niche store and most people are here for two reasons : DRM-Free & classic games, not "I want to mod this game but refuse to go to the same mod site that hosts exactly what I'm looking for". Seriously, I've never heard one single person say that...

Also, if Modder A is a Steam user that posts his mod to Steam Workshop but not GOG Workshop or Nexus, and if Modder B is a GOG user that posts his different mod to GOG Workshop but not Steam Workshop or Nexus, and if Modder C posts his different mod to Nexus but neither GOG or Steam, and if GOG & Steam block non-owners of games from downloading mods for that game (because they own it on the "wrong" store), how in the living hell is that fragmented mess "enhancing convenience" for anyone of any store? You really haven't thought this through...

Antstream is a cloud service, they're not in the same area as GOG. Bizarrely though, you can catch Antstream claiming they are preservation but i have no idea how or why they think that :P

The china fiasco in retrospect was the canary falling over in the mine.
It was the first major compromise of values for dollars; and you might just have to face the idea that DRM and being a digital whale will go hand in hand.
That is if you're not willing to think outside the box while focusing on your strengths while minimizing your weaknesses & their exposure.

Gog can make a game thanks to cdpr.
It can make a AAA and have it sell well. Though i didn't buy the witcher 3 I have thought about throwing money it's way, but alas i'm not impressed with the direction the series went with for combat; but for a lot of people they bought it and enjoyed it.
They can do good support to have it work when they give it the time & effort; the trick here is to create only one thing that has to be supported instead of having many different things each needing support.
It could create a game platform, it could monetize that by bringing out new things onto the framework.
With a variable user base who look for different things; these additions if varied and cheaper to create could create more wealth by making it available as a percent of investment in the overall product instead of having one big hit or miss AAA.
It also means that an actual miss if unable to be resolved economically can be cut from the load out for a replacement DLC or refund.
At the end of the day it would be an opportunity for positive user experience advertisement even if some DLC are failures.
My point is that if a rushed AAA has 40% 'bad product' it's a total refund and negative press; if the same was applied to an omni engine where the backbone is solid, but the faster turn around additions over the same time accumulate to a 40% 'bad product' you can cut out that 40% in 1% lots and substitute the discomfort in 2-5% good lots and generate 40 different examples of positive customer care examples.
In the future the way things under capitalism go; you will have more people and their buying power will be lower; which is why going big is simply not going to pay off; and why going small and trying to keep that human experience positive is the only realistic solution to economic viability.

It's all been said before; and such suggestions are for another thread.
Ignoring it's core values though; that always had consequences whether GOG understood them or not.
Not having a way to move forward wasn't the time to throw shit at a wall thinking it would do anything, but stink; it was the time to think, to enquire, to understand and accept it for what it is.
You don't overcome hurdles by getting disqualified walking through them ignorantly; nor if you can't jump them even in your best form.
Metaphorically you have a team and you focus on what each does best.

One huge oversight to failure is making a customer download anything over 20gb for 1 game. But doesnt even need most of the added data like extra languages. Just because they dont want to micro manage games. As if I need 10 spoken language packs bloating a game??? I cant even play some AAA games because it would take up 1/4th my entire f*ckin drive! Wtf!

Amen to that!
The most recent example that comes to my mind was the nearly 10GB additional installation size to Tomb Raider GOTY due to extra language files. Ofc, you could save that amount b just deleting the undesired language files from the installation folder.

The huge irony that I see here is though ... where are all those juicy renminbi then?!

GOG compromised their values for dollars that they apparently didn't get anyway. Seems like they got the worst of both worlds?

I loved this feature, and this was my case too. I also hate launchers by the way, I only like STEAM, and for different reasons, I hate launchers in general. Sometimes I like Steam sometimes not, depends, but definitively I really dislike Epic Store, Origin, Uplay, Blizzard launcher... etc. etc. etc. maybe because launchers should have FEATURES and advantages to the user, Steam have them, the rest? NOPE they are just A STORE.

Galaxy tried to be on this side, but is hard (The united platforms Galaxy idea was good)

Yeah I know is streaming, I just wonder if GOG could also look into old consoles, arcades, or computers, through emulation but owning the ROM. And became a real preservation place. But the question is, would be easy or profitable to do so? It matches the initial vision of GOG and is an interesting niche market. But a) I bet even this may represent TONS of work and investment, and B) Investors are very blind to new ideas, and they are always there judging what you want to do.

I am so glad I am not the only one that notices the damage Valve is doing to the modding community with their walled garden workshop. I hate how Epic Store is doing the same thing as Steam, though there is a light at the end of the tunnel for Epic because they do plan on upgrading their mod workshop to be hardware platform/store agnostic, but no time frame on when that will happen.

At least when Epic or the consoles do exclusives they don't hide the fact why they are doing it, but for Valve they have a history of doing things that are actually negative for PC gaming and they do it for the same reason as why Epic and consoles do exclusives but they hide it behind "convenience" to be as you said the good guy.

As far as I can tell Valve is actually insidious, and not to many people notice that.
EGS isn't doing worse at all, they are doing better than GOG. GOG makes ~$40 million in revenue per year and that is for first and third party games. Where as Epic has been making ~$250 million a year on third party games only. Sure Epic is in the state of heavy investing for the store through marketing endevors which is normal for a business venture, they take on short term losses for long term gains. GOG isn't a new business venture, it shouldn't be having the problems it is having after 13 years on the market.

No; it would not. If what you are saying is true at all, then GOG would have grown with each new feature they added, but they didn't, they never did. Not everyone uses or cares about all the features Steam has, they might like one of the features, or a combination of features or they might just don't care about any feature at all beyond buying, downloading, updating, and playing games. What this means that if features were truly a selling point, if features were truly something that brings customers, then GOG should have been growing each time they added a new feature, but they didn't.

Valve got people locked into Steam through the use of their DRM, they offered their DRM for physical version of games absolutely free, something their DRM competitors could not do because their competitors entire business model was selling the DRM. Vast majority of Steam users clearly came to Steam because Steam was required for the game they wanted to play, and not because of it's features, well beyond the DRM feature which was for dev/pubs. It happened so much and for so long that people just don't want to use another store because they don't want their libraries split.

This is why Epic's strategy using the coupons, free games, and exclusives has a far better chance at being successful vs working on features instead. With Epic's strategy these things happen:

- Exclusive games get people to start having games on another library
- Free games also gets people to start having games on another library and it gets people to have a large library rather quickly.
- Coupons appeal to the wallet while also helping to get people to have games on another library.

Everything Epic is doing is literally to combat the "all my games are on Steam so I want all games I buy to be on Steam" mentality, which is clearly the biggest mentality out there and the biggest hurdle to overcome. Also all of those things above get their Fortnite players on the PC who may be just starting out into PC gaming or will some day in the future to have a very large library of games on the store so they end up the mentality of "Epic is where all my games are at, so I want my games to be here as well"

Features is not the key at all, and GOG has literally proved that for the last 6 years since the release of GOG Galaxy.

I bloody hate steam for a variety of reasons but won't bore you guys with them lol

About the united Galaxy Platform... it was fantastic on a consumer's right standpoint, and absolutely something to praise them for.
But probably not very smart on a business perspective.
Excellent post.
Most people, that big "no steam no buy" crowd, doesn't use steam because of its features. They use it out of tribalism. Same as they root for a particular football team, or a political party and so on.
And Epic's business behavior is horrible for us customers, but it gives them the best chance to find a spot in the market.

I agree just change consumer rights to 'ideology' and business perspective to 'practical'.
You can't change the market by simply ignoring it and trying to make features that rely on it being a more open one than it is anyways.
A better move would of been calling steams 'we aren't an anticompetitive monopsony' bluff asking for access for direct crossplay for games that are sold between the 2 storefronts and when they invariably say no take them to court on the grounds that to do with multiplayer steam has created market conditions that are anticonsumer & anticompetitve whereby other digital stores can only sell inferior versions of licenced works due to steam integration thanks to it's developer tools that focus on using the steam server backend for multiplayer thus locking out other digital platforms.
Sometimes you just have to have guts to stand up for your principles.