running out of steam
THESE PEOPLE HAVE TO GET DEGREES IN FUCKING ENGLISH TO DO THIS
they need to use super generic popular idioms in order to be search engine optimized. technology killed journalism
Let’s be honest, this was apparent for a long time. Steam, a centralised platform, has been making strides in Linux gaming and has been making innovation after innovation together with its steam deck. Gog, a forefront to freedom in gaming, barely did anything for the Linux gaming scene. No innovation either. Its just the simple (and well needed) premise of no DRM. It’s necessary, but not enough. It didn’t cater to its niche, it just committing to creating one under a premise. That’s not how you go forward. How does this connect to bad management? Well, I think that with good management gog would make different moves. And wouldn’t rest on its laurels so much.
That’s… Largely a financials problem.
Steam: $8-10 billion/y
GOG: $80-120 million/y
Steam can throw 10 GOGs worth of resources at a problem and barely break a sweat. Yeah, of course they are making huge strides, that’s how consolidation of wealth works when that wealth is actually reinvested.
There’s nothing wrong with the business model of selling older games at affordable prices. This is about poor management. (Or deliberately bad management by a “CEO” who was hired to destroy GOG to remove a popular choice from us).
GOG was good for acquiring and re-releasing OLD GAMES. somewhere along the way they decided they wanted to compete with the big platforms and be “We’re just like them but without DRM”
I haven’t used GOG for years, they allowed me to relive a few of my old adolescence favorites, but stopped being useful to me a long time ago :/
Selling old games and new games isn’t mutually exclusive, and more money tends to be spent on new games than old ones. It’s not unreasonable to expect that selling new games too could subsidise the work to make old games run on modern platforms.
i mean I get that, but what I was saying was the original purpose of the store became an afterthought.
The former employee knew what they were doing with their choice of words.
Current employees are running over to Steam.
The launcher that they have is pretty rough. I downloaded it for Mac OS and it just wouldn’t run right. Kept closing down. If I could just download right from the website they’d have some money.
If they draw is drm free games why only allow purchase through a custom launcher like everything else?
I don’t use their launcher at all.
It’s kind of a convoluted process but you can definitely download every game you own through gog without it.
Thanks for that, honestly if I didn’t know these were drm free I’d be worried about them closing shop
Yeah galaxy is sadly a bit of a mess. Back when i was still running windows it broke its own update capabilities once or twice.
It also has a bad habit of keeping a zombie process running after you fully close it
Can you not download from the site on mac?
I’ll have to check. It seemed like downloads had to happen from the app.
I hope they stick around they are great for gaming. I need to buy off there more often.
Too bad, I use Steam and it works wonderfully on Linux, but i don’t want it to be the only option.
i don’t want it to be the only option.
Neither do I but it is. GOG doesn’t support Linux. Heroic is a 3rd party community effort. Valve is currently the only company making financial investments into Linux gaming.
Unfortunate. Competition is generally good for the consumer and I’d hate to see one of more more customer-friendly storefronts go away.
The word choice is certainly not accidental.
I’d certainly love to hear that they’re at least turning a profit. It’s my default store now, but given the ambiguity of what I’m buying in the multiplayer space, and the lesser experience I get as a Linux customer, they’re not making it easy.
Any other sources for this? Not for the job cutting, but for GoG’s business model going downhill? Haven’t big layoffs happened every few years since the start of GoG?
GameWorldObserver.
Can they be trusted?
