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Steam's new disclaimer reminds everyone that you don't actually own your games, GOG moves in for the killshot: Its offline installers 'cannot be taken away from you' (www.pcgamer.com)

submitted 1 month ago by ooli@lemmy.world to c/games@lemmy.world

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[-] callouscomic@lemm.ee 17 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I'll stick with my Steam cloud saves and game notes and community forums and community guides and custom controller configurations and community controller configurations and overlay and workshop and screenshots and steam deck and steam link and ...

Also, the very first game I ever bought on Steam was almost 15 years ago, and it was delisted and has not been available on Steam for over 10 years. Yet I can still re-download and play it right now.

Steam is not the evil corporation people pretend it is. Take your rage to Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo.

[-] woelkchen@lemmy.world 14 points 1 month ago

Steam is not the evil corporation people pretend it is.

Indeed. They're not saints either but for my personal demands, they offer the best arguments right now. I rank funding improvements to the FOSS Linux stack higher than a DRM-free pile of shame. That may change in the future but for now I prefer Steam over GOG. CD Project is a rich company. They could make a Linux version of Galaxy, put it onto Flathub, make it behave well under Steam Deck Game Mode, and put a tiny fraction of their revenue into Linux improvements.

[-] HKayn@dormi.zone 2 points 1 month ago

GOG is funding the FOSS Heroic Games Launcher through an affiliate partnership: https://heroicgameslauncher.com/donate

[-] woelkchen@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

GOG is funding the FOSS Heroic Games Launcher through an affiliate partnership

GOG has an affiliate links program. Heroic signed up for that. GOG isn't specifically funding Heroic. Wake me up when CD Project / GOG is hiring a developer of Mesa or something along those lines. You know, an actual part of the technology foundation that's being used by a wide range of Linux distributions.

An office worker sitting at a desk somewhere at a Linux-running PC is benefiting from technology advancements upstreamed by Valve as part of Steam Deck performance improvements.

Edit: GOG's "funding" is an advertising tracker:

[-] HKayn@dormi.zone 1 points 1 month ago

The end result is still part of GOG's revenue going toward the development of Heroic.

It doesn't meet your high standard and that's okay. I prefer to count my blessings in this regard.

[-] Ashtear@lemm.ee 3 points 1 month ago

Meanwhile I'm over here thinking about how I greatly prefer to put my saves in my own cloud storage (too many games these days not giving me as many slots as I'd like), the community forums are some of the most toxic places on the Internet right now, it's a coin flip whether Steam's going to give me a problem with my DualShock4, I hate how the Workshop is a walled garden, and I'm so much happier with my streaming now that I've dropped Steam Link and moved to Moonlight.

I guess the guides and Big Picture Mode can be nice?

Steam's still the #2 best option for me on PC storefronts; the battle.net launcher has some aggressive advertising, as an example of hellscape we're avoiding here. But Steam continues to not offer me much added value. I go there only because some of my games aren't available on GOG.

I will say I appreciate what Valve is doing with the Steam Deck, and I'm really hoping it continues to grow an ecosystem that directly competes with Nintendo. They are actively burning up banked goodwill right now, and that segment of the market is getting unhealthy without someone keeping them in check.

[-] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago

Man, the forums really got bad at such at a rapid pace, and I'd love to know what changed to make it that way.

[-] Ashtear@lemm.ee 2 points 1 month ago

Probably the same reason it's happening all over the corporate web: fewer eyeballs moderating content. I was never enough of a regular on Steam communities to be sure, unlike GameFAQs (which I can tell you has always been that way).

[-] callouscomic@lemm.ee 2 points 1 month ago

I do agree the community discussions have gone to shit. But that's true of the entire fucking internet. People are assholes when veiled behind anonymity. That's not a Steam issue. It's a human issue.