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OK, but the model that Valve pioneered is the model that supports 90% of all commercial PC games made today, a higher percentage if you cut out MMOs and free to

OK, but the model that Valve pioneered is the model that supports 90% of all commercial PC games made today, a higher percentage if you cut out MMOs and free to play games, which you certainly don't own. I love GoG and I have worked closely with a lot of people there on projects they are great. This announcement seems like good news. No one has to sell games on Steam. No one has to use a model where they "rent licenses". They could sell you everything DRM free. They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business.

deleted 10mo ago
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rantallion 10mo ago
> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business. This is what we've been told since time eternal but it seems more likely that those pirating are those that wouldn't be inclined to pay at all.
- deleted 10mo ago
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- doctorpangloss 10mo ago
  people are commenting in this HN thread like piracy hasn't been thought about, deeply, by many thousands of people for ages in the games industry. i could link to numerous people writing very wise things about it - the CEO of a certain competitor to GOG and Steam comes to mind, he basically wrote the Luther thesis on games piracy - but then i'd be downvoted.
  - jonasdegendt 10mo ago
    I’m interested, please link!
  - nottorp 10mo ago
    If it's Epic, they went the predatory free to play route and are financed by gacha money from Tencent. If it's EA or Ubisoft, they make boring design-by-commitee "AAA"s - lately with IAPs thrown in - and I don't even look at what they release.
- embedding-shape 10mo ago
  > eternal but it seems more likely that those pirating are those that wouldn't be inclined to pay at all. There are a lot of different reasons people pirate games, and other stuff, not all reasons apply to everyone, and some reasons on apply to a few. I used to pirate 99% of the games I played when I was young, because my family simply didn't have money to buy me video games. Once I grew older and had more disposable income, I started buying more games on Steam. Now I have more disposable income than I know what to do with, and I'm back to pirating games, but only for the ones that don't have proper demos available. I probably spent $1000 on games I no longer play and cannot refund, because I'm over the 2 hour limit, and nowadays I pirate the game, and if I enjoy it, I buy it as a way of supporting the developer. I'm probably not alone with this sort of process, but it's probably also not the only reason other's pirate.
Telaneo 10mo ago
> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business. Given how many games on Steam are sold either DRM free (you can just transfer the files over to another PC and they just work) or functionally DRM free (Steam's DRM is trivially bypassed, so one step removed from DRM free), this doesn't really scan. Other than games with Denuvo and multiplayer games, DRM is a non-issue for actual pirates. It seems a lot more likely to me that the people in charge will have a fit at the idea of releasing the games DRM free, but don't actually care to know anything about the details. So long as the DRM checkbox is ticked, and they don't know about the fact that Steam's DRM is trivially bypassed, everybody mostly gets what they want.
- HeavyStorm 10mo ago
  Also, many such games are on gog DRM free, and certainly pirates don't care where they get their games.
  - hhh 10mo ago
    Yes they do. When I used to pirate a lot of games because I was broke I was gleefully happy to see a GOG release. The scene exists for a reason, it is a very trust based ecosystem.
    - guizadillas 10mo ago
      Yeah I usually trust anything a girl who is particularly fit repacks
      - 867-5309 10mo ago
        good luck sourcing the (supposedly) malware-free release
        guizadillas 10mo ago
        the source is almost always the same forum, what's your point?
Kim_Bruning 10mo ago
> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business. You're saying this about Steam, the 'Piracy is a service problem' company.
computerex 10mo ago
People only pirate games because the publishers make it too painful to play games legally. I have pirated games that I own simply because it's easier to play. This pattern has been shown time and time again. When people pirate, it's usually due to a problem with the experience. People pay for convenience. Now a days a lot of people are pirating games because the quality of games has gone down the drain. Publishers are releasing unfinished games and pricing them at record high. Consumers are pissed at the lack of value.
- oriolid 10mo ago
  I'm not completely convinced. When I was a teenager I pirated games because I didn't have money (and games were incredibly expensive back in the day). The people who I copied them from did it to show off their collection and connections, or just because they were my friends.
  - badsectoracula 10mo ago
    > I'm not completely convinced. When I was a teenager I pirated games because I didn't have money Yes, but if it was impossible to pirate, you'd still have no money to buy the games, so in the grand scheme of things nothing would change.
  - buran77 10mo ago
    For people who have no money to spare for games it really doesn't matter if games come with DRM or not. They wouldn't afford them anyway so "for free" is the only option that matters. For people who have money for games but don't want to pay, the presence of DRM matters very little. 99% of games are usually trivially cracked, especially if you are willing to wait for some days or weeks after launch (an important sales window for the publishers). For people who have money for games and are willing to pay, DRM turns out to be maybe an inconvenience, but definitely a guarantee that they don't actually own the game. The game can be taken away or even just modified in a way that invalidates the reason people paid in the first place.
    - mindcandy 10mo ago
ninth_ant 10mo ago
> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business. This is an opinion, stated as if it’s fact. There are many factors contributing to the ongoing success of steam. Ease of access, a strong network effect, word of mouth from satisfied customers, a strong ecosystem of tools and a modding platform, willingness to work across many platforms and a variety of vendors including competitors, and more. Boiling this down to one factor of “too many people pirate” is dramatic oversimplification.
- cogogo 10mo ago
  I grew up playing pirated games on the Apple II 35 years ago. The fact that many people pirate is not an opinion.
  - ekianjo 10mo ago
    Piracy is much less endemic nowadays.
    - Ygg2 10mo ago
      Yeah, because rather than pirating from cracxxxed.warez I can buy the game on Steam/GoG sale for $1.4.
      - t-3 10mo ago
        Exactly. Games are just software, there's no real unit cost to factor in when setting minimum prices, just market strategy. Running sales with different levels of discounts is as close to optimal as possible $/customer without doing stuff like individualized pricing (which surely requires a vast amount of computing power and human effort to do at scale). Only the truly penniless or retro-game fans need to pirate nowadays.
        kevml 10mo ago
        The real unit cost is worker development cost. Like any other tech company, this cost gets muddied in the platform/framework development costs versus more product focused costs.
KronisLV 10mo ago
> They could sell you everything DRM free. They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business. Depends on the game and DRM. Nowadays I buy all of my games (a little bit safer than running who knows what on my PC), but when I didn't have a job or money I used to pirate a lot - most DRM protected games would eventually be cracked and made available regardless. If an uncrackable DRM was in place, I wouldn't buy the game - I just wouldn't play it. Depending on the mindset, the same logic applies to someone with money, they might never be a customer regardless of whether it can or cannot be pirated, especially for games that never go on big discounts and sales. I say that as someone who by now owns about ~1000 games in total legally (though mostly smaller indie titles acquired over a lot of years and sales). The good online stores at least make the act of purchasing and installing games equally if not more convenient than pirating them - something all of those streaming companies that crank up their subscription prices and want to introduce ads would also do well to remember. I like Steam the best because it's a convenient experience, the Workshop mod support is nice, as well as Proton on Linux and even being able to run some games on my Mac, just download and run. I think the last games I pirated were to check if they'd run well on my VR headset, because I didn't want to spend a few hours tweaking graphics settings and messing around just to be denied a refund - in the end they didn't run well, so I didn't play or buy them, oh well. Also, despite me somewhat doubting the efficacy of DRM (maybe it's good to have around the release time to motivate legit sales, but it's not like it's gonna solve piracy), it better at least be implemented well - otherwise you either get performance issues, or crap that also happens with gaming on Linux with anti-cheat, where you cannot even give the companies money because they can't be bothered to support your platform. Even worse when games depend on a server component for something that you don't actually need for playing the game on your own, fuck that. It's like the big corpos sometimes add Denuvo to their games and then are surprised why people are review bombing them.
SXX 10mo ago
Valve and Steam dont force DRM on anyone either. Downloader client is ofc DRM in itself, but a lot of games run just fine without Steamworks.
sallveburrpi 10mo ago
How is GOG a viable business if everything gets pirated?
- Kim_Bruning 10mo ago
  This is a really old question and a really old solution. It turns out that piracy is actually a service problem. Services like Steam and GOG provide a decent enough service that piracy becomes less common.
- ThrowawayR2 10mo ago
  Many games on GOG are at the tail end of their sales cycle (i.e. were released on Steam long ago) trying to eke out a few more sales, are from small indies for whom any attention at all is good attention, or are very old^H^H^Hclassic games that garner purchases for nostalgia's sake by older gamers that can afford more discretionary spending.
  - delaminator 10mo ago
    And many aren’t. I bought Factorio early access on Gog, and Timberborn, and Loop-Hero.
- phantasmish 10mo ago
  1) Modern games are enormous and as long as services like GOG let me re-download my library it frees up literally terabytes of space on my disk array for pirated movies and other things that benefit far more from piracy than games do. 2) I don’t want viruses. I don’t want viruses more than I want to avoid paying $1-$20 for a game (as if I’m anywhere near caught up enough on my backlog of games from the last 40ish years for buying games at full launch-week price to ever make sense, lol, I do that like… once every several years, all the rest are very cheap)
Hammershaft 10mo ago
Steam uses outsized market power to take an enormous %30 cut so it also does major damage to the games industry.
- SXX 10mo ago
  This. As game developer this is a huge problem since outside of top 1% industry is shit poor and platforms squeeze it badly. Unfortunely needs of game developers and customers are not exactly align. Valve is good steward of their outsized market share when it's comes to gamers interests. Epic Games tried to shake market with "gamers dont matter" policy (no reviews, no community, worse services) and low fees and failed miserably. As game developer I'd love to see platform fee of 10%, but as gamer I dont want to buy my games and give power to Tencent, Microsoft or Google. I could only dream that customer-first platform not owned by VC / PE money like GOG could compete with Steam. Unfortunately unlikely to happen.
- TulliusCicero 10mo ago
  The 30% cut is standard, and was so at retail even before Steam existed IIRC.
  - ThrowawayR2 10mo ago
    And the cut can't be lower? The rush to defend Valve's monopoly is so weird since HN usually hates fat cat billionaires. Valve is raking in so much money as a middleman that Gabe Newell has ~$1 billion worth of yachts alone, in addition to the rest of his wealth, yet gamers want Valve to keep on bleeding them and game studios?
    - chii 10mo ago
      > And the cut can't be lower? why should it be lower (or higher)? steam's cut should be whatever they set, and the market responds. The natural equilibrium would get reached. The value steam provides, imho, certainly justifies their cut imho. There's plenty of other platforms to release games on - including free ones (such as itch.io, or your own website).
EA-3167 10mo ago
Piracy is widespread, that's undeniable. The question that industry groups and lawmakers love to avoid or lie about however is how much of that piracy represents lost sales, and how much represents people in the third world finding a way to participate with all of the people who can afford it. I pirated a lot as a kid because I had no money, there were no lost sales there. As an adult I don't pirate at all, because I have money, because it's inconvenient now compared to legitimate access. So I'm perfectly prepared to believe that Steam is a good option (I personally love it), and frankly if the worst happens and the games I pay for go away on Steam... there are options. Once I pay for something I no longer feel any guilt about seeking a backup for example, and neither should you, even if the industry groups count that as a full-sale price theft.
- kgwxd 10mo ago
  Once you pay who? Money going to the wrong people is far worse for "creators" in the long run than if you had just copied it. Every digital industry has proven the argument billions of times over. If you're going to bother feeling guilt, aim it at actual injustice.
  - EA-3167 10mo ago
    You’re adding a lot of dimensions to the act of buying something than I care about. I’m not trying to fight injustice when I buy most things, I’m just following the realistic legal requirements to use the thing.
    - kgwxd 10mo ago
      Oh, well then, depending on the content, you're almost certainly still "guilty" violating the license you purchased. Smoking my friends prescribed medical marijuana is still illegal in e.g. Florida.
nutjob2 10mo ago
Pretty much all games with any sort of substantial audience are pirated, regardless of DRM. The fact that DRM negatively affects honest customers more than pirates still holds true.
dannyw 10mo ago
I like Steam because they have basically kept the same DRM for, like a decade now? It’s not intrusive.
qwm 10mo ago
It's worth noting that many, if not most, games on Steam don't have DRM. You can often just take the .exe files out of them and play. Sometimes you need a polyfill for Steam's client API, but that's usually it.
solatic 10mo ago
> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business Game piracy is fundamentally un-safe for players, since games are fundamentally executable code, where setup usually requires admin permissions, and pirate distributors are financially incentivized to add malware to turn the game system into part of someone's botnet. The only "safe" way to pirate is to do it on a dedicated machine, on a separate VLAN, network controls, etc., which most people will not set up. This is not like TV/movie piracy, which would depend on zero-day exploits in the video player. Buying a DRM-free game legally is much safer.
- nottorp 10mo ago
  Most good quality pirate sites have a comments section and remove malware laden torrents.
- pdntspa 10mo ago
  How silly that you assume pirates are always doing it for financial gain, as opposed to cred or the lulz
swiftcoder 10mo ago
This is mostly fear-mongering on the part of the big IP holders. We saw the exact same cycle with mobile distribution of audio and video - Amazon even had to fork Android to add kernel-level DRM before any of the video rights holders would allow Amazon Video on tablets (this is before Google added DRM to android in general). And now? That DRM was circumvented, and you can torrent pretty much any Amazon video the day after it goes live. But it's inconvenient enough that most people don't, the rights holders still feel all warm and cozy, and nobody really cares.
generic92034 10mo ago
> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business. So, how does it work for Valve to sell games which are also available at GOG without DRM? If too many people are pirating, why would anyone buy the Steam version?
- georgeecollins 10mo ago
  That's actually honestly a really good point. Things are changing. In real dollar terms games are getting cheaper and the size of the market has grown so I don't know if maybe a DRM free store will soon support premium games. I can't think of a game available on GoG that sells on Steam for > $20. I am sure one exists, but in general these are older, cheaper games. You could also point to games that the Epic store gives away that are sold on Steam. That's an even better example. You are right that people don't just pay for games because they can't get them for free, they are also willing to pay to get them in a convenient format even when another format is free. My question is, does that really support the model for most premium games? Nobody likes DRM, the game industry didn't used to have it.
  - SpEd3Y 10mo ago
    > I can't think of a game available on GoG that sells on Steam for > $20. I am sure one exists, but in general these are older, cheaper games. Fair point but I think there are quite a few of those: Baldur's Gate 3 comes to mind. Expedition 33, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II even Cyberpunk, but it's true that nowadays Cyberpunk is a ~20$ title. But not sure these were on GoG day 1. Or they added them after ~1 year after they got most of their sales on Steam and already the piracy of the games started.
    - nottorp 10mo ago
      >even Cyberpunk, but it's true that nowadays Cyberpunk is a ~20$ title Newsflash: Witcher and Cyberpunk are CD Projekt Red titles. CD Projekt Red was the initiator of GoG and owned it 100% until 2 days ago. Every CD Projekt game was available on GoG from day zero.
  - 10mo ago
serf 10mo ago
>OK, but the model that Valve pioneered is the model that supports 90% of all commercial PC games made today, a higher percentage if you cut out MMOs and free to play games, which you certainly don't own. OK, but this model deployed in other parts of essentially any industry is equally scummy and abusive, no matter how much <$company> is liked, no matter how well they deployed it, no matter how many buckeroos it made someone. in fact it's scummy any time the concept of sales and ownership gets warped aggressively, and even more so when it's done so in such a way that the leasee doesn't realize what they are until they get screwed somehow. also, REMINDER: steam doesn't solve piracy, it helped to solve distribution. anti-piracy was sold (and lobbied to devs by Valve) far after the fact when it became clear that Valve had to have enough benefits to shove devs and customers into this style of non-ownership. Same reason why Steam also tries to be a half-assed discord/social media outlet. Yes it's wildly successful. A lot of scummy shit is. Steering the world that way (by example of business success) is sure to end well. Isn't that what FernGully was about?
scotty79 10mo ago
> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business. Piracy is what makes games a viable business. Even now marketing budget for a game can exceed development costs. Each pirated copy is not a lost sale. It's marketing brain worm implanted in a person that you didn't have to pay for. The fact that most pirated games become bestsellers is not an accident. And it's not the other way around. It's the same thing as with Windows. It wouldn't be most used and best selling operating system if it wasn't amply pirated. Apple, to have anyone use a copy of their OS, has to bundle a device with it. And Linux has to give it all for free to buy its mindshare. Piracy makes Windows business model viable.
easyThrowaway 10mo ago
DRM is not, and it has never been, about piracy. It is about publishers putting an expiry date to a digital product, in order to not having to compete with their own products in the future. It is about making sure that by the time your hypothetical FIFA 2026 release comes out, all the available existing copies of FIFA 2019-2023, which mostly differ for the squad roster, are unusable. This is exactly the same reason for single player games requiring constant online support nowadays. The authorization servers for "The Crew", a mainly single player game by Ubisoft, went offline coinciding with the close release of "The Crew Motorfest". This didn't go unnoticed, and nearly ended up with the EU passing some specific legislation on the matter[1]. [1]https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/2024/000007_en https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/20...
ajuc 10mo ago
> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business I think mostly they don't because people already have steam installed, and creating a new account on some other website to buy 1 game is too much hassle. See dwarf fortress that was free for decades, and got much more popular when it was released on steam (paid version). Or see Vintage Story which is great, and should be much more popular, but it's only available on its own website.
thewebguyd 10mo ago
Except we are at a point now where you almost do have to sell on Steam. If you aren't already huge, you aren't going to gain much traction, if any at all, for your game outside of Steam. I remember when Steam launched, it was rightfully met with hostility. Somehow Valve managed to completely win over gamers, and they do good work, but lets not forget that they are quickly approaching monopoly status. Just because someone could sell on some other store doesn't mean it would be profitable to do so because of Steam's userbase.
0xedd 10mo ago
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rantallion 10mo ago

> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business. This is what we've been told since time eternal but it seems more likely that those pirating are those that wouldn't be inclined to pay at all.

deleted 10mo ago
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doctorpangloss 10mo ago
people are commenting in this HN thread like piracy hasn't been thought about, deeply, by many thousands of people for ages in the games industry. i could link to numerous people writing very wise things about it - the CEO of a certain competitor to GOG and Steam comes to mind, he basically wrote the Luther thesis on games piracy - but then i'd be downvoted.
- jonasdegendt 10mo ago
  I’m interested, please link!
- nottorp 10mo ago
  If it's Epic, they went the predatory free to play route and are financed by gacha money from Tencent. If it's EA or Ubisoft, they make boring design-by-commitee "AAA"s - lately with IAPs thrown in - and I don't even look at what they release.
embedding-shape 10mo ago
> eternal but it seems more likely that those pirating are those that wouldn't be inclined to pay at all. There are a lot of different reasons people pirate games, and other stuff, not all reasons apply to everyone, and some reasons on apply to a few. I used to pirate 99% of the games I played when I was young, because my family simply didn't have money to buy me video games. Once I grew older and had more disposable income, I started buying more games on Steam. Now I have more disposable income than I know what to do with, and I'm back to pirating games, but only for the ones that don't have proper demos available. I probably spent $1000 on games I no longer play and cannot refund, because I'm over the 2 hour limit, and nowadays I pirate the game, and if I enjoy it, I buy it as a way of supporting the developer. I'm probably not alone with this sort of process, but it's probably also not the only reason other's pirate.

Telaneo 10mo ago

> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business. Given how many games on Steam are sold either DRM free (you can just transfer the files over to another PC and they just work) or functionally DRM free (Steam's DRM is trivially bypassed, so one step removed from DRM free), this doesn't really scan. Other than games with Denuvo and multiplayer games, DRM is a non-issue for actual pirates. It seems a lot more likely to me that the people in charge will have a fit at the idea of releasing the games DRM free, but don't actually care to know anything about the details. So long as the DRM checkbox is ticked, and they don't know about the fact that Steam's DRM is trivially bypassed, everybody mostly gets what they want.

HeavyStorm 10mo ago
Also, many such games are on gog DRM free, and certainly pirates don't care where they get their games.
- hhh 10mo ago
  Yes they do. When I used to pirate a lot of games because I was broke I was gleefully happy to see a GOG release. The scene exists for a reason, it is a very trust based ecosystem.
  - guizadillas 10mo ago
    Yeah I usually trust anything a girl who is particularly fit repacks
    - 867-5309 10mo ago
      good luck sourcing the (supposedly) malware-free release
      - guizadillas 10mo ago
        the source is almost always the same forum, what's your point?

Kim_Bruning 10mo ago

> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business. You're saying this about Steam, the 'Piracy is a service problem' company.

computerex 10mo ago

People only pirate games because the publishers make it too painful to play games legally. I have pirated games that I own simply because it's easier to play. This pattern has been shown time and time again. When people pirate, it's usually due to a problem with the experience. People pay for convenience. Now a days a lot of people are pirating games because the quality of games has gone down the drain. Publishers are releasing unfinished games and pricing them at record high. Consumers are pissed at the lack of value.

oriolid 10mo ago
I'm not completely convinced. When I was a teenager I pirated games because I didn't have money (and games were incredibly expensive back in the day). The people who I copied them from did it to show off their collection and connections, or just because they were my friends.
- badsectoracula 10mo ago
  > I'm not completely convinced. When I was a teenager I pirated games because I didn't have money Yes, but if it was impossible to pirate, you'd still have no money to buy the games, so in the grand scheme of things nothing would change.
- buran77 10mo ago
  For people who have no money to spare for games it really doesn't matter if games come with DRM or not. They wouldn't afford them anyway so "for free" is the only option that matters. For people who have money for games but don't want to pay, the presence of DRM matters very little. 99% of games are usually trivially cracked, especially if you are willing to wait for some days or weeks after launch (an important sales window for the publishers). For people who have money for games and are willing to pay, DRM turns out to be maybe an inconvenience, but definitely a guarantee that they don't actually own the game. The game can be taken away or even just modified in a way that invalidates the reason people paid in the first place.
  - mindcandy 10mo ago

ninth_ant 10mo ago

> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business. This is an opinion, stated as if it’s fact. There are many factors contributing to the ongoing success of steam. Ease of access, a strong network effect, word of mouth from satisfied customers, a strong ecosystem of tools and a modding platform, willingness to work across many platforms and a variety of vendors including competitors, and more. Boiling this down to one factor of “too many people pirate” is dramatic oversimplification.

cogogo 10mo ago
I grew up playing pirated games on the Apple II 35 years ago. The fact that many people pirate is not an opinion.
- ekianjo 10mo ago
  Piracy is much less endemic nowadays.
  - Ygg2 10mo ago
    Yeah, because rather than pirating from cracxxxed.warez I can buy the game on Steam/GoG sale for $1.4.
    - t-3 10mo ago
      Exactly. Games are just software, there's no real unit cost to factor in when setting minimum prices, just market strategy. Running sales with different levels of discounts is as close to optimal as possible $/customer without doing stuff like individualized pricing (which surely requires a vast amount of computing power and human effort to do at scale). Only the truly penniless or retro-game fans need to pirate nowadays.
      - kevml 10mo ago
        The real unit cost is worker development cost. Like any other tech company, this cost gets muddied in the platform/framework development costs versus more product focused costs.

KronisLV 10mo ago

> They could sell you everything DRM free. They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business. Depends on the game and DRM. Nowadays I buy all of my games (a little bit safer than running who knows what on my PC), but when I didn't have a job or money I used to pirate a lot - most DRM protected games would eventually be cracked and made available regardless. If an uncrackable DRM was in place, I wouldn't buy the game - I just wouldn't play it. Depending on the mindset, the same logic applies to someone with money, they might never be a customer regardless of whether it can or cannot be pirated, especially for games that never go on big discounts and sales. I say that as someone who by now owns about ~1000 games in total legally (though mostly smaller indie titles acquired over a lot of years and sales). The good online stores at least make the act of purchasing and installing games equally if not more convenient than pirating them - something all of those streaming companies that crank up their subscription prices and want to introduce ads would also do well to remember. I like Steam the best because it's a convenient experience, the Workshop mod support is nice, as well as Proton on Linux and even being able to run some games on my Mac, just download and run. I think the last games I pirated were to check if they'd run well on my VR headset, because I didn't want to spend a few hours tweaking graphics settings and messing around just to be denied a refund - in the end they didn't run well, so I didn't play or buy them, oh well. Also, despite me somewhat doubting the efficacy of DRM (maybe it's good to have around the release time to motivate legit sales, but it's not like it's gonna solve piracy), it better at least be implemented well - otherwise you either get performance issues, or crap that also happens with gaming on Linux with anti-cheat, where you cannot even give the companies money because they can't be bothered to support your platform. Even worse when games depend on a server component for something that you don't actually need for playing the game on your own, fuck that. It's like the big corpos sometimes add Denuvo to their games and then are surprised why people are review bombing them.

SXX 10mo ago

Valve and Steam dont force DRM on anyone either. Downloader client is ofc DRM in itself, but a lot of games run just fine without Steamworks.

sallveburrpi 10mo ago

How is GOG a viable business if everything gets pirated?

Kim_Bruning 10mo ago
This is a really old question and a really old solution. It turns out that piracy is actually a service problem. Services like Steam and GOG provide a decent enough service that piracy becomes less common.
ThrowawayR2 10mo ago
Many games on GOG are at the tail end of their sales cycle (i.e. were released on Steam long ago) trying to eke out a few more sales, are from small indies for whom any attention at all is good attention, or are very old^H^H^Hclassic games that garner purchases for nostalgia's sake by older gamers that can afford more discretionary spending.
- delaminator 10mo ago
  And many aren’t. I bought Factorio early access on Gog, and Timberborn, and Loop-Hero.
phantasmish 10mo ago
1) Modern games are enormous and as long as services like GOG let me re-download my library it frees up literally terabytes of space on my disk array for pirated movies and other things that benefit far more from piracy than games do. 2) I don’t want viruses. I don’t want viruses more than I want to avoid paying $1-$20 for a game (as if I’m anywhere near caught up enough on my backlog of games from the last 40ish years for buying games at full launch-week price to ever make sense, lol, I do that like… once every several years, all the rest are very cheap)

Hammershaft 10mo ago

Steam uses outsized market power to take an enormous %30 cut so it also does major damage to the games industry.

SXX 10mo ago
This. As game developer this is a huge problem since outside of top 1% industry is shit poor and platforms squeeze it badly. Unfortunely needs of game developers and customers are not exactly align. Valve is good steward of their outsized market share when it's comes to gamers interests. Epic Games tried to shake market with "gamers dont matter" policy (no reviews, no community, worse services) and low fees and failed miserably. As game developer I'd love to see platform fee of 10%, but as gamer I dont want to buy my games and give power to Tencent, Microsoft or Google. I could only dream that customer-first platform not owned by VC / PE money like GOG could compete with Steam. Unfortunately unlikely to happen.
TulliusCicero 10mo ago
The 30% cut is standard, and was so at retail even before Steam existed IIRC.
- ThrowawayR2 10mo ago
  And the cut can't be lower? The rush to defend Valve's monopoly is so weird since HN usually hates fat cat billionaires. Valve is raking in so much money as a middleman that Gabe Newell has ~$1 billion worth of yachts alone, in addition to the rest of his wealth, yet gamers want Valve to keep on bleeding them and game studios?
  - chii 10mo ago
    > And the cut can't be lower? why should it be lower (or higher)? steam's cut should be whatever they set, and the market responds. The natural equilibrium would get reached. The value steam provides, imho, certainly justifies their cut imho. There's plenty of other platforms to release games on - including free ones (such as itch.io, or your own website).

EA-3167 10mo ago

Piracy is widespread, that's undeniable. The question that industry groups and lawmakers love to avoid or lie about however is how much of that piracy represents lost sales, and how much represents people in the third world finding a way to participate with all of the people who can afford it. I pirated a lot as a kid because I had no money, there were no lost sales there. As an adult I don't pirate at all, because I have money, because it's inconvenient now compared to legitimate access. So I'm perfectly prepared to believe that Steam is a good option (I personally love it), and frankly if the worst happens and the games I pay for go away on Steam... there are options. Once I pay for something I no longer feel any guilt about seeking a backup for example, and neither should you, even if the industry groups count that as a full-sale price theft.

kgwxd 10mo ago
Once you pay who? Money going to the wrong people is far worse for "creators" in the long run than if you had just copied it. Every digital industry has proven the argument billions of times over. If you're going to bother feeling guilt, aim it at actual injustice.
- EA-3167 10mo ago
  You’re adding a lot of dimensions to the act of buying something than I care about. I’m not trying to fight injustice when I buy most things, I’m just following the realistic legal requirements to use the thing.
  - kgwxd 10mo ago
    Oh, well then, depending on the content, you're almost certainly still "guilty" violating the license you purchased. Smoking my friends prescribed medical marijuana is still illegal in e.g. Florida.

nutjob2 10mo ago

Pretty much all games with any sort of substantial audience are pirated, regardless of DRM. The fact that DRM negatively affects honest customers more than pirates still holds true.

dannyw 10mo ago

I like Steam because they have basically kept the same DRM for, like a decade now? It’s not intrusive.

qwm 10mo ago

It's worth noting that many, if not most, games on Steam don't have DRM. You can often just take the .exe files out of them and play. Sometimes you need a polyfill for Steam's client API, but that's usually it.

solatic 10mo ago

> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business Game piracy is fundamentally un-safe for players, since games are fundamentally executable code, where setup usually requires admin permissions, and pirate distributors are financially incentivized to add malware to turn the game system into part of someone's botnet. The only "safe" way to pirate is to do it on a dedicated machine, on a separate VLAN, network controls, etc., which most people will not set up. This is not like TV/movie piracy, which would depend on zero-day exploits in the video player. Buying a DRM-free game legally is much safer.

nottorp 10mo ago
Most good quality pirate sites have a comments section and remove malware laden torrents.
pdntspa 10mo ago
How silly that you assume pirates are always doing it for financial gain, as opposed to cred or the lulz

swiftcoder 10mo ago

This is mostly fear-mongering on the part of the big IP holders. We saw the exact same cycle with mobile distribution of audio and video - Amazon even had to fork Android to add kernel-level DRM before any of the video rights holders would allow Amazon Video on tablets (this is before Google added DRM to android in general). And now? That DRM was circumvented, and you can torrent pretty much any Amazon video the day after it goes live. But it's inconvenient enough that most people don't, the rights holders still feel all warm and cozy, and nobody really cares.

generic92034 10mo ago

> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business. So, how does it work for Valve to sell games which are also available at GOG without DRM? If too many people are pirating, why would anyone buy the Steam version?

georgeecollins 10mo ago
That's actually honestly a really good point. Things are changing. In real dollar terms games are getting cheaper and the size of the market has grown so I don't know if maybe a DRM free store will soon support premium games. I can't think of a game available on GoG that sells on Steam for > $20. I am sure one exists, but in general these are older, cheaper games. You could also point to games that the Epic store gives away that are sold on Steam. That's an even better example. You are right that people don't just pay for games because they can't get them for free, they are also willing to pay to get them in a convenient format even when another format is free. My question is, does that really support the model for most premium games? Nobody likes DRM, the game industry didn't used to have it.
- SpEd3Y 10mo ago
  > I can't think of a game available on GoG that sells on Steam for > $20. I am sure one exists, but in general these are older, cheaper games. Fair point but I think there are quite a few of those: Baldur's Gate 3 comes to mind. Expedition 33, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II even Cyberpunk, but it's true that nowadays Cyberpunk is a ~20$ title. But not sure these were on GoG day 1. Or they added them after ~1 year after they got most of their sales on Steam and already the piracy of the games started.
  - nottorp 10mo ago
    >even Cyberpunk, but it's true that nowadays Cyberpunk is a ~20$ title Newsflash: Witcher and Cyberpunk are CD Projekt Red titles. CD Projekt Red was the initiator of GoG and owned it 100% until 2 days ago. Every CD Projekt game was available on GoG from day zero.
- 10mo ago

serf 10mo ago

>OK, but the model that Valve pioneered is the model that supports 90% of all commercial PC games made today, a higher percentage if you cut out MMOs and free to play games, which you certainly don't own. OK, but this model deployed in other parts of essentially any industry is equally scummy and abusive, no matter how much <$company> is liked, no matter how well they deployed it, no matter how many buckeroos it made someone. in fact it's scummy any time the concept of sales and ownership gets warped aggressively, and even more so when it's done so in such a way that the leasee doesn't realize what they are until they get screwed somehow. also, REMINDER: steam doesn't solve piracy, it helped to solve distribution. anti-piracy was sold (and lobbied to devs by Valve) far after the fact when it became clear that Valve had to have enough benefits to shove devs and customers into this style of non-ownership. Same reason why Steam also tries to be a half-assed discord/social media outlet. Yes it's wildly successful. A lot of scummy shit is. Steering the world that way (by example of business success) is sure to end well. Isn't that what FernGully was about?

scotty79 10mo ago

> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business. Piracy is what makes games a viable business. Even now marketing budget for a game can exceed development costs. Each pirated copy is not a lost sale. It's marketing brain worm implanted in a person that you didn't have to pay for. The fact that most pirated games become bestsellers is not an accident. And it's not the other way around. It's the same thing as with Windows. It wouldn't be most used and best selling operating system if it wasn't amply pirated. Apple, to have anyone use a copy of their OS, has to bundle a device with it. And Linux has to give it all for free to buy its mindshare. Piracy makes Windows business model viable.

easyThrowaway 10mo ago

DRM is not, and it has never been, about piracy. It is about publishers putting an expiry date to a digital product, in order to not having to compete with their own products in the future. It is about making sure that by the time your hypothetical FIFA 2026 release comes out, all the available existing copies of FIFA 2019-2023, which mostly differ for the squad roster, are unusable. This is exactly the same reason for single player games requiring constant online support nowadays. The authorization servers for "The Crew", a mainly single player game by Ubisoft, went offline coinciding with the close release of "The Crew Motorfest". This didn't go unnoticed, and nearly ended up with the EU passing some specific legislation on the matter[1]. [1]https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/2024/000007_en https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/20...

ajuc 10mo ago

> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business I think mostly they don't because people already have steam installed, and creating a new account on some other website to buy 1 game is too much hassle. See dwarf fortress that was free for decades, and got much more popular when it was released on steam (paid version). Or see Vintage Story which is great, and should be much more popular, but it's only available on its own website.

thewebguyd 10mo ago

Except we are at a point now where you almost do have to sell on Steam. If you aren't already huge, you aren't going to gain much traction, if any at all, for your game outside of Steam. I remember when Steam launched, it was rightfully met with hostility. Somehow Valve managed to completely win over gamers, and they do good work, but lets not forget that they are quickly approaching monopoly status. Just because someone could sell on some other store doesn't mean it would be profitable to do so because of Steam's userbase.

0xedd 10mo ago

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