You’ve already moved the goalposts so far, what does it matter? If Kingdom Come: Deliverance II just last year doesn’t show that DRM-free won’t just invite piracy, or Baldur’s Gate 3 just two years before that, no answer will be good enough for you. Few AAA companies choose to release their games on GOG. More will choose to if that’s where the money is. Indiana Jones didn’t come to GOG less than a year after its initial release because they just wanted pirates to have it, finally. When Divinity, The Witcher 4, and the new Cyberpunk games come out, a few things will happen: they will sell in the tens of millions of copies and make a boatload of money; they will be available DRM-free on GOG; they will still sell most of their copies on Steam anyway; people will pirate it (but they would have even if the games were only on Steam anyway). Mina the Hollower was make or break for Yacht Club, but they put the game on GOG because they wanted to make money from those customers as well. If they were so sure that people would have just pirated it, surely they would have opted not to release it there.

Which GOG release bankrupted a company by way of piracy?

Plenty of the games people want to buy are on GOG. Definitely not all of them, but you can find GOTY winners like Clair Obscur and Baldur’s Gate 3, games that should have won more awards like Kingdom Come: Deliverance II and The Alters, awesome indie games like Mina the Hollower and Escape from Ever After, plus the old stuff that GOG restores like Dino Crisis and Alpha Protocol that had pent-up demand. There’s no chart to compare sales, but developers talk, and they know their own sales data. Firms like Circana buy sales data and then sell the analysis back to help companies figure out what will help them make more money, including where people are buying video games.

Also there’s just no denying it, and even trying is disingenuous - a game like GTA 6 releasing on GoG without DRM would sell significantly less than it would in a platform with DRM. It’s just the truth.

That’s easy to claim and impossible to prove. Baldur’s Gate 3 released day 1 without DRM and still went on to sell over 20M copies; how many people do you think pirated it? Millions and millions? There are some people who are always going to pirate, but I think most prefer the experience of just buying the damn thing and getting better service out of it, not the least of which is quick and easy patching. We also now live in a world where Denuvo is fully broken open. There’s no difference in one’s ability to pirate once the game has been cracked at all. Piracy is going to happen one way or another, and GTA6 is basically guaranteed to make more money than any other video game that came before it.

In the terrible state that the video game industry is in for developers, releasing a big AAA game DRM-free would be the last game they ever release.

This is demonstrably false, given the AAA games that release on GOG all the time.

This looks great, but the one thing I need software like this to do in order for it to be useful is cloud saves (my NAS would be the cloud in this case), and I’d want those saves to be account-driven. Looks like it’s “coming soon” on their feature comparison page, so I’ll definitely check it out eventually. I’m months into a journey to self-host a bunch of other use cases, and this could be very nice for me.

More games release on GOG when customers show there’s money to be made there. If you make it important to you that your games are DRM-free and spend more money on GOG than Steam, you help tip those scales. It’s not fundamental. If DRM is poison for making money, then fewer games will employ it.

It was $50 before that and as high as $90 before that. $60 is kind of arbitrary, honestly.

I don’t think I can read books fast enough to make automation attractive either, haha. I break DRM on Calibre with two plugins, books purchased from Kobo, and then organize on Komga after manually dragging the files.

I did enjoy Outer Worlds 1/2 as the Bethesda-esque space-faring with stable code (and more of a soul, honestly). Avowed doesn’t really scratch that itch. It started life as an Elder Scrolls competitor but became more of a combat game taking inspirations from a few different places and landing on a whole new satisfying first person fantasy combat model.

I understand the fantasy of how systemic Bethesda’s games promise you that they are, but I personally never see it manifest beyond putting a bucket on a shopkeeper’s head so he can’t see you steal anything. Larian’s engine delivers on the sandbox nature that Bethesda games long promised, and I think Larian is now the one to beat. I’m not rooting for Bethesda to switch to Unreal, but I was rooting for them to time travel back to right after Fallout 4 came out so that they could start work on a new engine that doesn’t break in a light breeze, delivers on the sandbox nature that they promise, and holds up to semi-modern technology. As it stands, I think I’m far more interested in Warhorse’s new Lord of the Rings game, because they did design their tech stack to replicate the strengths of Bethesda’s design, and they had better quest design, too.

It barely works and fell way behind competing engines. I don’t see them retrofitting it into something that feels appropriately modern and stable, because they couldn’t with Starfield.

A fuzzy misinterpretation of what someone else said is what started your hostilities, so I get it.

Fair enough, but the fourth is “returns”.

The PR-friendly response for why they centralize servers always sounds good, because it’s PR. They push lots more updates than they did in the old days because it’s part of the business model, whereas we used to get sequels and expansion packs that paid for that work up front. This is another way of framing my perspective on this modern business model as being expensive for them and generally a losing bet that’s not worth pursuing compared to how we used to do things.

Again, I disagree with this cynical take.

I don’t even consider that cynical. It’s the only conclusion I can come to based on how these different companies behave. The artist already told me clearly what the intended experience was, and if I bought the damn thing, I should be able to disregard it. Games are also games, and we should be able to run house rules. Getting in the way of that is just making the product worse, regardless of what the art is.

So, yes, there may be a breakdown in terminology here. When I hear someone say they “demand” something from someone, for ex.

In some cases one, in other cases the other, so that might be what you’re reading. In at least one of these cases, we’re talking about consumer demand, what I want as a customer, the customer is always right, yadda yadda.

I’m hearing that you want legislation to require offline play.

Legislatively, I support what SKG is after. My personal desires are for more than that, because the product doesn’t offer enough value to me compared to one that works offline from day 1. And I think whether customers can articulate that well enough or not, they’re making a similar evaluation of the product in front of them, which explains the culture around people making a lot of noise about Steam charts, prematurely declaring “dead games”, and so on. A game like this one that launches as anything other than a phenomenal success looks like a bad investment if other people didn’t already sign on in droves.

Agreed, and there’s no legislation requiring devs to lay out their plan ahead of time, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable for the people to demand that information.

Without legislation, they could tell me the offline binary is ready to release and all they have to do is hit the button, but I’d have no reason to believe them.

By releasing a dedicated server binary for a game, you are inviting a fractured playerbase.

This is exactly why I believe it wouldn’t fracture very far. It’s going to be far easier to get up and running and playing the game by connecting to official servers. But it will sure be nice have to a safety net.

As for the intended experience, how much does it bother developers that their customers play offline games with mods? Or back in the day we’d use cheat codes. Grand Theft Auto always had missions, but for at least the first four iterations of it, it was more of just a chaos sandbox where people would ignore the main throughline. My favorite way to play Factorio is with aliens turned off. Devs have all sorts of ways to tells us what the intended experience is, but deviating from that should be our choice. I’ll get more value out of a game that doesn’t take that away from me, and I think devs get more information about what their players actually want if they look at how many people choose the unintended experience over the intended one. It’s why Rockstar hired all of those roleplay server folks to officially integrate it into GTA6. The only reason the unintended experience is a detriment to them is because they see it as a threat to their business model.

I think you’re conflating a few things of what I said here. I know what SKG is asking for, and I’m not suggesting they change it.

What I personally want is a game that survives offline today, tomorrow, and indefinitely, for the reasons I’ve stated.

And I think that regardless of whether or not anything changes legislatively, it’s such a losing bet to design your infrastructure for online matchmaking only, since most populations drop off extremely quickly, that you end up with costly retrofits like this in a best-case scenario after that point, so you may as well prepare for low population instead. This game, for instance, went from thousands of concurrent players to hundreds in just two months. It’s not an absurd demand to get a game built for offline play. They still make those. No one is forcing me to buy a game that isn’t built that way, but it’s really fucking hard to know which is which sometimes, even when doing research. The only thing that necessitates a central server that only the company controls, even for an MMO, is the business model, and them not wanting you to remove opportunities for them to sell you subscriptions and microtransactions. Nothing needs one, especially when the odds are your game will end up with low pop in no time at all.

They can have a ladder and matchmaking while still providing a server browser that goes to self-hosted servers. Even then, these are things that you set up with the assumption that your game is going to have a massive population, which is the foolish assumption all these live service games make. MMOs have been self-hosted for as long as pirates have been reverse-engineering the code. The only thing stopping it from happening more is the rights holders’ willingness to allow it. Competitive shooters started from server browsers and self-hosted servers.

They are doing voluntarily what I want a Stop Killing Games initiative to require from all studios: just ensure the game continues to work.

If they wait until the game is a failure and about to close shop, I have no guarantee that this update will be its fate. But let’s say I know in advance somehow that the game is going to survive the servers’ decommissioning; I still end up with all the other negative side effects of an always-online game in the interim. Server queues, downtime that I can’t do anything about, no ability to play LAN with friends in a place with lousy internet, etc. SKG is looking for a minimum of preservation that I can get behind, but I don’t think it would be enough for me as a customer unless it was never always-online.

You understand they’re out of business, right?

Looks like I missed it as I scrolled by a block on that page trying to recommend me other articles, as I was looking for the rest of this article.

They’d need to be forward thinking in which technologies they use such that they can be handed over to customers. Open source is always nice but isn’t strictly necessary, and it’s far less likely to happen whenever middleware is involved.

It shows that they’re trying to keep the game in a state where they’re spending no money and still potentially making money, but that may not be mutually exclusive with what you said.

With no insider information, Elder Scrolls VI probably comes 2028 or 2029, as that’s about what Bethesda’s cadence is. That would make Fallout 5 somewhere around 2033 or 2034.

They also could have just done that from the start. Look, this is good news, but the reason you design your servers like that in the first place is because you have the hubris to think you’re going to make Fortnite money. Hopefully their next project isn’t built with the same naivety.

They’ve already got one of those, Fallout 76. They’ve kept it going, and it’s probably even profitable at this point thanks to the TV show, but I doubt they’ve got the appetite for another one of those right now.