Overview page: https://www.gog.com/en/anniversary
Direct sign up for Galaxy Linux beta: https://www.smartsurvey.co.uk/t/YEF5EV/
Overview page: https://www.gog.com/en/anniversary
Direct sign up for Galaxy Linux beta: https://www.smartsurvey.co.uk/t/YEF5EV/
Right, you’re trying to make a “who are the good guys” judgement using money as the metric …
Then let’s do some cold hard business analysis on all this shit:
For starters, Valve does very little of the work in projects like Wine compared to the work done by voluntaries working on those Open Source projects. I vaguely remember that they had one person full time on it.
Further, judging by their yearly profits (more than $1 billion as leaked in 2021) they clearly “invest” very very little of the fee “onto improvements to wine, dxvk, FEX, as well as the features they offer like Steam client, cloud saves, etc.” otherwise the profits would be much less.
Imagine how far something like Wine would go with just half a year of Valve’s profits, enough to pay for a year of work of around 5,000 devs here in Europe (depends on the country - I’m using $100,000 per year per worker which is actually well above average dev pay in all of EE)
More Maths: say you would have to PAY directly for the software that lets you run games in Linux. Let’s put a fair value per copy for that at €200 - well above a consumer price and actually a business price for software, though not a corporate price. Let’s further say that the average price you pay per game is €40. Last but not least, lets simplify our math by saying that Valve paid for the entire development of all that open source software, which is nowhere near the case, and lets ignore taxes as they vary a lot from country to country.
Valve takes 30% commission per game sold, so even in this wildly pro-Valve imaginary scenario were Valve does all the work in those open source projects, if your game collection in Valve is more than 17 games, then you’re already losing. Any further game you buy is just you delivering value to Valve for no extra value in return as you’ve already paid for the value you get from those open source projects.
The reality is that Valve aren’t the good guys - if they were their profits would be way less because they would be truly “investing the fee onto improvements to wine, dxvk, FEX, as well as the features they offer like Steam client, cloud saves, etc.” as you imagine they are. In fact the most reasonable explanation for them putting a small bit of their billionaire revenues into those projects is that it’s a small strategical investment to reduce their dependency on Microsoft and the risks associated with Microsoft doing like Apple does with iOS and Google is on its way to do with Android - forcing all sales of software that runs in Windows to go through a Microsoft store. Valve is not a charity: they send a little bit of money that way that just keeps the projects rolling with volunteer work without actually putting so much money into it that they basically take over because it’s the optimal business strategy that minimizes the cost for them whilst helping secure their market share against such a move by Microsoft.
Valve are there to make money for their owner and all they do is to make money for their owner, not help out the likes of you and me.
Mind you, neither are GOG or any of the other for-profit game stores the “good guys”: they’re all in it for themselves, not for us and anything they do which is good for us they do it because it’s good for them and would otherwise not do it.
Ultimately if you really want to make this about “value”, then you have to figure out how much “value” you derive from each feature that each store offers you - so how much are cloud saves worth it to you, how much is having a game store launcher in Linux and its features worth it for you, how much are offline game installers and no-DRM worth it for you and so on.
Personally I see little value in store launchers and cloud saves and more value in offline game installers and no-DRM, so my value consideration makes me lean towards buying more from GOG than from Steam. Yet I will still buy from Steam if a game is in Steam but not GOG and the value of the game for me is enough to exceed this imbalance, which is why I have a small collection of games in Steam - I actually tend make purchasing decisions based on value considerations since I have a background in Finance and as a business owner so naturally look at products and services as something that delivers value to the user.
However, it’s perfectly valid that other people see different value for themselves in these things and that adds up to a preference for Steam over GOG - the value an individual derives from features of products and services is a personal thing.
Let’s however not deceive ourselves by looking at small strategic investments of massive for-profit companies and think they’re doing it for us.
PS: By the way, of the 3 games you listed 2 of them I bought directly from the game makers.
No, my metric is what am I getting for the money?. on Steam I get the game and some niceties, plus I’m directly financing the game development and indirectly financing wine/proton/FEX. On GoG I get the game and I’m directly financing the game development and nothing more.
Buying the game directly from the game dev I’m financing game development and nothing more exactly like GoG but the dev gets 100% of my money, if the game is doing things very right (like the 3 I mentioned) that’s my preferred form, especially because Valve gives developers extra keys for them to sell as long as they don’t sell them cheaper than on Steam, so I can have my cake and eat it too. Although to be honest most of the time I just buy on steam because I’m a lazy fuck. But for example, Project Zomboid I bought directly from the devs before Steam came to Linux, exactly because it had a Linux version.
Which reminds me of something, you probably started using Linux recently, some of your comments mention GoG Galaxy on Windows, and that only came out in 2014, so I must assume you migrated after that. Depending on when, you probably haven’t been around long enough to feel the impact Valve is having. So while in relative terms to their profit they might not be doing that much, in absolute terms they’re definitely doing more than every other player combined at least 10 times over. And I’m not naive in thinking that they’re doing it out of the kindness of their heart, but the improvements are real, and even if they do a 180 and completely shit on Linux their improvements are here to stay and I can vote with my wallet then.
Mathematically for every game you buy from Steam about 0.07% of what you pay for it ends up flowing to help the Linux gaming ecosystem.
So each time a customer buys from Steam that does very, very little to help the Linux ecosystem - if you’re a dev earning €100,000 a year literally 1 minute of your time on a related open source project is worth more in helping the Linux ecosystem than buying €1000 in games from Steam.
So unlike what you seem to think, gamers get very little “help the Linux gaming ecosystem” value from buying from Steam vs buying from others. Thus other possible forms of value for gamers easilly exceed that, such as the freedom that comes from DRM-free offline installer. I’ll happilly forgo the 0.07% of my money that goes to help the Linux gaming ecosystem when buying from Steam for getting games in a format were I have full ownership rights.
That’s the point I was trying to make (but was too confusing about it).
Mate, I’ve been a gamer since the late 80s, before PCs and well before the Internet and Steam. I’ve also been using Linux since the early 90s and in fact decades of my software development career involved making (later designing) server-side software that ran on Linux (and later even designing and developing entire distributed computing software systems using thousands of Linux machines).
Linux was not in my main gaming PC until recently because until maybe 5 years ago it was a PITA for it and frankly I didn’t have the patience to, after hours working making and bugfixing software, come home and have to fix problems in games in Linux before I could have some R&R playing a game.
I’m coming from the very opposite end of experience you think I’m coming from: we were fighting in the 90s the very shit that Steam pushed with their store - remote authorization and tracking over the internet of how and when you can play your games.
Back in the early 90s there was no such things as phone-home DRM. You put your floppy or CD in your PC and installed the game. Then you played the game whenever you felt like. At most some DRM forced you to have the game install floppy or CD on a PC when playing and that was it. You used to be able to lend your PC games to your friends and even sell them second hand with nobody getting in the way, same as continued to happen to console games with physical distribution for years.
As the Internet became more common we started seeing phone-home DRM in games that came in CDs and DVDs.
Steam normalized that shit - phone-home DRM is a standard feature of the Steam API. It normalized reduced ownership rights. There were only two ways in which Steam did good:
Steam’s tiny, tiny, trully miniscule amount of their revenue they spend helping the Linux ecosystem now, pales in comparison to everything they took from us gamers, and then your generation grew up in an era where you have pretty much no fucking rights and think Steam is so great because they do a tiny tiny amount for Linux to further their own strategical objectives.
Mate, Steam fucked you up as a gamer maybe even before you were born and you’re blind to it because you were never a gamer in the era when gamers had full ownership rights and way more freedom. Now you see them doing the very minimum they can to help something you like and you think they’re great, not having any idea of all Steam helped take away from you well before you became a gamer.
I dislike Steam exactly because I was already an avid gamer through the whole period when Steam did most of the work of de facto taking those rights away from us and getting people used to having very few ownership rights and even be thankful when Steam allowed them back a few of those rights (like the ability of sharing games with the rest of the family) which were standard when games came in physical media and you didn’t need to ask anybody or give them your personal information to enjoy.
Steam is to games as Amazon is to books and all it takes is to compare what people can do in practice with physical books (like lending them to friends or even pick them up from a library for free, read them and return them) vs Amazon’s heavy DRM locked e-books to get an idea of what we could do with games before Steam vs what we can do now with games from Steam.
PS: And, by the way, I’ve been boycotting Amazon for 2 decades, so it’s hardly as if I’m inconsistent in this.
Valve is personally financing over 100 open source devs across wine, proton, dxvk, drivers, Vulkan, etc. 100 people at 100k it’s at least 10 Million yearly investment, and that’s just what they directly finance on open source devs, their own employees also contribute and projects like the Steam Deck, Machine and Frame require specific things outside of those 100 open source devs for which they hire people directly. I don’t know where your 0.07% number comes from but regardless the point is that by paying the same price for the same product I get some benefits like cloud saves and I’m directly financing that. Whereas if I were to buy the game from GoG I would not, simple as that. Also, I don’t see GoG investing anything into making games DRM free, so while buying from them does signal you like DRM free it doesn’t fund that.
This, this is what Valve changed. Like I said, you migrated to Linux as your gaming OS recently, after Valve pushed the scales, you are the proof that what Valve is doing is improving the Linux gaming landscape. You just don’t see it because you’ve migrated after that change was in motion, so to you it’s just a natural progression, but as someone who was full time Linux gamer since before Steam came to Linux I can absolutely tell you that it’s not.
Gaming on Linux had always ben a Chicken and egg problem, not enough users to justify the investment from studios, not enough games available to justify users migrating. Valve broke that cycle. By providing an easy way to play games that weren’t made for Linux, users had a way to keep playing their games when migrating, even better the devs would see how many users were doing so, and be incentivized to maintain compatibility even if through proton.
To achieve this Valve invested so heavily into wine and dxvk that it made the ecosystem better even outside of Steam. This moved a lot of people over to Linux gradually (like you), and made other companies start paying attention, and at least attempt to make things compatible.
I’m younger than you, I don’t remember the 80s, but I do remember gaming on the 90s, however I’m from a third world country, so until midway through the 00s most of my games were pirated. Not that I knew it back then, I went to the store and bought the games, the fact that they were copies wasn’t something I truly understood until much later in life, but here’s the thing, I didn’t had any alternative, my entire childhood I cracked games thinking that that’s what you do with games to be able to play them.
All that is to say I understand the DRM-free appeal, but if a game developer blocks me from playing a game I paid for I won’t feel obligated to give them money again, and likely won’t give them money again for any future games as they’re not trustworthy. No DRM is perfect, eventually it will get cracked. So while I agree with you and would like to play my games without DRM, I would first like to be able to play my games before even worrying about DRM, and that was not an easy possibility before Steam for Linux.
I will not change your mind because to you DRM is more important than Linux. That is to say, we would both prefer to run DRM free games on Linux, but you would rather keep a windows partition to play DRM free games than play DRMd games on Linux, and for me it’s the other way around.