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How about you go and have a conversation with XYCat now? You two deserve each other.

What a Coincidence I am too, But Australia's pensions are not as generous as The UK's

I am not sure how this can be twisted and where to staart.... first of all to trade inside China offically, you must follow DPRC rules and regulations, if not you are not allowed to trade, so there is that. Off course, taxes made from the sales also goes to DPRC, sales outside China does not, so having a specifc client inside the Chinese market is part of funding the Chinese governmen as well. When the Steam China client starts, it starts from splash screenss showing messages from DPRC. Game times are limited, so you stay 'productive' and have a healty lifestyle. They can not sell games which are not approved by DPRC. In the alpha, the social functions where limted, there where only Steam id's (the string of numbers) as usernames first have to be aproved by DPRC... and so on....

But I guess none of these can be seen as supporting DPRC. And it is not only about supporting the Chinese gmaes market, there are many (approved) western games as well.

I Never did, I even told you people about it in what 2016 you have only figured it out now

Count me in.

I've been buying a lot of games of all shapes and sizes for as long as I've been able to afford to, because gaming is a significant part of my life.

After Steam essentially lost its steam and turned complacent back in the day, and after some other quite major annoyances with Valve in general, up until now I've almost exclusively been buying from GOG (for the life of me I can't figure out why McPixel is not on GOG, but here we are, and now I have to qualify that sentence with "almost").

Most of the points listed in the OP, among other peeves, have been getting on my nerves for a long time now. Some of GOG's and CDPR's recent history seals the deal for me.


If I'm to retain my personal integrity, then I'm running out of options here as my s***list grows very large indeed. But I don't actually NEED to buy games.

After brief research I am not versed enough with these cases to comment on that directly.
I will say just this: Steam has advanced content rules, some are debatable, it's execution is afaik strict tho.
I cannot comment if Valve's decision in regards to those 2 games was right or not since I simply don't have enough data and will likely not have insider data ever (not because I couldn't, just because they would not give me a reason for refusing another developer, for legal reasons I guess).
I am also having some trouble finding those 2 games in DB. Would you mind sharing at least their developers names? (I am having doubts if the names cited in the linked article are 100% correct, it may be that these are english translation of titles, I don't know).

Look, we live in a time when there is not much pure left.
People need to actively choose the "lesser evil" all the time.

While I recognize "Steam Platform" (official chinese name) to be not perfectly good thing I know that it's nowhere near the GOG case.
How I see it is that Valve just created offbranch to deal with CH in an contained manner, like I said before.
And according to wiki that's the intent:
[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_(service)#Steam_China]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_(service)#Steam_China[/url]
[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_World_(company)#Collaboration_with_Valve]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_World_(company)#Collaboration_with_Valve[/url]

Germany has "awkward" censorship laws? Steam makes developers release "special" versions for Germany.
China has some ludicrous censorship laws to the point where "containment" is needed?
Well Valve has stepped up and decided to put out a fire in early stage and decided to literally make a separate offbranch joint venture to contain that fire in it's source - they created "Steam China" that is implied to operate completely independently from Steam itself.
Is that a bad thing?
That way Steam international remains independent and there is far less possibility for such BS like GOG now.
Literally whatever CH wants gets contained within "Steam China" while normal Steam remains fairly independent.
That's my take on the case.

Meanwhile GOG literally assists CH gov by bowing to their arbitrary WORLDWIDE censorship request.
They had all the technical means to just region lock the game in CH. No. Instead they chose to not release the game INTERNATIONALLY.
Let alone the fact that the "offending content" was removed long ago.
I really don't understand how people could not see the distinction between the 2 cases :/

In current situation I personally see Steam as more faitful to it's principles than GOG. Therefore lesser evil.
It's not perfect. But imo lesser evil atm. At least they don't do what GOG currently does.
This Devotion debacle, along with EGS ordeal, CP2077 "my rewards", spitting in the face of Linux users, lack of access to historical builds for 90+ % of games, and a bunch of other stuff made me reevaluate how I see GOG as a platform and where I place it in hierarchy compared to Steam.
Steam at least doesn't openly lie about it's principles. And at least for me right now I feel better treated as a customer ON STEAM.
I deeply care about DRM-free. But if a platform CLAIMING to be 100% DRM-free just up and lies about it I may as well back off to a platform that is OPEN about it's DRM or lack thereof (or if there are errors on Store page presense in regards to that I can still verify manually if game has DRM or not through console commands, DB queries and other technical means, it is possible on Steam while not on GOG [the tools may exist but they sure aren't public]) where I can make majority of games DRM-free by "other means" such as Steam API emulators and such.
I don't intend to buy ANYTHING on GOG at this point.
GOG has burned their reputation in my eyes.
That's just my 2 cents.
Nobody has to agree with it. You are free to have a different opinion. There's free speech internationally. But please don't step on me personally or I will start reporting every attempt at that.

It's been a while since they perished.

Okay there is a problem developing here and that is placing labels on people.

This is an issue as it allows people to dismiss criticism by just saying "You you are just a defender", or "You are just a hater".

Can we please avoid labels and again be civil.


Honestly no platform is perfect:

My biggest issue with Steam happened years ago when a number of my games just stopped working, when I contacted Steam they just told me to go E-mail the publishers. I contacted one publisher and after over an hour of trouble shooting we discovered that it was indeed the Steam client preventing the games from running (the support person gave me a workaround for the game and it ran flawlessly).

I then presented all of our findings to Steam so they could fix the issue but instead of resolving the issue they sent me a cease & desist letter stating if I ever attempted to circumvent Steam DRM they would ban & delete my account. So I had games I legally bought that would not work because of Steam DRM and instead of fixing the problem they threatened to delete my account meaning I would lose all my games, so it was either lose access to some of my games or lose access to all of my games.

Dude, it's a public forum, you made a post and I answered to your post, nothing more nothing less.

Sorry but that's some heavy mental gymnastic here, "private" companies in China have strong ties to the government, it's not like in the west, when a company decide to work with a Chinese company to do business in China they are working with the government be it indirectly. And it's even worse here as we are talking about video games that needs to be individually controlled and censored by several government agencies before being available officially for sales.

That you want to boycott Gog because you don't like how they handled the Devotion situation or that you need to use Galaxy to unlock an in game T-shirt that's one thing, and it's fine it's your choice, but saying that you boycott Gog because you don't want to support the Chinese government while at the same time continue buying from Steam is silly to say the least. At least the OP is consistent in the fact that he don't purchase from Steam nor Epic.

no , what is or was that?

Used to be able to make lists that would show up on the store pages.

Say you liked games with a good story. You'd make a list including games that fall under this category and your list would appear on the store page on the right. People would vote on the lists and higher rated lists would appear at the top.

Someone made a list being negative about a developer and they axed the whole system. There may have been other reasons, but the timing of it all would have been quite the coincidence.

They used allow people make a list of games they can recommend to others but a few years back they removed it entirely. I'm guessing they're also afraid of this one particular GOGmix that shows which games being sold on GOG that treat GOG users as second-rate customers with missing features, DLC, updates, patches, etc. from other platforms like Steam or Epic.

iirc you could put together lists of games (e.g. games with a certain theme, your favorites etc.), and many users lovingly created them, often with substantial commentary.
Then Gog suddenly deleted the feature, consigning all those gogmixes people had put effort in to obivion :-) And there was never a replacement for that feature.

Both names seem to be correct. "Liberate Hong Kong" brings up results easily; "Karma" got released on itch.io: https://herstory.itch.io/karma/devlog/110824/karma-trad-chinese-version-released-karma

I'm just quoting that other bit since I want to clarify I don't see that strategy as evil. It is the best thing they can do to satisfy China's restriction fetish while leaving other countries alone. But their recent guidelines have still been confusing for quite a number of devs, especially if their game has anime aesthetic. It's like they want to confirm USA based companies don't want to give in to the "lewd". (In contrast, if I'm not mistaken, Japan is fine with actual lewd stuff, but really adverse towards explicit gore.)

Thx for the answers.