Well... it finally happened on the 17th of December, 2021:

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/83587/goldman-sachs-has-more-voting-rights-in-cd-projekt-than-cdpr-president/index.html

EDIT: Okay so there's people with more power in the company than Goldman Sachs, but still. It was bound to start happening sooner or later.

Yikes, so we're in terrible hands. Happy Merchant hands, more specifically.

And this sort of thing is why companies like Gog should try to avoid going public and/or taking venture(vulture) capital.

I very much agree. Gabe and co. were smart not to do so (I assume Valve were never desperate for money like I think CDP were once, though).

Thing is, I don't think it was needed for Gog to go public/etc.....I think some of em just saw the dollar signs and that overrode their common sense/principles to varying degrees. A shame, really.

tbh I don't know much about the stock market. I assumed GOG is "public" because CDP SA is "public".

It seems like CDP was private until 2018? I thought they went public back in the late 2000s, needing money, but perhaps I'm confusing them with someone else, maybe from the dot-com era.

In any case, if GOG could have been kept private like Valve, yeah I certainly wish they had done so. As it is, if GOG does return to their "roots" of DRM-free emphasis like a recent Verge article suggested, I hope it pays off for them financially. (otherwise Zoom might, eventually, actually be able to compete with GOG.) Galaxy doesn't seem like much a worthwhile investment anymore, though I was under the impression most GOG users used Galaxy. (I don't really blame GOG for trying with Galaxy 1 and 2 and heavily investing into it, until installers seemed to be "left behind"; back around 2015ish I honestly thought GOG had somewhat of a shot at competing with Steam.)

My bad, I meant cdp/cdpr(and by extension, Gog) in my prior post.

Afaik cdp/cdpr were making good money from The Witcher games before they went public.

Imo this would be nice to see either way(more serious competition from zoom, I mean).......the more competition the better.

Thanks. It sounds good for the customer on the short term, but I'm not sure about the long term prospects of such a strategy.

I'm guessing that Steam is taking a loss liter (and once you include costs of distribution and operation for online features, it is a loss liter) in an effort to entrench would-be customers in their platform, but you can't financially operate that way at scale (I'm guessing it works because a small fraction of sales are done that way, but if that was scaled out to a much greater fraction of sales, it would no longer be viable).

So, industry-wise (and such considerations are the reason why I buy games instead of simply pirating them), I'm sceptical that this is a move in the right direction.

Going further, my personal belief is that game store operators should be compensated for their service and rather than taking a cut on each sale, they should charge a recurring service fee, because unlike the game developers, who tend to have a more limited support window, their operational model is more that of a long term service.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not sure the above could be sold to the public (who find the business model of a traditional brick & mortar store easier to grasp), but the closer we can get to that model, the closer we can get to something that is viable in the long term, irrespective of game sales and I personally have interest in GOG sticking around and continuing to support its games (however inadequate we find that support to be at times), irrespective of sales figures.

Thanks, I'm just more conservative with software than you are.

I try hard to minimize the expected long term maintenance cost of whatever solution I adopt.

One big risk I see with the way you are operating is that if steam changes its distribution format on future updates, your entire workflow could break down and you'd have very little recourse as Steam never publicly endorsed support for what you are doing (ie, zero PR backlash for them).

If nothing else, they could just publish the protocol and allow the community to publish implementations either under a copyleft or non-commercial license.

That would take very little work and would show some goodwill.

I think I wasn't clear enough. Steam is not involved in any way in keys sold elsewhere. Their only involvement is allowing publishers/developers to autogenerate as many steam keys as they want. Games sold outside steam are based on agreements between publishers and those stores (Fanatical, Humble, GMG, etc.). If anything, it's the publishers who decide to take a "loss". And indeed some publishers do not sell through key resellers.

I'll be in exactly the same boat as I would be if GOG decides to change its distribution format (i.e. remove offline installers). All previously-bought (and backuped, naturally) games are playable as before (but no longer updatable). New games cannot be bought. Exactly the same.

Honestly it is "hackish" in the sense that it feels like piracy with extra steps and very little with getting DRM-free games. I mean personally I am interested in DRM-free games because they really don't have DRM. If it's creating a backup of the install folder to have a copy, change a TXT file to be able to start the game without client fine, I can still consider that "technically" DRM-free.

But if you need to use a Steam emulator, use whatever other tools to get around the DRM, then it's not longer DRM-free, it's just DRM using games that you crack yourself.

Personally one of the reason why I purchase DRM-free games, even some I am not really interested in, is to support the dev for not using DRM, not support them for being lazy / cheap and using a weak DRM instead of something + Denuvo.

I your objective is to get games as cheap as possible or want to purchase some DRM using games then yes it's a solution, but it's definitely not a way to support DRM-free in any way; if anything it's counter productive.

Merry Xmas

I understand your POV, but it is not mine. I have never been particularly interested in DRM-free. All I want is games that I can (a) backup on an external HD, (b) easily keep up to date, (c) copy at will from computer to computer, and (d) play whenever I want without any additional application (e.g. steam client, galaxy) and without any internet connection. In that respect GOG and steam are the same for me, except that steam is cheaper and games are more up to date.

And I have never pirated a game, nor do I consider what I do pirating. I have bought (or been gifted) all the games I play. They are mine and I can do anything I wish with them (e.g. replace DLLs).

I agree.

If they did that then even I might be convinced to use it. I might even write a client of my own in that case.
But it would depend to some extent on what's actually in the specification, of course.