mrkgnao: No. That's not what I meant.
Steam and GOG's sales do indeed tend to be comparable. However, Steam allows other sites to sell keys (without Steam getting a cut from it) and GOG (with rare exceptions) does not. This leads to the phenomenon called "bundling" in which a group of (often related) Steam games are sold together (outside steam) for a ridiculously low price.
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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.
mrkgnao: I'm not sure what "hackish" means (I'm old and do not keep abreast of online language).
If you mean that I am using Steam not the way it was intended, then you are absolutely right. Steam is clearly designed to be used with a client. Using it otherwise is not trivial, nor is it easy.
I use:
- SteamCMD to download and install single-player games, whereas it is intended for multi-player server maintenance
- The Goldberg DLL to disable non-DRM client dependencies (e.g. achievements, workshops), if necessary
- Steamless to automatically disable basic generic steam DRM (not other forms of DRM), if necessary (only had to use it once or twice, so don't have much experience with it yet)
- scripts I have written to automate some of this
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I greatly prefer to use steam "not as intended" and have up-to-date backupable client-free games at a ridiculously low price than to use GOG "as intended" and have many outdated or lacking games (vis-a-vis galaxy and vis-a-vis steam) at a much higher price.
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).
ChinaGovtIsFascist: My concerns with that are that, under current circumstances, it would take resources away from more important work, and that it might be too big an ask for GOG's obviously questionable IT security abilities. In an ideal world I'd agree, though.
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.
