What were the 2 games? I can confirm Days Gone and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order 100% DRM free.

It's not one-sided. The store has been called "a kid in the basement". Those are words from someone at GOG. What would that make GOG? It would be the kid in CDPR's basement, right? Every small company has to start somewhere. Anyway, I'm not here to talk smack about GOG. It's the biggest DRM-free store and I hope it continues to be DRM-free. Some of the decisions have been questionable, though. I would like for all of the DRM-free stores to work together or at least not have anyone messing with the other. We're supposed to be on the same side.

I agree about it not being one sided and wanting the store's working to together. The CEO said he tried to work with GOG, but they said no. He never showed proof of them saying it. Then again, the CEO also said, he pretty much wanted to take GOG down. He accused GOG of nitpicking their game's and undercutting prices. I don't think he owns the rights to where the games can be sold. Haha

GOG might of been A hole to them, but at this point they're coming off as aggressive.

Edit: have you seen the things said about GOG? I left their discord because the negativity for GOG was just hate. It became a little much. At least the negativity on GOG forums is constructive criticism. Lol

Yes, because what companies do in the context of partnerships and what users with assorted pet peeves, or plants with an agenda, should be allowed to do in a company's private forum are definitely to be equated at the same level.

If you have complaints about the crack down on advertising please direct them to those that forced gog's hand on the issue - you won't have to look far...

Lmao!!

I really don't see the problem. GOG's policy isn't some kind of ethical standard, they just probably feel it doesn't make business sense to advertise competing stores on their own site. If Epic has a different policy then there's no reason for GOG to impose restrictions on themselves on Epic's site.

GOG doesn't like people wearing shoes in its house. When GOG visit someone else's house and they're told it's fine for them to wear shoes indoors, they don't have to take their shoes off just because they do in their own house. There's no hypocrisy.

Isn't this is a form of predatory pricing by China/Tencent/Sweeney?

I honestly don't care, since I - the consumer - am the main beneficiary in this case, by getting free games on a weekly basis.

Worst case scenario: Epic undercuts the competition, drives them out of business and becomes a monopoly. How would that effectively change anything, considering the PC gaming market is already firmly in the grip of a monopoly (ie. Steam) and has been for well over a decade.

But Steam isn't a monopoly. They may be a market leader, but they are not abusing that position to stay on top. If a storefront was, oh I don't know, hemorrhaging half a billion dollars to engage in predatory pricing, bribing devs to not release on other platforms, or using sheer financial strength to buy up the competition and then forcing people to register new accounts to play games they already own, then I would consider that a monopoly. Hey, wait a minute...

Good analogy. The fact that EGS doesn't focus on marketing their own store just shows to me that Epic isn't interested in being a serious competitor. Epic just wants to buy/litigate their way into multiple markets and collect 100% of a VBucks paycheck even if someone else did the work on the infrastructure/marketing. If Epic was truly serious about being a major competitor in the gaming store space, they would focus on offering an innovative platform. But instead we are almost 4 years into this mess and EGS still feels like the gaming equivalent of a child's lemonade stand. GOG has focused on nurturing a strong platform and realizes the value in focusing on promotion of their own brand, and I do not fault them in the least for not allowing other stores to be promoted on the GOG platform.

It is true that Steam does not need to abuse their power to stay on top, but a monopoly requires a company to be the market leader and for them to abuse that position to either gain or maintain their leading position. Steam is not currently abusing their market leader status by trying to create barriers to entry so they would probably not currently be classified as a monopoly. Epic, on the other hand, is abusing their financial power from Fortnite/UE to create barriers and would probably be considered a monopoly if they were ever to somehow become the market leader. (At least according to my reading of the FTC's definition of a monopoly.)

Steam absolutely is abusing it's market position and has set up huge barriers to entry. They have succeeded in convincing/forcing practically the entire video games industry to use their mandatory walled-garden client, to the extent that many game developers simply assume that 'PC = Steam'. Steam is largely responsible for the death of physical media for PC games, as well as the normalization of DRM for digital distribution.

Their more recent moves towards trying to force mods to have to use their locked proprietary systems are further evidence of their desire to monopolize the entire video games market. Plus, the failure of Epic to capture market share by throwing literally billions of dollars into free games shows just how absurdly strong Steam's walled garden is.

That's literally what Steam Workshop, having the client (not the game) handle achievements, etc, have been about by design all along. Getting games devs to write for a Steam 'Walled Garden' specifically in a way that makes it intentionally more work on the devs to support releasing on a 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc, store knowing the devs would have to rewrite game-code once per store doesn't scale well. Eg, it would have been very easy to create an open API where the devs code the game once to "unlock" achievements, mods, cloud saves, etc, to a neutral API which simply checked which store version was installed (Steam, Epic, GOG, etc) and transparently redirected to the correct server (see GameSave Manager which does exactly that for cloud saves), but instead everything is directly hard-coded to Steam within the game's exe under the guise of "convenience" until "walled garden code" within the game (that should never have been there on a genuinely open platform) became normalized virtually on an industry level by design. The resulting coercive "captive audience" is no accident at all and entirely by design.

Steam are not a traditional monopoly, but they absolutely do create barriers to entry every time they come up with a "Great Idea" that unnecessarily merges more and more console-like proprietary walled garden locked-in client code into formerly neutral game code to "help". The Steam of today is nothing remotely like the genuinely healthy competition we had pre-2004 where no-one cared where they bought games from (Gamestop, family run high street corner store, Amazon, mail order, etc) because the discs were all bit-identical and were never originally locked to glorified middle-man salesmen that sold them, which is where all of today's "Walled-Garden Console-Wars but for PC instead of consoles" tribal cr*p originated from in the first place.

Precisely. If we lived in a sensible world, there would be government regulation to impose an open standard for such APIs on the game industry, rather than letting a single corporation capture practically an entire market. Unfortunately, we don't live in such a world ... big money talks.

On an unrelated note, is anyone else having issues with posting? The forums have been refusing to accept my posts/edits over the past day or so.

So I'll apologize for the unfortunate wall of text here as I have been unable to participate in the discussion in real time.

Most of Steam's "competition" are dev-owned stores focused on pushing their own products and are not focused on the larger market. (See: EA, Ubisoft, ActiBlizz, Rockstar, formerly Bethesda...) I consider Steam and GOG to be the only two stores that have seriously dedicated themselves to making a general storefront for the masses (Itch.io deserves an honorable mention, but they are focusing on indies), and I think that GOG would probably be a much larger if AAA devs weren't so obsessed with DRM. But GOG is serving a niche market (which is a good thing), and they are doing that well despite the fact that this niche means that they will command a smaller market share.

I don't like the death of physical PC games either, but to be honest/fair I don't believe that's the result of Steam forcing anyone to do anything. For starters, DRM was already running rampant which was/is still causing physical copies to be bricked thanks to Microsoft ending support for DRM due to security concerns. So physical gaming was on life-support anyway by the time Steam came about thanks to an existing focus on intrusive DRM. Secondly, greedy devs looking to maximize profits at the time saw Steam's 30% cut as a huge improvement over the distribution cost for physical goods at brick and mortar stores (which I think was more than 50% but I can't find any references at the moment on how much of a cut a big box physical release would require). Finally, clearly nobody except for Valve wanted to put the amount to effort into making a viable storefront at the time. Sure, people tried, but making a successful storefront required Valve to practically exit the game development market in order to focus on Steam which is something that the other players weren't willing to do. Instead, Valve made this nice shrink-wrapped package of a storefront, online DRM, and a far lower cut than the rest of the existing retail market which is why everyone rushed to Steam. So while I hate this shift away from physical media, DRM companies would have put an end to it themselves with on-disc DRM had Steam not come along first.

I haven't seen anything about Steam requiring people to use Workshop. It has always been optional and does not prohibit people from posting mods elsewhere, AFAIK. To me, Nexus Mods is currently and historically the de facto market leader with respect to mods, and there are a lot of open-source mods that end up on GitHub, etc. So I don't really understand why Workshop is being called out specifically here. I take far greater issue with Bethesda's paid mods nonsense.

IMO, Epic's failure to capture significant market share is the result of very dumb decisions on Epic's part. From the start they have put more focus on promoting their service to devs (through a lower commission, exclusivity deals, etc.) while at the same time antagonizing the players (by lying about lower prices thanks to the lower cut, by doing platform exclusivity deals, by not actually spending money/effort in making a compelling storefront, by requiring an Epic account for Steam games, etc.) So that's on Epic for not fostering a userbase like Valve did. It also shows that it's pointless to try to moneyhat your way to the top with a product that's not compelling in the first place.

And who controls this achievement/cloud save/mods API? Someone has to, and they will most likely monopolize it. But even if it was created by a consortium of companies, there would still be smaller companies who want something different. Do these smaller players just get forced out of the market for wanting to do something above/beyond the status quo? The fact is that there no such thing as a neutral, one-size-fits-all API for anything. Requiring everyone to use the same API would definitely stifle innovation, and seems like a massive barrier to entry.

So basically you're advocating for a hard and fast government monopoly on APIs where they do own the market and can/will abuse their power? Government money is still big money with the same wealthy types at the top calling the shots for personal profit.