I'm okay with paying more for DRM free (I won't bother buying it any other way honesty) or waiting longer for DRM free. But I'm not really interested in doing both.

If a game is already being released much later, and is being priced much higher, I'll just put it on the wishlist and wait for a sale.

There are enough games out there I rarely have any game that I need to play that specific one, and among those even fewer that I need to play right away. Not enough hours in the day for that, at least not for me.

( following text is directed BOTH towards you and other thread participants )

I will go further with my statement.
Most people play each obtained game only once. If an individual gets game Z on DRM-non-free platform A and he plays through it and it's not explicitly one of his absolutely exquisite havourite games and then the game Z later appears on DRM-free platform B then there is simply not enough incentive for such user to get it on said platform 99% of the time.
That's why it's so important for games to be released on DAY ONE here. As simply no sale will save your lost day one sales if you get an afterthought release here GOG.

I care deeply for DRM-free from the bottom of my heart.
But I am not a fool. If I can get game Q on platform 2 (that is DRM-free) but I already have it on platform 1 (that is DRM-non-free) and if said game Q ISN'T one of my very precise favourites then just NO, you are not getting my money again for that game.
I simply have no incentive to throw money into the air like that.

I am also, unlike majority here, not blinded and so I see that I need actual storage capacity to store these games in ACTUAL longterm.
Something that major amount of people on GOG fail to see while they s**t so happily onto Steam is that Steam offers you free unlimited cloud storage of your install files, indefinitely. They never charge you for that. You pay once and you get 1.Indefinite time rent of the game 2.Indefinite time free cloud storage of install files with proper server bandwidth; they even throw in an extra in form of either A.Moderate cloud saves storage B.Or if the game is old enough then totally unjustified 1 GiB per game.
It's a linear cost for a user - it's a flat line on 0.

Now,
cloud storage isn't even remotely linear cost, it's heavily spiky chart.
You can choose between stages. To date I hv not seen even one cloud storage solution that isn't enterprise (so let's throw AWS and the likes out of the window) that allows fluid flat rate pricing per GiB.
So if for example game X weights 10 GiB but your minimal stage for cloud is 50 GiB then you pay same amount of money regardless if you store one game or 5 games like the game X in there - non linear, "point" cost chart.

For physical storage (far less convenient maintanance and logistics wise, far more convenient in case of global network failure [the global network doesn't hv to die, it's enough if internet exchange point the cloud provider is connected to has a sudden failure], in situations when you cannot patch-in into the network for whatever reason [say business trip, holiday, you are stranded in the middle of the desert and you want to play Hitman 2, etc, so on and whatever]) it's even worse.
Your minimal stages are pretty high.
So if you want to store your 1 purchased game for 40 years you have to exchange your minimal storage drive 5 times at least (if you like living on edge feel free to reduce that number). The cost is even less linear and you have to consider physical security (even solar flare could screw you btw) at all times.

Optical media? Pretty linear cost. But physical storage requirements suck and it's a logistical pain.
Plus most places don't sell archival grade discs, let alone 'Japanese-definition-of-HQ' ones.

And if your precious physical backup fails for whatever reason and your precious DRM free content provider goes out of business in the meantime,
well, then it's like you tossed your money in the air and it landed in the Nile next to Anubis who still casually tries to lure random water inhabitants for help.

And I am not trying to drag people here in one platform or the other. I am simply offering you an explanation of a perspective that too many people can never see clearly.

What I'm saying is:
The way I see it is - if a game Z is one of my beloved ones I have an actual incentive to buy it DRM-free and keep it "Precious" for ages. But if it's something that I know I'm going to play once then I will just get it elsewhere - even if LITERAL cost is the same the ACTUAL cost of DRM-free is higher because I have to pay for my own longterm storage.
It is simply not worth it for something I know I would play once.
So unlike some people I DON'T mindlessly aim for duplicating my Steam games here.

Since I don't hv HZD on Steam and didn't hv occasion to wholeplay it on PS4 I can CONSIDER getting it on GOG.
But for most games I was interested in they just showed up TOO LATE.
It's really great to see this game here. But by the time it came out here most people interested in playing HZD specificly on PC already obtained it elsewhere.
Release timing is far more important than it may seem. It directly influences incentive to buy something.
That's just my 2 cents. None of you hv to agree with it but don't mindlessly bash me for it. Also, downvoting a post just because it's long is a playground insult and doesn't speak too well about people responsible for it. So please, refrain from it for once since it's pointless.

If anyone is interested, today (or yesterday, depending on where you live) GOG's official Twitch channel featured this 2-hour stream showcasing gameplay of Horizon Zero Dawn: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/819305074

Is it likely that CDPR swung their CP2077-on-Playstation weight around in some form to get Sony to allow a release here? Obviously I'm happy the game is here but I can't imagine Sony giving a crap about GOG on their own (unless sales on Steam and Epic were pretty poor).

(I'm also wondering if the "Epic games sold through Galaxy" deal helped bring The Outer Worlds here somehow.)

That applies only to people who tend to buy all their games day one.

I have no figures, but I presume increasingly there are more and more people who wait before buying many games, either to get them through sales, or simply to wait until important bugs have been ironed out and maybe some extra content (DLCs) have been released for the game. I presume this as there is such a wealth of releases to buy and play these days, it is not like someone is just waiting for one certain game and not buying nor playing anything else in the meantime.

For such gamers, if they indeed buy some game day 1 (on e.g. Steam), then it probably is one of their most favorite games that they possibly intend to play many times, in which case they might even consider buying it the second time, if they see any benefit in that (like getting a DRM-free release).

Thanks for the condescending tone, but no, you have no idea how others think. You are not any "wiser" than the rest of us.

Some comments to your long message:

1. Keeping an archive of some generation's/platform's games on a physical media tends to get cheaper and easier over time, as costs per GB go down and the media itself grows. For instance, nowadays you can keep all games ever released for e.g. Amiga (from the early 90s etc.) on an USB thumbstick. Back in the 90s you probably wouldn't have had a hard drive big enough to keep all of them.

So while you may be replacing the media in which you keep your archives files (e.g. games) may and will be replaced several times during 40 years, the cost of keeping those old archives around will become increasingly cheaper (for that particular set of archives; naturally if your archive keeps growing over time, then that will increase costs over time as well).

2. To your question "what will these people do when a solar beam zaps their archive hard drive and they lose all their archives and the store from which they bought the games is no more?". Common sense says that if you have archived files that you don't want to lose, you keep them in several media and/or places.

For instance, at this point I see no point to keep my downloaded GOG game installers on several media, because I can still download them also from GOG servers. If a meteor hits hard drive where I keep my GOG games, I guess I'd just replace that hard drive and redownload those games at some point.

If and when it seems GOG (or any other store) might be closing their doors, THEN I would start caring about keeping the archives in several places. That's what I've done e.g. with the DRM-free games I bought and downloaded from DotEmu and Strategy First's store, and those games are not downloadable anymore on those services (DotEmu closed its doors 1 or 2 years ago, and SFI games didn't offer "unlimited redownloads" service anyway, but you were supposed to download the installers and archive them yourself for later use). So I have those games on (at least) two separate HDDs.

3. To your point that not all games and files are keepers... how do you know which ones are beforehand? If you play some game and then decide you never want to see that game anymore and no reason to ever replay it or let your son play it at some point etc., then fine, you can just as well delete it from your DRM-free archives.

Then you happen to play some game you didn't know much beforehand, but it surprised you and you keep coming back to that game, even years later, and also want to show it later to your son maybe. Then you know that that game is a keeper, and you keep better care of archiving it.


Also about the costs of cloud storage... is it really so that AWS, Azure, Google etc. really charge you monthly for e.g. 50GB, even though you use only 10GB of it? Surprising if so, as it is quite common for data center and cloud storage companies to use e.g. thin provisioning and data deduplication on their platforms, in order to conserve the used data storage.

That is, even if someone reserves 50GB of cloud storage, still only the amount he is really using is used from the actual datacenters, the physical HDDs or SSDs. Also data deduplication enhances that even further by keeping around only one copy of data block if it reoccurs several times in the filesystem (but then data deduplication also consumes more RAM, so it is a trade-off).

Anyway, I have been under the impression that with the aforementioned big cloud services you mainly pay only for the used resources (e.g. CPU, RAM and network usage), and not by what you have reserved to your use (like two vCPU cores and 8GB of RAM, even if you use only 10% of one core and 1GB or RAM). So I would be surprised if this pricing wasn't extended also to storage, ie. you pay only for 10GB if you use that (but there might be some lower base price for reserving 50GB, even if you are not using all of it).

Exactly. I don't run to buy any game unless is something am crazy excited about. And if am crazy about it then most likely is the type of game i would buy a second non-DRM version of.

Other than that i have so many games i see no reason to jump to buy a new game on Steam or Epic. I can't even figure out why people get annoyed by time exclusives because to me is not an exclusive at all. Waiting a little more means nothing.

Actually am at the point that i have such huge backlog of games that if a game publisher just doesn't want to give me the version i want at the price i want then i just don't bother.

I do admit though that many other people seem to not be able to help themselves. Waiting seems too hard for them while i can just sit on a game for 5-6 years until i find the right offer etc without caring.
Maybe is because they are only focused on a few games and don't buy many stuff to keep themselves busy.

I admit there are different groups of gamers, and it may be partly related to age. For instance, if you are at school and everyone is talking about some super hot release (possibly one you play with friends online as well), you feel pressure to get that game too in order to discuss with your friends about it and maybe play with them.

So it is not like me starting to play GTA 4 long after GTA 5 is already released... I was probably quite different when younger and just couldn't wait to get my hands of some hyped release as soon as possible (but then quite often I was also disappointed that they didn't live up to the hype).

Oh I specifically remember how disappointed I was as a kid when e.g. Dungeon Master was first Atari ST exclusive and the gaming mag I was reading was all ooh and aah about it, and just with a slight hint that it MIGHT at some point be ported also to my Amiga. And when it finally did appear for Amiga, I couldn't even wait it to arrive to European/Finnish game stores, but asked my big brother to get it directly from US and send it to me... That game actually was worth the hype, I was still amazed by the game even after all the hype (well, some hype was exaggeration, like some preview claiming that the enemy monsters have very advanced AI where they go hide behind corners in order to ambush you etc.).

So, yeah, I guess I have also been an impatient gamer in my youth...

My entire response to your response to my statement could be summed up as: you didn't fully understand my points & "do yr darn research before u say something".
So I'll try to keep this short.
(u know what, I overflowed char limit so my response will be split in 2, please don't respond until both parts are live)
P 1/2

Perhaps it didn't occur to u but I'm not the kind of person to talk things made out of thin air.
I hv made extensive research before writing this and on top of that I know the things I'm talking about here.
So with all due respect, I know what I'm talking about.

I get that u think of yourself so highly that u think everybody else thinks like u, but u're wrong, my tone was not supposed to ever sound patronizing nor condensending. So if u see it that way, I apologize.

1.U don't know what I know. U cannot speak about everyone in that regard.
2.YOU actually have NO CLUE WHATSOEVER how I think. So congratulations, yr statement immediatelly backfired. And since u seem quick to jump to conclusions - I hv nothing personally against u.

Oh, so you're representing entire humanity or something now?
I never implied I am smarter than EVERYBODY. But don't even try to publicly imply I'm dumb.
U're playing with your matches too close to a tank of gasoline named "forum conduct". I will let this slip just this once but consider yourself warned.
Do you think about yourself as some supreme being who can judge my intelligence other the internet now?
Because, pay attention, I actually have NOT implied ANYTHING about intelligence of ANYBODY here. Pay special attention to the wording in my messages because I choose specific one to make clear enough points.

I don't know if u managed to notice but when 16 GiB pendrives are a thing u cannot exactly get 1 GiB ones for 1/16 of the price of 16 GiB ones.
Your point is incorrect, over the years price per GiB of physical media gets lower, but u need to spend a specific minimal amount of money for at least a minimal available tier of storage capacity (moving target, 250 GiB > 500 GiB > 1 TiB, and so on, changing over the years, as in: LOWEST CAPACITY storage media AVAILABLE atm) and that price value doesn't really change much. That's exactly what MY point was about.

Also, on the subject of USB pendrives, they are NOT suitable for longterm backups by any means. But I don't feel like writing an essay on degradation of flash memory cells and how manufacteurs use the crappiest controlers in existence for those here so u will hv to excuse my sudden cut of this topic.

Solar flare is an acutal term whereas solar beam is not exactly fyi.
Your entire response here didn't actually void my point. I never said "the ONE drive u hv backup on". I said "your backup".
U are free to be blissfully ignorant and not understand that even tho possibility is pretty low it's STILL possible for all your backup drives to fail at the same time. There are plenty of stories about such occurences on dedicated data archiving forums.
My point remains the same.

Research, gameplay watching, etc.
Besides, it only reinforces my point that game Z should be HERE day one. Otherwise incentive to buy it here dies when time passes.
If game Z is available here on day one then at least I hv a CHOICE. Which wasn't presented for HZD for 3 entire months.

Judging by your responses I can safely assume u have not much or none at all knowledge about cloud providers.
So here is a brief for u:
ENTERPRISE offerings (meant almost ONLY for enterprise clients) such as AWS S3 Storage, or Glacier for that matter, they offer more fine grained payments and financial opportunities, such as per GiB transferred /& stored as well as "per duration of storage" - in VERY fine grained scale.
But there are some major caveats for using those and they are GENERALLY not suitable for a costumer grade backup (for a backup that frequently grows and is accessed on irregular intervals with irregular transfers requiring varying bandwidth).
Pricing of enterprise offerings is lucrative but it's only worth it if you can assure consistent cloud storage interactions.
Because if you don't, if for example you get tier that is cheap for irregular transfers, and then you one day have to offload vast majority of stored data in upload or download (to or from the server) your wallet is going to beg for mercy.
Unless you can utilise some clever, VERY fundamentally strategically planned UNIX tricks this kind of offering is just NOT FOR COSTUMER GRADE backups.
So NO, you cannot just dump a backup of say HZD to S3.

(edit: moved some data from P2 to P1)

P 2/2

(continued point)
On the other hand we have costumer grade offerings:
Things such as Google Drive, Microsoft One Drive and Dropbox.
They offer pricing tiers & various restrictions among with them.
If for example we hv tier 1 that offers 15 GiB of storage then it DOESN'T matter if u store there:
1.NOTHING
2.One curriculum vitae file weighting 2 MiB
3.A 10 GiB game installer backup.
Regardless of how much u store there u pay the same.
U pay for full chosen tier regardless of your usage.
Becasue u don't pay for storage used. U pay for storage capability.
And tiers are pretty far away.
If u would want to store a backup of JUST HZD (let's assume it's 70 GiB for sake of this conversation) for even just a span of 10 years on costumer grade cloud storage your bill would be pretty high.

My entire point here is that CLOUD STORAGE is STILL too expensive to outweight the worth of getting less-liked games on GOG instead of Steam where you get "free lifetime storage" of your installer files.
And if a game is released several MONTHS later on GOG then there is even LESS incentive for a potential costumer to get it on GOG.
People don't think about it but self storage of DRM-free games is pretty darn expensive. It's still TOO expensive to be precise.
The release of game Z on day one on GOG is actually about CHOICE. About having choice WHERE to get it from.
HZD showed up here, it's great news, but it's 3 months TOO LATE for a vast amount of people.

You are, frankly, incorrect.
The copies obtained on preorders along with ones obtained within first week from game going live (from day one) amounts to pretty substantial chunk of overall first year sales. So no, it applies to anyone within like first few weeks from release.
If HZD would be available on DAY ONE (the very same day it was released on Steam) on GOG then chart of platform HZD sales comparison would look completely different.
It's about choice. One that was not given for HZD PC port interested people for 3 entire months.

Peace (I rly mean it).
L.

Thanks for the update :)

15 minutes of (heavily scripted) gameplay footage from the sequel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQATS4HOxdo

More of the same from the looks of it which isn't necessarily a bad thing. If they improve on at least some of the more severe shortcomings of Zero Dawn (better story with more actual C&C; better characterization, especially of Aloy (less perfect, more flawed), if that's even possible at this point; exploration that's actually rewarding; being able to climb "everywhere"; deeper customizability of character as well as gear, etc.) I'll glady pick this up in 2025/2026 or whenever it arrives here.

(haven't watched the gameplay yet)
I personally wish they would use Vulkan with the sequel.

The interesting world and story got me through to the end, but the last thing I want is 40 more hours of that same thing.