...yet games from all three turn up on Steam. They may have their own stores but they still need to attract the customers and those aren't very keen on hanging around on dead platforms such as Uplay or Uconnect or whatever it's called these days.

I'd wager that Ubisofts DD-platform runs a bigger risk of going away than GOG.

well yeah

I just checked for R*, even if you buy on steam you still need R* social. Same with M$ (at least halo infinite which I checked)
Ubisoft games are not on steam.
Just because you buy through another store doesn’t mean they are on that store. Just like if you buy epic games through galaxy, you don’t own them on gog, on epic. Or is this where the discussion is going? Perhaps it should be galaxy only users and drm’d to other stores?

tbh I'm pretty skeptical that DRM-free fans would be better off with whoever would end up buying GOG. I imagine the purchaser would want to increase revenue by a lot, and would easily drop DRM-free to get "AAA" titles here. Hopefully I'd be wrong though of course.

Depends, it’s very hard and costly to compete with the likes of steam (which is embedded in the mentality of pc gamers), epic (which has a big war chest and can give away free stuff), Ubisoft/R* with their monopoly systems, and M$ with its need to ruin all its games with GFWDead or WindowsStore. So a new store needs to do something different, this is where gog has gone wrong, it’s not different anymore (well it is to a degree).

i guess so

sadly there's more than one of those fanatic gog fan cultists

Who knows who will crash and burn. I think the vast majority of companies, and even a few governments, are fair game.

And even if they stick around, if not legally forced to, there is no telling how long they'll honour their commitments.

In this day and age, my favourite companies are those that offer me a plan b to keep enjoying my purchases should they byte the dust or decide to stab me in the back.

While not perfect, gog is ahead of their mainstream competitors in that department which is why I'm still around.

Whoever expects the corporations that are selling them stuff to provide anything beyond what they are getting at the instant of purchase (unless the corporation is legally forced to, that's different) is someone waiting to be exploited.

I'd be thinking along the whole netflix fragmentation route.
If youre a small studio and want exclusivity you'd want to buy for a pittance the GOG distribution platform.
Of course GOG won't sell for a pittance; but that doesn't mean a conglomerate of small studios might not want to band together if there is essentially going to be 3 equally cut throat platform deals.
At the moment though I think what epic is offering developers though will be hard to incentivize away from.
What anyone who does work wants is a know result of profit for their efforts, & cash for exclusivity and giveaway to push the platform is basically just that.

Anything is possible, except the impossible of course.

Ubisoft has vastly, vastly, vastly more customers than GOG does.

If GOG were taken over by anyone other than the ZOOM Platform, and how likely would that be, we would be far worse off ... those of us who care about DRM-Free anyway. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind about that.

What right-thinking company would take on DRM-Free?
While DRM-Free is great for those of us customers who love it, it is a very big limiting factor to attracting game providers and selling games.

In fact, if GOG are in dire straits now, you can put that down to the difficulties in solely supporting DRM-Free, and the actions they have taken in regard to that. Not saying they have always made the right choices, just that it has been difficult for them, and perhaps there has been a level of desperation, which often doesn't lead to smart thinking.

A bigger concern like Epic for instance, could well consider taking GOG over, trying to snap up more customers, but GOG would no longer be the DRM-Free store we know it as, as DRM would very quickly creep in and likely eventually take over.

If GOG fail, then I am pretty sure that will be it for DRM-Free, certainly on a large scale. There might be some future hope with the ZOOM Platform, but I wouldn't count on it.

The commercial entertainment sector is hellbent on DRM not DRM-Free.
They are also full steam ahead going in the streaming direction and rental (subscription) fees.

Don't be so quick to crucify CDPR for the so-called cyberpunk debacle .... shit ... mistakes ... poor thinking ... happens. It's a fact of existence, and no-one is immune.

EDIT
As for lies, that can be subjective, and where they do happen, while I don't want to give that a free pass, ii is the usual market speak, that all businesses engage in to some degree. Most businesses get away with it a lot easier than GOG, because they are even less forthcoming or transparent or communicative than GOG ... or just better at covering their ass than GOG. Personally I think GOG have tried too hard to be something they can objectively never be, and that has created expectations amongst some of their customers, especially the older ones.

“Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” - Sherlock Holmes

It’s not the mistakes or the even the rushed game, it’s the whole attitude, the lies, the pushing of galaxy, the online only games, the microtransactions. The company is one to clearly step away from.

As for drm free, you are fighting a losing battle. The world is moving further away from drm free or ownership, in fact, I don’t see 10 years down the line people owning anything at all, it’s simply a rush to the lowest common denominator. Even drm free games have gated content, crippled systems (mods for example), added requirements etc. just as consoles are removing all physical media, pc gaming is moving to streaming. Heck one day soon you just stream everything to a contract rented tablet, there will be nothing else.

Since Microsoft had them on their stage for E3 a few years back as a super big deal, I'd guess Microsoft would buy them. Plus, they have the $ to certainly buy-out CDPR and GOG.

Heck, M$ bought Zenimax/Bethesda and also Activision-Blizzard out, for crying out loud.

Plus, M$ seems to be the New Super-House of RPG's anyways - also already w/ Obsidian, InXile, and Bethesda on-board. Adding CDPR to their catalogue would be bananas for them.

Also, putting Witcher series and Cyberpunk 2077 on Game Pass would be huge for them.

I'm certainly not fond of exclusive-ness for obvious reason (i.e. I think gamers should play games anywhere they really want and can, TBH, thinking that's the best approach so all gamers can play) - but exclusives do sell consoles and making any of those titles and/or future sequels for Witcher games and Cyberpunk games exclusive to X-Box Console and X-Box for PC would be HUGE, shutting out their competitors (i.e Sony and Nintendo).

I'm certainly not fond of big companies gobbling everything & anything up and all for obvious reasons - but, this to be is the most logical buy-out if CDPR and GOG needs $, whether we like it or not.

Of course, I'd rather CDPR and GOG remain as they are right now, not with anyone but themselves.

EDIT:
There's also Phil Spencer wanting more emulation and preserving the legacy of old games by "legal means of emulation", too - so yeah, that could be another factor for them to chase CDPR and GOG too.

See this - https://www.vg247.com/phil-spencer-legal-game-emulation-preservation

I won't delve in the motivation of GOG and it's parent company (desperation/greed, etc).

But yes, maintaining long term ownership of gaming titles (both keeping them accessible online and keeping them working with future OSes) is a non-trivial endeavor that is more akin to a service than a fixed product that you sell.

This is why I'm feeling uneasy about GOG just selling games and then not charging any recuring fee for keeping them available online and updated (or supposedly doing so for the later case anyways). As long as they keep selling, it kinda works I guess, but as they acrue an increasing backlog of sold titles with their userbase, that model will either collpase or start showing cracks (as it has done already I believe) if they don't sell an ever increasing amount of titles.

As such, I think its in the interest of anyone who has a sizeable backlog with GOG to just pay a recuring service fee to GOG for them to host the games online and work more closely with developers to get the latest updates of the games and keep those games working with upcoming os releases, sometimes after the developers themselves have lost interest in their games.

I think interest in ownership of intellectual property has always been proportional to the degree of attachment with said intellectual property.

You will always have a percentage of the populace that cares about such things (might not be a dominant percentage, but it will always be there) regardless of the current climate.

For everyone else, various events will cause more mainstream interests in ownership to wax and wane.

Atm, online services like steam and Netflix have proven reliable and cheap, causing a waning of interest in owership, but you are always one crisis away from that interest resurfacing.

I guarantee you that if Steam shuts down in a month (or change their access policy to be more restrictive) or Netflix loses some of its beloved series due to some freak occurance (ex: Yeah... we got hacked pretty deeply and "Stranger Things" and "Cobra Kai" are gone... like forever, sorry guys... did anyone by any chance do illegal copies?), you will have a ressurgence of interest in ownership.