Posted May 10, 2012
Also, it's hard for me to take you seriously with a user name like Amerika. Not that my name is much better being as unoriginal as it is.
can't you see what's going on? GOG is starting to offer newer and brand-new games in order to bring in new customers. people read and hear about Alan Wake for $15 on GOG, people who AREN'T GOG members already. the exact same people GOG is after now.
Alan Wake was a SteamWorks title up until it appeared on GOG. every other digital distributor and physical retailer only offers the SteamWorks edition. it is entirely reasonable that a customer new to GOG would expect to be able to activate the game on Steam, even if it was only an optional activation next to a DRM-free download.
this issue was bound to come up. like it or not, many gamers want their games on Steam. now GOG is the only place selling the game WITHOUT the ability to activate it on Steam. since the average gamer doesn't care about DRM, they won't know or care that GOG is all about being DRM-free.
if GOG continues to offer SteamWorks games without optional Steam activation keys, these problems will only get worse and GOG's reputation will suffer. a relatively simple solution would be for GOG to strike a deal with Valve and the publisher(s) involved and provide a Steam key for (former) SteamWorks titles as an OPTION, maybe even at a slightly higher price.
Once upon a time, games were sold without DRM. People owned the games they bought. Then, around November 16, 2004, a long-awaited PC game was being sold at retail stores in a physical box, just like normal. Many people bought this game and took it home and put it in their disc drive only to find out that they couldn't play it without some online activation. You may find this surprising, but the average gamer didn't even know what the hell DRM was. It's entirely reasonable, like it or not, that most all customers fully expected to be able to put the disc in the drive and play the single player game they paid good money for just like they always had. This game wasn't presented any differently than any others had been in the past. The main reason for going to a store to buy a game in those days is because their internet service sucks. Even if they could get decent service, it cost money to pay for that better service.
True story, that. I even bought the collector's edition of Half-Life 2, and guess what? I couldn't get a refund for it. The retail clerk asked me if the game was broken and I told her that, yes, it was but it appears that they intended to make it that way. Well, no refund for me then if that's the way it's supposed to be. I could have tried another clerk or the next store and told them that the disc was missing or that it was shattered when I opened it, but that just would have been dishonest plus all I likely would have gotten was an exchange for the same game.
You know what I did? I accepted my mistake and ate the loss. I also quit buying PC games once I figured out that this trend wasn't going away. I only started buying PC games recently again through GOG.
I will say that I never once went onto the Steam forum and complained though. Sure, I've complained other places but never there. Has it ever occurred to you that maybe GOG isn't trying to take away customers that love what Steam has to offer? If people love it, they'll stick with it. Maybe they're trying to get people who might be reluctant buyers of DRM'd games that would rather not have DRM but have no choice? That they're trying to get people like me who quit buying PC games altogether even though they loved playing on a PC?
The reason that console games still sell at retail is because they don't have the kind of DRM PC games do. It appears to me that the average PC gamer migrated to consoles because of DRM. Hell, music CDs are still selling well and they don't even have copy protection on them. I can buy a CD, rip it, and copy it onto a flash drive all in a few minutes and then give it to a buddy if I really wanted to and yet they are still stocked on the shelves. If music CDs had continued down this route, I would bet my savings that physical retail music sales would have gone the way of the dodo much like PC games are going now. Whether or not that would be good for the industry by causing people to look for better non-DRM alternatives on the internet is up for debate though.
Post edited May 10, 2012 by KyleKatarn
