big thanks for your generousity

you are a gift to the gog community

I bet Steam has something to do with this (and the whole matter in general) because well, Steam has th rest of the Freedom Force series, maybe they want it as an exclusive.

Does Steam pay extra for exclusivity?

No. Both Freedom Forces are also available on GamersGate (and not as a Steam key).

Steam coud still try to harm GOG, considering how much the Steam community seems to hate GOG, I would not be surprised if the managers do so too.
If you read the statements made by Nordic, they mention they don't want to make other partners angry, and the only competitor that seems to find real threat on GOG is Valve.
As I mentioned before, EA sems to have no worries on releaing some of heir games (Maybe not AAA titles but still good games) on GOG, even though EA supports DRM, but Valve will never release any of their games on GOG (Even though CD-Projekt RED released The Witcher series on Steam, so they kind of did a favor to Valve which valve will never pay for).
To sum it up it is not hard to imagine Valve trying to find new ways to screw their DRM free competitor and primary threat (In their perspective), also they can just be Bullies picking on the least popular kid in the playground.

Really, it is all too suspicious for me, and I bet I am not the only one.
I would not be surprised, many companies do so.


Just to mention, at first I thought Valve was no that bad, but then I began to analyze many facts that have transpired through the latest years and began to think they are real corporate jerks.

Thanks for the tip. The first Freedom Force is currently discounted to 0.99€ on GamersGate, and it is marked as DRM-free.

http://www.gamersgate.com/DD-FREEF/freedom-force

Looks like I will be buying another game from GamersGate, after all. After that I have a grand total of 6 GamersGate games (two of them got for free, Cities in Motion and the Volvo racing game).

I never figured out why GOG didn't have it, when they had the other Freedom Force game (which I already have from GOG). I hope the GamersGate version works fine. I'll take my chances for one euro.

No, on the contrary, Steam advocates you putting your game on as many stores as possible.

Do not forget that Valve do not get a single dime of any game sold outside of the Steam store. Valve also do not demand Steamworks exclusivity, it just happens that it is a very well implemented (and free) framework which is easy for developers to use. We will have to wait and see if gOg can match it.

Thanks for clarifying the thing about exclusivity, but they still owe CDPG for the whole Witcher series.

And everything seems suspicious to me.

....Steam isn't out to get GOG. Oy. They don't release their games on GOG because like a lot of digital distributors GOG takes a 30% cut, which would be outright silly for Valve to do as GOG ATM isn't really on their radar competition-wise, and the multiplayer aspects of some of their later games are linked to their own VAC system to prevent cheating. Also, the Steam DRM is completely optional and up to the developers/publishers of the game.

People who are Steam veterans tend to dislike pure DRM-Free listings because that means it can't be linked internally to their steam libraries and thus miss out on some Steam features (they can still add it as an external app, but again misses some features).

If you haven't yet you really should read up on CEG and the other DRM services Steam provides developers/publishers (read: optional):
http://www.steampowered.com/steamworks/publishingservices.php

Insist, it is very suspicious, specially the part of Nordic not wanting to make "Other partners" angry.

The Doc didn't realize GG carried a DRM-free version until kind souls enlightened him in April. <i>Of course</i> the Biz Dev didn't miss it, but the situation is 'still complicated'. Have to wonder what's so complicated for gog, that's not complicated for GG. Maybe it's the stupid 'o' in the acronym.

There's nothing suspicious about it at all - Nordic is a large-ish publisher with a metric ton of stores it sells to, digital and physical. Giving a large preference to a small partner is a huge NO in that world. It isn't like they are abandoning DRM-Free either - they have games on ShinyLoot, GamersGate, etc. that have no DRM. Also, speaking of ShinyLoot, from the looks of it they have fixed pricing too and Nordic seems to have no problems with them (http://www.shinyloot.com/about).

The issue with Nordic and GOG is actually quite complex for the layman, even I have trouble understanding the finer details of it and I tend to follow economics a bit XD.

I am not going to argue about that anymore, it won't fix the current issue which bothers me the most GOG losing games and not getting enough new ones, but I will finish it by saying that Valve could have been grateful if they gave GOG three of their own games (Maybe not the best, but good ones) In exchange for the Witcher series, CDPG never asked for it, but that is why it would be a sign of gratitude.

Holy mackerel.