You are allowed to talk about what gog may do, I can talk about what steam may do. The argument was copy-pasted, I can go on and to the same again if you want...

Both are peoples disagreeing with something the right holders are authorized to do, how is that different ?

Because one is mentioned on the box ? Well if you want to go that way they mentioned months before the game release that the game would be DRM-free on GoG but they would go against pirates so it was not exactly "out of the blue", not to mention that when you download a game from an "unofficial" site you usually know "what you are in" or at least you should.

But anyway just because you have a "disclaimer" on the box it doesn't means that it becomes magically "ok" and that you lose the right to complains about it should you not like it.
If you include the crack otherwise your backup is useless, not to mention that you usually don't have access to the installer.

Ouch. True. That's how the current system works. Preorder discounts for taking risks, sales for missing the zeitgeist. Alternatives aren't better. As a personal ethical stance it kind of works. However - "of mankind we may say in general they are fickle, hypocritical, and greedy of gain", so you're better off using the carrot of convenience and the stick of shame instead. The market incentivizes "trying" a game and using the money thus "saved" to buy a game that does not allow "trying" (or a nonscarce product).

My ideal model is abolishment of copyright and a government salary/stipend for content creators. The (currently unsolvable) problem is curation: sponsored content in Russia is two orders of magnitude more repulsive and offensive than commercial content. Crowdsourced curation (Artistic Freedom Vouchers) is marginally more difficult to manipulate.

Moreover - rationally, it's not "buy if it's good". "Try" leaves to place for "buy" in the modern sense. The list price is no longer rationally valid, it becomes a psychological trick (anchoring). This does not mean everything is free as in beer - on the contrary, fairness leaves no place for great deals. If you enjoyed a work "more" than the price you paid, you should compensate the creator accordingly. Again - this is not an ethic fit for promotion and large-scale adoption. That obviously favors uninspired skinner-box crap. I am disappoint. I forget who said it first, but the worth of a game is not measured exclusively by for how many hours it distracts the player from the inevitability of death. It is also - and, for great art, primarily - what you do and what you think about after you're done playing. <div class="quot">Marketing can&rsquo;t compensate for a bad game anymore, because people will quit playing rapidly if the game isn&rsquo;t any good. </div> FFFFFFFFARMVILLE. And other assorted trash that can stay playable beyond the proposed free period on the basis of novelty alone. Because novelty is easy. Of mankind we may say in general they are fickle, hypocritical, greedy of gain, and easily distracted by shiny objects. <div class="quot">I also believe cloud services can be a boon to consumers if not abused. </div> [url=http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1717]No. And no. Cloud services do not provide an incentive to archive content. Once the property cannot compete in profitability to other projects (even though it may be profitable at all), the rightsholder is encouraged to kill it. There's currently no legal requirement to preserve those digital cultural treasures.

Fortunately, creating HD assets is expensive, storage is cheap, and connections are unreliable. So there will be standalone indie games for the foreseeable future. Hooray for that.

Except that it is in GOG's interest right now to get it done (to attract and retain customers) and as previously stated, they have moved in that direction so far.

Steam is speculating on what they may do when it is no longer in their best interest to please customers.

What do you think they were gonna say when people asked them if they'd remove the DRM if they went bankrupt?

You really expected them to say no?

These guys are not stupid, they'd lose a good chunk of their customer base right there if they'd say that.

Where ? the only time this was mentioned was in an old Gabe's interview... years ago... at a time where the only Steam games where Valve ones. AFIAK it never had been mentioned officially anywhere since.

Far as I know you just package it up and point your favourite sharing software to the relevant file. Doesn't sound too complicated to me.

There are pirated copies of many DRM-free games available. If the game is of interest, people will share it. It's hard to argue that people won't do it when they already do.

Why do you (OP) even care about this guy's opinion? Have you ever considered he's sticking to it just to provide more opportunities to bait you. If he wants to hold that opinion then leave him to it, ignore him and focus on your course. He's probably not even worth one upping.

If he approaches you just tell him that you've decided to agree to disagree and to get lost and mind his own business, if you think he'll take it smugly just include words along the lines of "You're really not worth my time, you're arrogant and pathetic". If he thinks he's won that's fine, who cares? It clearly shows what a moron he is and you'll meet many more just like him in life.

< gaming mode > Alternatively a liberal boot to the groin followed by an uppercut works wonders or you could plan a complex and embarrassing scenario as a way of metering out revenge. </ gaming mode >

no, the point is that you asked what is steam doing better then gog right now. You got not 1 but two very quick answers. Your counter is something that gog may possibly do the same in the future... and this is valid because? it was an annoying answer.

Gog do something better then steam
Steam do something better then gog

But for some reason one of them is 'good' and the other is 'evil'. Gog looks after and protects its customers, valve is only wanting to get their money and will in the end screw you over.

I have no problems at all with either company. And I must say - one of them have more or less saved PC gaming today and the other has brought back a lot of retro gaming to the mainstream again. I will let you figure out which one is which , and you can get back to your pitchforks and torches.

To put it bluntly, the primitiveness of their update support annoys me, but less so than online activation.

However, I suspect GOG will be definitive better service (for the lazy or not) in not too long in the future.

You're putting a lot of accolades on the shoulders of either company.

DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION propelled the PC gaming industry away from it's quagmire where console games dominated store shelves and if GOG had not moved in on the retro scene, someone would have clued in about it (especially with the advent of emulation like DOSBox).

Yeah, millions of people have better things to do then worry about social issues and this is why the power players of our society often get a green card to screw most of us over.

Some issues are just bigger than you as an individual.

That being said, I'll still sign off now and go back to work :P.

And this is why I give them the finger and go buy my single-player (or LAN playable) games from someone else.

They can screw their honorable customers over to deal with less honorable ones, but then as an honorable customer who is treated dishonorably, I can choose to go over to another distributor who treats me better.

Yeah, the old "I can't beat you with logic so I will sulk" will show everyone how right you are.
I'm sure that once GOG offers an automatic update application which you log in at start time and keep running in the background it will be much improved. I mean, that's what people are missing, right?

It's called being grown up and not wasting your life on people who aren't worth it. It makes life a lot easier. He's tried using logic, the guy pulls stuff out of his arse to counter it and ignores it. It's purely done to antagonise.
It's not about sulking it's about moving on... people are entitled to different opposing opinions on issues like this (shareholders love DRM for instance). All he's doing is fanning the flames, it's far better to realise that it really doesn't matter that much what he thinks or what others think.

For no reason ? You might disagree with what they did and how they did it, and for the record I do too, but it wasn't for "no reason", If those peoples didn't had any interest in being involved with CDP then why did they download a CDP's game in the first place ?

Of course there was probably some false positive, that's one of the main reason why such campaign should be banned, but you makes it sound like all the letters were sent randomly and that 100% of those receiving them were "innocent".

That was actually my point; Like I said multiple times I am 100% against what CDP did (or Techland, or the pinball guys, or all the others who did similar), and I never said that peoples didn't had the right to complain against this decision, just that it was kind hypocritical to complains that peoples were trying to force others to "act according to their own sensibilities" while at the same time arbitrarily deciding for them what was worth of complaining and what wasn't.

You probably have no idea how many places and households leave their wireless connections unprotected.

Small example, the center of our city has public wireless access. Who are CDP going to sue? The local government?

Yes, DRM-free games are probably more torrented than DRM ones. It's a lot easier to pirate DRM-free game too. The thing is: if a user want to pirate game, he will do it anyway. To think that DRM will stop users from downloading and pirating the games is just plain stupid. But when user want to buy the game - it is completely possible that DRM will stop him from buying.
In short: when developers who go DRM-free basically lose nothing, the others lose some gamers with these activations/constant internet-connections/additional software/etc.