Only if we also get spam protection against grumpy posts too. Scratch that the forum would be bare. ;)
Mind you my posts wouldn't exist either, and I'd be the saddest human being on this planet. I like people like me: grumpy. This being said do you think GOG can compete with Steam, people want to know? ;P

Steam didn't advertise it, no. They have no reason to advertise GOG, and everyone into PC gaming is likely to already know what Steam is. Even those outside of PC gaming often refer to PC gaming as a whole as just Steam.

Steam doesn't see any negatives, and honestly no real noteworthy positives. GOG possibly attracts customers who either a. don't want to use Steam anymore as much as possible but don't want to rebuy their library, or b. want DRM free copies to back up/play and maybe use a variety of services or stores. It's all in the hopes that those who come by to use it stick around and maybe purchase more games on GOG instead of Steam. How many will actually do that instead of just claiming their copy and going back to Steam? Only GOG knows. It's apparently a risk they're willing to take, and in the end GOG will be seen as being customer friendly for offering such an option.

We will know if it's a failure or not if GOG starts offering less and less titles on it :)

Indeed. Thanks for the answer and the info.

1.: On GOG there are so many good games I doubt that you can finish!!! them during the next years.

2.: And why are so many good games on Steam and not GOG? Because the buyer don't care about DRM....
and the publishers are only interested in money.
Add the fact that PC-Games are only a small part of their earnings. Would you release a game on a platform
like GOG? Considering that GOG is largely unknown for most casual players in contrast to Steam.

Spread the word. The more GOG sells, the more the likelihood that we see more AAA games here.
(pweeh, now I praying....If it's true that we are here to help others, then what exactly are the others here for?)

It could work if it offered any advantage over Steam. As it stands right now, apart from exclusivity of some games, it doesn't. So, most people don't bother with them because of it.

It's because of that sodding Windows/DirectX convenience. Most companies don't bother with the other OSs/APIs so we are stuck on this circle of "Most people don't use "X" OS because there's no games, the Devs don't bother with "X" OS because people don't use it.

None of those things happening would bring more than the most extreme smallest trickle of users to abandon Steam and come to GOG. Again, lets not forget that the overwhelming amount of gamers that use Steam are doing so to play games that simply do not exist and will likely never exist on GOG, and nothing like those games will likely ever exist on GOG. Either because they are Valve games, or because they use microtransactions, or other aspects that are at odds with being accepted on GOG even if the company that makes the games in question were to consider offering their games to GOG.

A new Batman game sucking like the last one did isn't Steam's problem - it is the publisher and developer of the game. Even someone who has misplaced rage and blames Valve for allowing the game to be sold on Steam and decides to abandon Steam in a fit of rage is going to be like 1 in 200,000 people. It's not going to remotely be any kind of mass exodus, and such people are transients by nature and do not make up the overall demographic average gamer who simply doesn't care about that stuff. The majority of gamers don't even care about DRM, and if they do - not enough to outright stop buying games that use it or stop using Steam altogether because of it. Sure, there are individual people who are the exception to that, but those are just an extremely small percentage of people that are lost in the noise.

One of the biggest selling games of all time loaded with DRM is GTA5, and that DRM doesn't stop any of the gamers who wanted to play it and bought the game from doing so. The ideology that some of us here on GOG have, simply does not exist in the extreme majority of gamers out there or Ubisoft, EA, Rockstar, WB, Blizzard and many other companies would not only not be the biggest game companies out there making the most money and selling the most games, but they'd go out of business due to mass rejection of DRM. But the majority of people simply do not care about DRM and so that is why it exists and prospers, because even if someone hates DRM, they want to play GTA5 much much more than the amount that they hate DRM.

Those people aren't going to leave Steam even in a small trickle over even the worst types of anti-consumer behaviour. They might boycott a particular game, or the company that developed or published it, but they're not going to lead a mass exodus from Steam to a platform that has very few of the games that many of them are looking for. I don't say that to suggest GOG is inadequate as it GOG is my personal favourite distribution platform, but I say it because that is what the majority of mainstream gamers that spend all their time playing DOTA2, TF2, CSGO and other big name big buck AAA games are likely to think en-masse, especially for the multiplayer titles which are so popular there and non-existent here. I own but do not even play any of those games, but I'm in the minority in that case.

Go look at how many people are playing some broken Batman game on a given day. For every one person playing that, about 1000 to 10000 or more people are playing DOTA2 that don't care if Batman is broken or even if it burned everyone's house down that played it. :)

I think you may be confused about what GOG Connect actually is. GOG Connect has nothing to do with multiplayer at all. The only thing GOG connect does is get your permission to access your game list through the Steam API after you go and make your Steam profile public, then it accesses the list of games you own on Steam and lets you know if any of those games have been made available temporarily for free courtesy of the publisher of the game to people who own them on Steam. That is all that GOG Connect does.

GOG Galaxy Multiplayer service has a component called "Crossplay" which is what allows people to play multiplayer games across the two platforms. Crossplay has nothing to do with GOG Connect, and other than Aliens vs. Predator and maybe a couple of other games, I'm not even sure if any other games even support crossplay yet even if they do support Galaxy multiplayer. From what has been shared by GOG about Galaxy Multiplayer and the crossplay feature, unless I've misunderstood it myself - it does not work with any games by default at all, and only works with games that the developer of the game purposefully adds Galaxy Multiplayer support to their game and enables crossplay functionality and then releases that specific game on both GOG and Steam with that feature enabled. If I'm incorrect about this I'd like a GOG employee or anyone else in the know about it to correct me and link to a video or other source of first-hand information to correct myself. Galaxy crossplay is a cool idea, but it really isn't used by barely anything at the moment.

GOG is the second biggest online store after Steam so they are in a brutal competition already. However we all know that GOG has a long road ahead of them to "match" Steam's quality and quantity.

1. Galaxy needs to be developed much better.
2. [url=https://www.gog.com/forum/general/the_problems_with_gog_review_system ]They need to fix the review system. [/url]
3. Improve game quantity. I have complete faith that this will happen sooner than we might think.

On the other hand there are parts where GOG is better.

1. Forums are much better. Steam forums are a mess.
2. Definitely smarter and more friendly community. Steam has some awesome people with a lot of annoying ones. That number is less than one hand's fingers on GOG.
3. Much better and smarter support. I always got what i wanted from GOG support.

That depends on who you ask. Plus, the forum's only as good as the people in it.
I honestly think this is due to population size. The more people you get, the more bad apples you get as well. I believe I used earlier the analogy of crime rate increasing as a city's population increases.
Again, this also depends on who you ask.

That is an easy question to answer. GOG, like any company wants to grow their business by selling more games, and to do that they need to regularly add new games to the store, but also they need to add new customers to their platform. Even though GOG is apparently the #2 game distributor from what I understand, they're still only the smallest fraction of what Steam is in terms of the number of customers they have and their sales revenue. To grow any business you have to come up with marketing ideas and promotions, campaigns to draw new customers to your store. The majority of PC gamers out there know what Steam is and have an account and games on Steam. That's the biggest boat full of gamers on the planet that a gaming distributor could possibly tap into. So they obviously want to come up with ideas on how to approach people who use Steam and say "hey, please come and try out our platform" and one of the best ways to get people to try a gaming platform is to give them free games. A lot of people have games on Steam but wish they had them on GOG as well, as some people prefer to have their games on GOG and use Steam as little as possible if at all.

GOG Connect is a way to approach both existing customers of GOG as well as people who are Steam customers that are not GOG customers and offer both of them an opportunity to get free copies of the games they own on Steam - on the GOG platform to draw them to the GOG store to try it out in the case of people that do not use GOG already, and as a customer service promo reward of sorts to people who do use GOG already and wish they had their games on GOG that they own on Steam. It is a way to promote the use of GOG and draw in more customers in conjunction with publishers that are willing to permit them to offer free copies for a limited time window like this.

The reason it doesn't work in reverse to let people transfer their games to Steam, is because that does not promote people to buy things on GOG and come and use the GOG store, it would promote people to get copies of games they own on GOG onto Steam and use Steam more which would make almost no sense towards the goal of obtaining new customers.

It would be like if a small local business wanted to draw in new customers and ran a promotion periodically stating that on the weekend, they will accept coupons for certain products from Walmart at their store for goods they also sell and that they are able to bring this deal to their existing customers and new customers because they worked out a deal with the manufacturer of those products. Then someone comes along and says "well why cant I use your store's coupons at Walmart too then?" The answer really is "Um, I dunno, go ask Walmart, they decide what coupons they accept, not us."

So, if someone wants to be able to redeem their GOG games on Steam, they shouldn't be asking GOG about that, they should be contacting the publisher of the game and/or Valve to ask if they plan on doing that because it would be the publisher of the game making a deal with Valve to do that, and GOG would most likely have no involvement in the process. Of course on the technological side, for such a thing to work the same way as GOG Connect does, it would end up being called Steam Connect, and it would exist on the Steam website and in the Steam client, and it would connect to GOG's servers to access your GOG account if you gave permission to allow that. It would talk through the GOG Galaxy API to do this, much like GOG uses the Steam API to talk to Steam. Except we do not have user account profiles on GOG (yet) and there is no GOG Galaxy end user API that others can use (yet) because it hasn't been written and published, so it is not possible technologically to do anything like that right now.

Even if GOG could do what you're asking, there is zero incentive for them to want to do so or to spend any time, money or other resources on what amounts to helping people to /leave/ their platform. That would make no business sense.

They don't and why would Steam advertise "hey, use GOG Connect to get free copies of your games on another store, so you can get rid of Steam and no longer be our customer!" essentially? That would make no sense in the same way I described above that it would make no sense for GOG to do the reverse.

Sure, it might be ok for people to want these features, but you have to think about why a company would even offer such a service in the first place and spend money to pay developers to write the software. No sane company is going to write software to help their customers switch to a competitor. I mean, it's wishful thinking on the customer's part, but there's no business rationale for it nor incentive because it wouldn't do anything for the business to achieve their goals of promoting their own business.

I do find it a little strange though that this isn't more obvious to more people. :)

Yes. And a lot of those people used to rebuy the games here on GOG. Now, they sometimes won't need to. While GOG might be a benevolent force in this industry are they THAT benevolent?

Do they? It seems only GOG customers were told of this initiative. How would Steam users know there's another platform offering them to get their games free if the only platform they use doesn't "advertise" it? Maybe some GOG users on Steam told it to their friends and got some people to check GOG. The number would be very little in the grand scheme of things. So how many Steam users actually discovered GOG because of GOG Connect?

Yeah. Exactly. Then why did Steam agree to it? What do they get? Could they potentially lose customers to GOG? Maybe. Who knows? So why did Steam do it?

Again, why did Steam agreed to it then?

Just for the record, I'm not asking GOG to do anything. I'm asking the very clever "GOGlins" *shrug at that word* what they think that whole deal got both companies.

Steam would advertise for whatever reason Steam would advertise. Good PR? They're not "losing" sales as people still need to buy on Steam to get the games on GOG.

One thing that would make sense, is Steam knows it's such a small percentage of their customers that will use this service, and they either 1) don't think those customers will leave their service or 2) estimates the number that will leave to be negligable.

I'm not sure what that last sentence was about, but I was just curious to know what other people might see in that initiative. Should I feel dumb for asking? Thanks for your point of view nonetheless.

You probably overestimate how many people actually do that, compared to the much larger number of people that will come to get something for free, possibly bringing friends along. Plus, the mere promotional news that gets out there can draw others into the store that don't even qualify, or who might not even use Steam. It doesn't cost GOG anything really because they're just digital bits copying around which have neglibible value measured in ISP file transfer costs more or less.

GOG.com and CDP are the 2nd largest game distributor online. I think that they probably have both a massive amount of data statistics from being in business doing this for as many years as they have than any end user customer such as ourselves, and the successful business sense that got them this far to make mostly good business decisions on how to promote and draw people to come to their store. French monks excepted of course.

The only real costs to GOG, are that they also support the games they sell unlike Steam and other distributors selling 3rd party games. So some of the people who take up these limited time offers may seek technical support and that will cost GOG some money, but it'd be a rather negligible cost of doing business.

Even if they lost money, it would be extremely small in the grand scheme of things, and at worst case a loss-lead situation. Kind of how printer companies sell their printers for cheaper than it costs them to make and sell, but they pick up the losses by selling ink cartridges at $60 a teaspoonful. I'm not suggesting that GOG is engaging in the negative aspects of that analogy, but that they pick up the money in increased sales from new and happy customers.

Or they wouldn't do it in the first place.

You must not read gaming news or monitor how just about anything that becomes available for free in the world of gaming spreads around the Internet virally in like 10 minutes. Is every person that uses Steam going to hear about it? Of course not. Thats not the point. The point is that people do hear about it, both existing customers and people who hear it word of mouth, on Facebook, on Reddit, on Epicbundle.com, on any one of 1000 other gaming related websites and social media, and lots of people come to check it out. Is it 100,000,000 people? Of course not. The point is that new people hear the message and come to check it out, and from that new customer relationships are born. Also, we don't know the terms of these deals, but there's a good high chance that the game publishers themselves agree to do this for free for the publicity as well.

Game companies give away free shit all the time that vastly trumps this. Go to Epic Bundle and their game deals page and click on freebies. It's a garden hose of free games popping up somewhere or another for promotion just about every day nowadays. I'd have to go back and check my RSS feed, but I believe the GOG promo was covered there also, which is one of the biggest one-stop-shopping gaming deal news websites online really. There's also an unofficial GOG.com group on Steam that has tonnes of people on it, as well as an Epic Bundle group there too. Gaming news is so tightly cross polinated that nothing happens in this industry without it being spread across the Internet in like an hour or less. Especially free stuff. Even if it was a free bundle of the worst possible crappy Indie shovelware, 10 billion people would show up because... FREE!!!

Anyone can write a Steam application that talks through the Steam APIs, you just have to go get a Steam developer account for free and download the SDK, read the docs, then start programming. Read the terms of service agreement on Steam's API and follow the rules. As long as one follows the rules then Valve pretty much doesn't give the slightest shit what people do with the Steam API - unless they are doing something illegal or abusive. Perhaps you are under the impression that to do this someone has to take Gabe Newell out for steak dinner and pick the lint from his toes or something, I dunno. That's not the case. Valve does not have these police-state type controls over everything related to Steam like so many people think they do. Valve pretty much doesn't give a crap about much of anything as long as people aren't scamming people, breaking the law, or abusing their policies which are pretty loose.

In fact, the Steam API is a more open and easily available API that anyone can use moreso than any other platform out there - including GOG Galaxy at the moment. Granted, GOG has promised that their API will be public when it is finalized and they plan on documenting it for developers to use according to statements they've made - and I personally trust them fully on that. But Galaxy being complete with a stable API is a long long way off IMHO.

I've probably got about 3 dozen websites bookmarked that use the Steam APIs for free to do all kinds of cool stuff, and half of them people would probably think Valve would be upset over and shut them down. But - Valve pretty much doesn't give a shit. :)

https://steamcommunity.com/dev
https://steamcommunity.com/dev/apikey

5/10/20 minutes or so yada yada, and you're writing Steam apps like GOG just did, and Steam, Valve, and Gabe most likely don't even know you exist. :) You're a data base entry in a computer not touched by humans. :)


Because you have a mistaken belief that Steam wants to or has to agree with it and specifically approve it, and you believe that doing what GOG is doing is drawing business away from Steam and thus threatening Steam so therefore Steam would not approve this. Except - that isn't at all how it works, and Steam doesn't give a shit. :)

See URLs I linked to above for details.


Wow, you're really totally missing the point. This isnt encouraging people to buy games on Steam so they can get free copies on GOG. They're very short lived temporary promotions offered by the combination of the publisher of the game and GOG. Valve and Steam don't need to be involved in any way shape or form.

If a game publisher wants to offer their customers a free copy of a game for download from a different distributor, they don't need to talk to Steam at all, nor does the Steam API even need to be accessed by GOG at all. The publisher can simply say "Send us a receipt or screenshot with proof of purchase of your game from Steam/Amazon/the Space Shuttle, wherever, and we will give you a free key for our game on GOG.com's service.

Not only can they do that, that is exactly what the "RECLAIM YOUR GAME" link on the REDEEM CODE page does on gog.com for the last several years. There were a few publishers with a few games which offered to give their customers free copies of games on GOG that they owned on Steam. Instructions are on the page. Only a small number of games are elligible and there are other conditions, but basically - prove you bought the game with a proof of purchase and you get the game on GOG for free. Not only is Valve/Steam unaware this happened, they don't care and why would they? The game publisher can give their game for free to whoever they want under whatever reasons/conditions they want to. They're trying to provide a customer service to their customers, and they can do just that if they want to.

So what is GOG Connect all about then if they could do this and have done this for several years anyway without GOG Connect? It's GOG's attempt to improve and simplify the steps a customer needs to take to get free copies of games on GOG that are owned elsewhere, by having an automated mechanism that can just go out on its own and obtain the proof of purchase with as little effort from the customer as possible. That's doable because Valve purposefully provides a programming API that provides access to this type of information for 3rd party developers to be able to access to write useful applications. Valve isn't losing anything, they're gaining more people using their APIs to do useful things. What GOG and publishers can now do with GOG Connect, they could do before via web forms, email, a photocopy of a receipt and an envelope sent through the mail, or other mechanisms. GOG Connect using the Steam API just makes the whole process happen without all those extra steps and hassles (caveat: so long as it works when someone uses it, and they aren't hitting the Steam API's maximum limit per day, which they did apparently).


3) Aren't aware that it is even happening and don't give a crap because it isn't violating Steam's terms of service, in fact it is using the Steam API for precisely the type of reason why those APIs exist and are made public and easily available for developers to use. Steam makes money when they sell games, so they've developed their service to provide as many value-added functions as possible and let people create things. As I said, as long as people aren't breaking the law, or causing mischief or other misdeeds, Valve/Steam simply doesn't care.

Hell, there are two video games being sold on Steam, which simply make fun of the Gabe Newell the founder of Valve. I'm sure many people thought "Oh, there's no way Valve would let them sell that game in the store, that's blasphemy!", when in reality - Gabe doesn't give a shit, he makes money off those games being sold too.

GabeN
Gabe Newell Simulator

What GOG and the game publishers are doing by providing GOG Connect, is attempting to provide a friendly and useful customer service. Glitches that occurred during the rollout of that aside - it was well intentioned and meant to provide something useful and easy to customers. Funny enough, what Valve/Steam are doing by providing the API with which GOG can do this, and not caring that they're doing it - is providing value added customer service as well.

This industry is all about customer service, and by focusing on trying to provide good customer service and value add, Valve has pushed themselves to become the #1 game distributor. Think of it like going to Walmart to buy a new garden rake and them being out of stock and telling you to go try the gardening department at Target. If you do so, then they just helped make Target more money and they didn't get your money. But what they did, is provided you with a good customer service experience, and you're going to remember that next time you go shopping.

The idea some people have that these companies are all in heavy fight club style deathmatch with each other trying to rip each other's throats out, or that they need to worry about their competition about minor trivial things like this is just misplaced and would be a very bad way of thinking if one was running a business. Put the customer first, provide good service and try to help the customer solve their problem, and you'll get more business in the end, even if you send some folks to your competitors along the way, or collaborate purposefully or as is the case here - incidentally with them.

If there are any doubts in one's mind - go read the Steam developer docs etc.

Valve doesn't give a crap. :)

How would they know? Well, lots of gamers probably visit news sites, so...

http://www.pcgamer.com/gog-connect-imports-steam-games-to-your-gog-library/
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/06/01/gog-connect-steam/
https://www.vg247.com/2016/06/01/gog-connect-lets-you-add-drm-free-versions-of-steam-games-to-your-gog-library/
http://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/gog-connect-steam/
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/06/transfer-steam-games-to-gog-connect-drm-free/
http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/1/11828372/gog-connect-games-steam-valve-import-library
http://www.pcmag.com/news/344948/new-gog-connect-feature-lets-you-import-steam-games
http://steamed.kotaku.com/gog-now-offering-steam-users-drm-free-copies-of-their-g-1779827313
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/162770/20160605/gog-connect-now-lets-you-download-drm-free-steam-games-you-own.htm
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3077878/software/gog-connect-entices-pc-gamers-with-free-drm-free-copies-of-your-steam-games.html
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/4m14zi/introducing_gog_connect/
http://www.shacknews.com/article/94956/gog-connect-lets-you-add-steam-games-to-your-gog-library-for-free
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-06-02-gog-now-connects-to-steam-accounts-and-duplicates-games-you-own
http://www.epicbundle.com/article/gog-s-steam-connect-how-to-grow-your-gog-library

There you have it.

Steam doesn't need to advertise this. Steam doesn't need to give permission. This is the equivalent of a mosquito sucking an elephant's blood.

Well you do know ... valve is currently in big trouble right?
Hosting illegal gambling.. is a pretty big crime

TinyEram might soon be out of a job.

Well, I told myself I'd post here only if the thread was bumped. I guess it'll have to follow Regals' derail.

Thanks for the clarification.

I did search for GOG Connect yesterday and found plenty of gaming news sites that reported on it. Thanks for going through the trouble of posting so many.