Yeah, never happening lol.

I most certainly hope not, but I wish Steam being 'Google' of online game distribution to get smaller and have less of an impact on the industry.
I see GoG as neatly curated library of games and wouldn't like that to change. Steam is like a 'pawn shop', where everything goes. I don't want to browse countless positions in order to find something interesting / of value.

What I'd love instead is to see on GoG only 4/5 star games from Steam to appear and all the average / bad 'stuff' to remain over there.
You know - quality over quantity approach.

Steam did alot to make PC gaming at least viable again. Also kinda moot when in the last week heck most of the things added to the gog library is porn games, so its not curation here is any better.

'Porn game' / 'Erotic game' is just a category as any other. Leisure Suit Larry is still going strong after so many years, so quality can (and should be) maintaned here as well. Other than that, I don't see how this 'category' impacts what I've said earlier - it is just a personal choice.

IMHO, there's a whole lot of popularised false memories with "Steam 'saved' PC gaming in 2004". Early 2000's PC gaming was pretty good (Age of Empires, Age of Mythology, Baldur's Gate's, Call of Duty, Civ 3, Deus Ex, Diablo 2, Doom 3, Far Cry, FEAR, Freelancer, Gothic, GTA 3, Icewind Dale, Medal of Honor, Morrowind, Neverwinter Nights, No One Lives Forever's, Operation Flashpoint, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Rise of Nations, Serious Sam's, Star Wars, Splinter Cell, Syberia's, Tropico's, Thief's, UT 2004, etc). It was hit after hit selling millions of copies each (and sales figures like Age of Empires 15m were very high for PC-only vs today's cross-platform figures). Many games coming out were fresh new IP (vs today's excessive over-sequelitus / remakeitus of franchises from that same era which is where I see actual decline from publishers).

Steam's birth was mostly a barren as hell DRM Launcher for Half Life 2 & TF mods (which at the time they got massive backlash for). Half the features people "remember choosing" Steam for only came years later (2008 for Achievements & Cloud Saves, 2013 for game reviews, 2015 for refunds, etc). Oblivion (2006), Bioshock (2007), Dragon Age Origins (2009), etc, were still selling well on CD-ROM and it typically took until 2010-2012 before games were launched Steam only due to the "physical retail = Steam key in a box" great bait & switch which is what really made the 'choice' for many gamers when Skyrim, Bioshock Infinite, Dishonored, etc, started a 'new era' of Steam exclusives. Many AAA titles from 2004-2006 (eg, Far Cry, FEAR, Oblivion), were also only retroactively added to Steam in 2008-2009 rather than launched there. In fact, only 1 year separated Far Cry's launch on GOG vs Steam.

I'll definitely give Valve credit for Half Life 2 and Portal 1-2's being good games, but the whole "PC gaming was dying in the early 2000's" is a myth. Simply re-reading 2000-2007 era PC gaming magazines and reviews from the time certainly paints quite a different picture with the general sentiment being largely excitement / anticipation at all the above-mentioned titles coming out and hardly any mention of Steam being a default go-to place for anything until almost the end of the decade. The main negative PC platform issue at the time was encroaching consolization (ie, people were disappointed sequels like Deus Ex 2 and Thief 3 had to be extremely dumbed down (much smaller level sizes) vs earlier games due to needing to fit into the original XBox's 64MB memory limit, but that was unrelated to Steam.

They are no where near what leisure suit larry sure they have erotic stuff in it but they point and click and based around humor. Most of the recent isn't even that.
Never said save, I said viable. Before steam became a main stay not alot of companies cared or interested in selling on the PC for varies reasons. Valve and in turn steam helped make it more viable for companies to sell/distribute on the PC market.

A lot of that was the "XBox effect" though. Pre 2003/4 consoles had radically different proprietary ever-changing architectures with zero backwards compatibility made porting to x86 complicated, expensive and time-consuming. Then the XBox came onto the scene virtually same year as Steam did and as if by magic not only did we see more console games come to on PC, we also saw more PC franchises come to consoles for the first time, and Xbox controller support added to PC games as standard. Within 10 years, everything was x86 based. Looking back, people often ascribe every industry change made during this era as "Steam introduced all this", which wasn't really the case as lower budget PC publishing was a thing long before Steam (remember all those people playing Flash era games like Bejeweled, Diner Dash, etc, on those 'Netbooks' in cafe's), or 90's Shareware, etc, same with discounted games (aka the resale market).

In fact there was a time when "Greenlight = asset flippers" for which Steam very definitely didn't get praised for. If anything I wish publishing was still a little less 'effortless' than it is now (with the next upcoming trend inevitably being Steam gets buried under a mountain-ton of +250,000 titles of the same auto-generated AI crap that's flooding Youtube & Amazon right now). GOG won't ever be "big enough to replace Steam", but sometimes a little curation really isn't a bad thing...

There is an effect that mattered a lot to make Steam a dominant player.

User Convenience

Yeah, PC gaming was a thing and not "crashing", but so many titles were onerous and REALLY CUMBERSOME to use. So much so that cracking games you owned to bypass bullshit WAS a common practice.

Steam streamlined so much of the experience, making it more convenient than piracy.

Here, a quote from Gabe Newell that gets to that kind of point:

“We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.”


Accessibility, convenience, service provided to the end user.
Tacking in social aspects, making it easier to join friends, yeah, steam social aspects can feel half baked often, but the point was to provide CONVENIENCE to the consumer.

That never really stopped though. In fact +90% of torrented games today are cracked Steam games. NoCD's were indeed prevalent, but they didn't disappear, they simply turned into Goldberg & Steamless. Plenty of "This package can NOT be purchased / Steam key cannot be activated in your country" regional restrictions on Steam too..

Yet, the "pirate version" would still be DRM and region-free and it may not become revoked all of a sudden in many cases in which we can not buy it anymore.

However, i totally agree that the easy access and the convenience was the main driver making Steam a huge success and anyone being able to get even a DRM free copy (even on Steam it is in many cases possible) "this way"... will rarely ever consider a "swashbuckler version".

I would not overrate the modern "NoCD" version because those tools are out of development for years already and they are increasingly becoming incompatible with newer games. True pirates nowadays are using more advanced methods not openly available. The public kinda was messing up because they was pointing their fingers at those devs and they, at some point... "stopped caring". In the end, this "option" will slowly fade.

Thank you! I am actually feeling a lot better today, enough that I'm moving bast the grief avatar here and going back to the happy Catventurer one that I was previously using.

What you both need to keep in mind is that software cracking and software piracy are two different concepts.

Yes, most pirated software has been cracked, but that does not mean that most people who use cracked software are pirates. Many people crack software that they already legally own, and there are a variety of reasons why they might do so. That is why the use of for example No-CD patches in the past and tools such as Goldberg or Steamless today is not necessarily about piracy. These tools can certainly be used to facilitate piracy, but they are also used to remove inconveniences or limitations imposed by DRM in the products they have bought.

What Newell was referring to in that quote was the convenience of acquiring, accessing, and using software - that is, the quality of the service being offered. While DRM can indeed affect that experience, his point was primarily about service and convenience rather than DRM itself. The two are related, but they are not the same thing.

The billionaire man's DRM has not made PC games viable "again". For that would imply that at one point the PC platform just wasn't viable, which is flat out wrong. After all the whole point of PCs is that people can code software for them so we can run said software, all without going back to the hardware makers or the people who built the OS you're using. AFAIK no percentage of WinRAR sales go to Microsoft and you don't need their permission to run I don't know, Heroic Games Launcher, although that's probably different for Mac software. Of course there's no equivalent authority for Linux, the BSDs, and so on.

The big difference between the late 2000s/early 10s and now is that your experimental indie game was typically distributed through some website instead of itch.io, and now the prevalence of engines like Unreal or Unity make it so much easier to cook up a game than in the past, but I do not think for a moment that steam has had any hand in making anything viable "again."

In fact, the only way steam could've happened in the first place is that PC has never been at any point "not viable." And no, I don't really believe the billionaire man's sweet lies that "piracy is a service problem" whilst he runs the biggest service problem there is, and I really don't believe that convenience is really the reason steam is dominant - it's more like the other way around as explained earlier. You've got the games like Skyrim where the physical version was basically Steam DRM'd, and the ludicrous thing is that games that once shipped like every other disc game before then, like Oblivion, would be re-issued again but this time requiring Steam DRM. The entire thing started exactly this way with Valve's own HL2. Valve has done this (actively or passively) so many times that it got so many people on board who only then claimed an over engineered Start Menu being convenient is the reason why they got on it. But this was all possible cause the PC platform has always been viable, not the other way around.

Viable in the sense that there is a place for people to get games which steam has achieved, be upset over Gabe all you want plenty of console exclusives have added up on PC do to how easy steam has made it.

Would they without steam idk, I know most most stores barely carred PC games(likely do to nocd patch) so people could install and refund the game. Plus there were other forms of DRM on phyical discs.

In the end DRM clearly doesn't impact consumers decision when buying a game.

Yeah personally, PC gaming was not particularly viable at all before steam streamlined **so much**

Piracy and old stuff? Sure. I was able to experience much through places like home of the underdogs, but to **actually** purchase titles? It was extremely limited.

Boxed PC titles were extremely rare here in mexico!
Even physical piracy was such a niche. I COULD find pirated *software*, but not games. If you wanted pirated games? Consoles. PS1, PS2, Dreamcast, those could be sourced, but not PC games.

Steam literally changed that for me! It was both accessible AND more convenient, with less chances of malware.

At least in my region, PC games were not particularly viable.