Aceticon

That is not informing the potential buyer in a simple way, that's hiding the information in a different page, one which is a long text made up of legalese which one need Legal Training to fully understand.

You're just making my point.

You know what would be a simple, obvious, honest way of in that page of telling the purchaser that they're buying a license?

• To the left of the discount and the price put the text "BUY A LICENSE FOR:"

"Strangely" Steam chooses not do any such thing or similar and instead chooses to "inform" buyers with a link to a different page which is a wall of legal text.

I'm just correcting that incorrect statement of yours that:

Nobody is saying you cannot do on Steam, the big difference is that you can do that on 100% of Gog games, on Steam only on a very small percentage. (emphasys mine)

What the previous poster described is in fact possible with much more than "a very small percentage".

Mind you, I agree with you on what you just wrote in this last post of yours and in fact made the exact same point in response to the previous poster.

It's just that "very small percentage" part that I disagree - if you're technically proficient you can "hack" your way around Steam's closed system for most games since it's not really closed tight.

Then again a total impossibility of installing and running most Steam games independently of Steam if one has the right technical knowledge is not really the problem with Steam. The problem with Steam is threefold:

• It's designed so that only people with a certain level of knowledge can actually do that, those being a minority of Steam users.
• Even such "hacked" access is unreliable - maybe it will work easily, maybe it will be hard, maybe it won't work at all.
• There is no way to, before buying a game in Steam, know if that's one of those games which can be installed and run independently of Steam in that way or not, so one cannot make an informed purchasing decision on a game being possible to install and run without Steam or not.

The whole "it's not totally impossible" thing is just a trick that the previous poster and other such Steam fanboys try to pull when confronted with people pointing out that GOG is open and Steam is not: they misleadingly equate "the dependency of games on a central system can usually be hacked around in Steam" like to like with "GOG's is a purposefully open system that sells games guaranteed to not dependent on a central system" which is something very different in terms of intention of that feature being there, how well informed a potential buyer is of it before a purchase, the ease of use of it and how guaranteed it is for that to be the case. That's deeply deceitful, not even an apples and oranges comparison but more an apples and ghosts one.

Long document full of legal language than can only be truly comprehended by those with Legal Training isn't at all the same as BIG FAT TEXT INDICATING IN A SIMPLE WAY THAT THIS IS NOT A PURCHASE.

Absolutely, in the absence of actual Pro-Consumer Regulatory Obligations, the whole "Agreement" is a valid way for sellers of digital media such as Steam to legally cover their asses and not actually saying to prospective buyers the true nature of what they're buying.

It is, however, not a means to help a purchaser make an informed purchase, rather it's a way for Steam and other such stores to, in the current legal and regulatory environment, legally get away with doing the very opposite and obfuscate the true nature of what the purchaser is purchasing.

Think about it this way: if the intention of Steam was to be honest and make sure purchasers were making informed purchases, then why not inform purchasers upfront in the product page in a simple way that what they would be buying was a REVOCABLE LICENSE rather than ownership of a PRODUCT, and even explain the difference, rather than hide it in a long document that requires Law training to fully understand?

The fact that it's legal to have a purchase flow that looks like you're buying things without the seller being legally obliged to have a disclaimer in big fat letters that says something like "THIS IS NOT A PURCHASE, IT'S A LICENSING AGREEMENT. LICENSING AGREEMENTS CAN BE REVOKED AT ANY TIME AND YOU WILL LOSE ACCESS TO THIS MEDIA YOU ARE LICENSING" is the actual problem.

IMHO, Corruption amongst Lawmakers and Regulators is the actual problem.

People should be avoiding like the plague any stores whose media they can't actually download and keep in an open DRM-free format in their own devices, but they don't because they're not aware of it as the whole thing is one big bloody mess of expert legal domain and the fraud of misportraying a sale to be one things whilst it is a different thing being totally legal when it comes to digital media.

Can't blame people for not understanding this and thus not navigating it in an informed way, but I sure can blame Politicians and Regulators for not doing their jobs which is to make sure that sales are fair and the consumer can make an informed choice when evaluating a potential a purchase.

Actually, FYI, you can do that for a large percentage of Steam games, maybe even most, if you use the Goldberg Emulator that replaces the steamapi DLL.

Steam DRM is one of the easiest to bypass around, and I like to think that's very much a purposeful choice.

However, the entire thing is designed for it not to be easy to do for somebody with the technical know-how of the average gamer, plus it's not reliably possible and there's no way to know upfront if it will work or not when making a purchasing decision on a game in Steam.

Meanwhile "No DRM and with downloadable Offline Installers" is literally the Unique Value Proposition of GOG as a games store - access to download offline installers is there in the games page after purchase and that installer is guaranteed to work forever and ever if you still have the hardware and OS version supported by the game.

Not reliably as in Steam there is no contractual limitation on games having their own phone-home DRM plus some games are tightly integrated with Steam features (which Steam incentivizes) and don't work well offline, plus you need to known were the installers are cached as you can't just download them to a location of your choice and how to use stuff like the Goldberg Emulator otherwise only games which have ZERO integration with Steam will fully install and run offline.

In GOG, access to download the offline installers is right there in the product page in your library and contractually the games can't have any DRM as "No DRM" is GOG's unique value proposition as a games store.

Steam doesn't make it too hard to go around the phone-home DRM they put in place (making it better than just about all other phone-home DRM out there) but that's not at all the same as "here are the installers for you to use whenever you want online or offline and they're guaranteed to have no DRM".

Do not worry, Sony is not at all known for taking away from people digital media which they keep in their servers for those people

/s (just in case)

In most countries Management is not Meritocratic - people whose job is Organizing, Tactical Planning and even Strategical Planning are in practice selected on Networking (the social kind, not the tech kind), Social and Image Management skills as well as Knowing The Right People (which often is Coming From Well Off Families And Attending The Right Posh Schools) instead of concrete metrics on the skills they're supposed to have and apply on the job.

Since performance measuring in that domain is often pretty nebulous (especially in IT), it's a lot easier to get away with being mediocre at the job than it is in more strictly measurable domains where results are clearly PASS/FAIL.

So you get tons of Shoot From The Hip, Make It Up As You Go and generally insufficient problem space analysis, none of which conducing to reliable, sustained and robust outcomes. Since generally the management pyramid is people like that all the way up, the higher ups just see the inevitable problems that emerge later as "just the way things are" because they themselves did the exact same thing, and often even promote such people because they're like them:

The

• Some manager does insufficient upfront analysis and preparation, and then, when things needlessly blow up because of that, in a "superhuman effort" "saves the day" by avoiding catastrophe, hence is seen as a hero and gets promoted.

is very common exactly because upper level management themselves work in the same way and are thus unable to spot the causal relationship between not doing something they themselves don't do and the later crisis when a "unknown unknown" that should've been a "know unknown" for which there was already some defensive planning turns into a near catastrophe for which in their eyes "nobody could have seen coming" is a valid justification.

Mind you, this actually varies quiet a bit from country to country as the overall management culture is not the same - in my own professional experience it's not at all the same thing in Northern Europe and Scandinavia as it is in Western Europe and Anglo-Saxon countries and in turn between those and Southern Europe and Latin America.

Well, the upside of PCs is that you can keep on upgrading just parts of it, whilst console upgrading is generally just buy a new one, something that has become even more so around the late 00s when the upgrade cycle slowed down quite a lot, even for gaming PCs.

I think (but am not sure) that as long as you didn't aim for top of the range parts and instead used the ones just below (generally much cheaper for only a little bit less performance) all in all it was cheaper to just keep upgrading one's PC than keeping on replacing one's console with a new one as they came out.

Mind you, I've jumped out of the "keep up with the latest titles" threadmill over a decade ago since, with the notable exception of Indie titles, I don't actually find them as entertaining (they're generally very "guided" linear experiences whilst I like lots of freedom and high complexity) plus I discovered that I derive far more enjoyment from great gameplay than I do from great graphics: the latter can indeed be amazing and impressive for the first couple of hours, but it's the former that gets me back to a game again and again and again, even years later.

PCs and Patient Gaming is way cheaper than consoles, though I guess that by now there's also a lot of Patient Gaming in consoles since people keep on using the older one rather than buying the new on.

Further, upgrading one's PC or even just knowing what kind of things are better to upgrade at any one point and how to chose the right parts for upgradeability (such as enthusiast motherboards instead of just cheap ones and the kind of CPU socket that was recent enough that was likely to keep getting new CPUs for a while) requires quite a lot of technical expertise and is beyond most people. even gamers.

The first part it is indeed true.

For the second part it really depends: one thing is a technologically naive person who gets themselves into such a situation because of not knowing better, a whole different thing is somebody who should know better but still go in because of convenience and hoping for the best.

In my eyes the former are victims, but not the latter, so I'll definitely blame the latter for jumping in with some awareness of the risks thinking "I will probably be alright" - if you jumped in the pool were you knew there was a shark and got bitten that's on you.

I also definitely blame fanboys, because their actions help pull in more of the first kind - when one is too ignorant about the broader implications of a choice, they shouldn't be actively be trying to get other people to make that choice.

I'm a gamer from back in the days when a "games console" was a ZX Spectrum or an Amiga, not an open standard like the PC mainly because back then nothing was standard, but far more open than modern consoles.

Then came the PC and for a time it was the dominant platform for games (basically the good old days of Shareware and a few years after).

Then consoles were reinvented, with the modern console business structure and tech stack which most present day gamers are acquainted with. This time around consoles were a locked down tech and the business was a walled garden model.

At that point I was so used to PCs and to piracy as an alternative to source PC games (or even just a way to unlock purchased games by cracking their DRM), that I never really jumped into modern consoles as it was too locked down. Also by then I was already a Tech professional and aware of the risks of jumping into a tech stack wholly controlled by a 3rd party.

So, yeah, here we are now with the closed down walled garden tech stack were there wasn't even a proper piracy culture to disincentivize abusing locked-in customers having enshittified to extreme levels.

This shit was entirely expectable already back then.

I hope that the whole modern day business model for game consoles dies a horrible death, though people being people I expect that a decade afterwards they will get swindled again en masse by a reinvention of this console model.

It's their walled garden, which they control and were they get to do whatever the fuck they want.

Never, ever jump into a tech stack which is a walled garden, because sooner or later you're almost certainly going to get shafted by those who control it. This applies just as much as a tech consumer as it does as a tech professional.