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Amazon's previous VP of Prime Gaming said they "tried everything" to disrupt Steam
(www.gamingonlinux.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
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It really hasn't. They had a period where AAA pulbihsers were shipping games there day and date (Sega and Sony) and that's no longer the case. And if you default to GOG, which I do, it's easy to notice that fewer indies are defaulting to multilaunching on it.
To be clear, I'm not saying that GOG should start allowing DRM, I'm saying that they are quietly struggling and people won't prioritize getting their games on GOG over Steam to avoid DRM. Which is a shame.
"It really hasn't. Also, these are some reasons why it has." It is literally their whole spiel and what keeps them on the radar, even if the popularity of the platform isn't what it used to. Which makes sense, since they don't actively advertise or force their platform but they've also been subject to negative press such as their handling of the Devotion devs and "many gamers"in their efforts to prioritize the success of Cyberpunk 2077 over any potential fallout in the region.
You run on an ideological platform, you lose people on ideological grounds, like incorporating titles and forms of DRM into the storefront. Indies can default to whatever storefront they want, that's should be the norm. Mohjang did it to great success.
Being effectively forced to do it on Steam, that's basically a statement about their effective monopoly. Your accumulated Steam library is basically an ever increasing sunk cost fallacy, although to the credit of Valve they haven't acted like massive dickheads (yet). But that will change with time because the people who lead companies change over time whether they would have wanted it or not.
There is zero evidence that this is the case. I guarantee the vast majority of GOG users have never heard of Devotion.
GOG also do advertise. They've been reaching out to hardcore users for feedback, they have rolled out campaigns to promote their Capcom old game licensing and their new game request system and they've implemented an ad tab in their launcher (that they keep sending people polls about for some reason).
Much more likely what is happening is they are being choked out by Steam and DRM. With large publishers increasingly wanting data streams from their games, AAA releases on GOG are less justifiable. Sony pulled out when they started adding a PSN login to their games. It's harder to tell Sega's reasons, but they may have just been a desire to keep their increasingly popular Ryu Ga Gotoku stuff DRMd for longer. Indies, meanwhile, are cash strapped and MUST default to Steam, with support for any other platform being an increasingly unjustifiable spend. With Steam banning competing on prices (beyond free giveaways and subscriptions, it seems), there is just no competing.
So no, the DRM-free hook alone isn't working for GOG. Working here would mean growing or at least preserving their stake against Steam's all-consuming rage, and that's clearly not happening.
Which is why I'd love for people to start acknowledging the issues with Steam and their position and start defaulting to GOG where they can.
To be fair, "gamers" did acknowledge the drm related issues... and insist that Steam is also drm-free and it is only the games that use drm (including steam-drm...) that aren't.
Which... look, I like gog a lot and do make it a point to buy games there when feasible. But it is hard to get TOO upset with people changing the definition of DRM when cdp already did that for gog (it is basically just GOO with less stardock shitheads).
Which gets back to the bigger issue of people needing to understand what they are and aren't "giving up" for a given DRM model. But that would involve people thinking critically and... we don't do that anymore.
I keep reminding people that we "gamers" used to be super mad at Steam. There were boycotts. Every warez group on the planet dropped what they were doing to jailbreak Half Life 2 out of sheer spite.
I don't worship GOG any more than I do Steam, but I do want a solid competitor keeping Valve in check and I would love it if that competitor was also DRM-free because I like owning stuff.
The "most Steam games are DRM-free" line is baffling, though. Especially since Valve itself seems to disagree. I mean, they'll tell you to add more DRM on top and use their centralized online services to make backups and pirated copies worse because it's weak DRM... but it's DRM both stand-alone and as part of the GaaS model they're pushing. They even added an entire warning box to remind you that they aren't selling you anything and they can take all your stuff away whenever and people somehow presented that as a welcome sign of honestly, which was some of the most surreal PR I have seen in my life.