The FAQ posted on some of the recent developments with GOG, like the whole “patron” thing and also changing ownership, has this one entry that’s essentially “Is GOG in financial trouble?” and the answer is along the likes of “No, we’re fine, everything’s great.” And something I’ve noticed before is when someone keeps insisting that they’re fine is that they’re more likely to not entirely be fine if at all. That also goes for me. I have not been sleeping the best lately for one thing. But my main point is wondering just how well or poorly things are going over at that storefront and their desire to stick with DRM-free releases as well as attempting to be more willing to host games that are being banned from other storefronts by pressure of fascist banking. When it comes to other major market governments, a.k.a. “gamers” with massive quotes, putting pressure on games however, they’re less likely to stand up for it.
Either way, their most recent sale banner has some obvious signs of being slopped out, and essentially the presence of something like that up front and center just makes things seem low-effort, like they didn’t care about doing this sale or couldn’t even afford to pay someone 5 bucks or the regional equivalent to scribble on a napkin real quick, or even get some existing employee to do it. Even a generic-looking Photoshop template would have been better to get the point across, like for the other banner they did to advertise the year-end recap they’re doing like so many other sites do now.
I’ve noticed the same thing for a number of random Steam games, which don’t use any sort of generated assets anywhere in the actual game but the graphics they put up to advertise it are all generated, and by current Steam policy they have to disclose any user-facing “AI” generated content, which is how I know this for sure rather than just assuming that’s the case by looking at how generic the banners are. All I know is that at least to me it generates this sense of not caring about the product, like going through the effort of making a game then just being like “OK Alexa Google Whoever sell this crap for me.” It’s not even about the “taking jobs from artists” argument, which is still valid here, they just look either too lazy or poor to paste some text over a cropped screenshot as a bare minimum. That can be done in Microsoft Paint fairly quickly, even and especially versions before all the random Win11 features they shoved into that and Notepad.
So with this, as well as the recent thing about being able to “donate” money to GOG for apparently supporting their preservation program, and the decision to officially split off from CD Projekt Red to be run independently for whatever reason that I’m trying to figure out the real reason behind, everything’s just up in the air as far as my feelings about things. They did make some major pushes for some unexpected additions to re-release and have run better on modern PCs, and apparently also had a profit this last time around according to some reports which I haven’t verified, but I’m wondering what it would take to keep this up or at least stay afloat. I’m no business expert so I can’t say anything for certain. At least if they are under threat of going under, there’s the option to download whatever’s in the library to install offline for whoever’s got disk space to hoard things, even as much as they like to push their optional client with sometimes achievements and occasional cloud save support.
With Steam, there’s been the mention somewhere about the “final update” to unlock all the games to run offline forever in case Valve was in that sort of danger, but currently they seem to be doing quite fine, plus the renewed push into hardware and expanding Linux support for games in general. Of course they’re also looking to release new hardware in a market where even the most basic Grandma e-mail computer will cost at least six months worth of pension while several corporations are rushing out their “cloud PC solutions” to “fix” the problem they made going too hard into “AI”, so no idea how much this will sell between adjusted market price and that they’re also not going to be selling them in stores other than their own direct online thing in most regions. Apparently Japan is the exception for that with their official partnered store in selling Steam Decks over there. And I swear I bought my then-new classic Steam Controller from a GameStop if I remember right, or at least saw them sold there.
GOG is also looking to expand more into Linux, with not just having the occasional native Linux versions of their games, which those offline installers come in the form of a gigantic Bash script or something weird like that, but also making their optional launcher work there as well so people aren’t just using the third-party ones that appeared because of that lack of support. However I don’t know that they’ll be making compatibility for the games themselves more available though, unless they make use of the work that Valve has been backing as a general solution for anything outside of native and DOSBox.
They also mention something about using “AI” tools in their job posting about building the launcher for Linux, which some folks have taken to imply as “vibe coding” the whole thing, which that is such a douche-ass term. Actually if it’s a douche for an ass, it would be an enema, so it’d be an enema-ass term, even if that latter part is redundant. Either way that mention could also be referring to something more like what I’ve seen some people do at my work, which is occasionally asking some random chatbot how to do a thing in code instead of having it generate the whole mess messily. I just still stick with the usual “search for this thing in docs or on Stack Overflow or whatever” as I already have been since I haven’t found using a chatbot practical at any point yet. Or even the summary thing that’s in nearly every search engine I’ve heard of that I just would like to have not exist unless I specifically ask for it, which I probably won’t. Seriously, not everything needs to be summarized or a chatbot, it’s only dumping more cash into the drain they already filled when they first “invested”.