So… Is this a good thing? Bad thing? Gut reaction says that probably not the greatest for GOG, being detached from a huge publisher like CD Projekt probably isn’t great for a niche marketplace. In their faqs it states that GOG had a strong year financially but they would of course bill it that way. The question about why the new owner did so also just sounded disingenuous.
Interested to see where this goes from here. While I love gog and am a patron, their Linux support leaves a lot to be desired. The sole fact that cloud saves are such a pain to get working has led me to switch back to steam. I hope with these changes they can maybe get some support on Linux.
I feel like a lot of understanding behind the financial decisions around online games could happen if we explained to the kids what GameSpy was. Online was never “free”. Before microtransactions and Steam footing the bill, there were ads. But we had self-hosting as a backup plan back then.
I really want them to bring back self-hosting. Multiplayer games don’t need to have a limited lifespan.
I’d love to see legislation that if a game requires servers to play any portion of it, and those servers get taken offline, the source code must be released. Like, they’re already demonstrating that the game doesn’t hold enough value for them by shutting down the servers, so let the community take over.
I would love this as well. I think we should start with must be able to self host servers or use p2p servers though. You can have server software without it being open sourced, and I think that licensing wise it will be easier to pass a p2p requirement than a full open source requirement.
It was free for the consumer, Nintendo just footed the bill.
And that likely stopped making financial sense once online multiplayer operated at larger scales. On PC, GameSpy servers came with ads. Even downloading patches for games meant going to an ad-supported third party web site.