Tuesday, July 21st 2020
Epic Games Joins GOG in the Goal to Deliver Universal Ownership of Digital Goods
Today owning digital copies of games is a real struggle. There are are many platforms that offer games to be purchased, and some games are platform-specific. Take a look at Fortnite for example. It is only available on the Epic Games platform and launcher, so you have to download and sign-up to that if you wish to play the game. The PC platform is currently struggling with that problem as there is no unified store where you can purchase all of your digital copies of games. That is the main reason why Good Old Games, called GOG shortly, has decided to invite Epic Games and make a universal launcher for all storefronts.
The GOG Galaxy 2.0 is a new storefront that aims to give gamers the ability to "Install and launch any PC game you own, no matter the platform." With Epic Games joining the platform, it is a matter of time before others join. Some are still resistant, however. Steam and Origin are still not okay with that idea and they are keeping it to themselves. It is interesting to see the development of this, and in the meantime, you can check out GOG Galaxy 2.0 here.
The GOG Galaxy 2.0 is a new storefront that aims to give gamers the ability to "Install and launch any PC game you own, no matter the platform." With Epic Games joining the platform, it is a matter of time before others join. Some are still resistant, however. Steam and Origin are still not okay with that idea and they are keeping it to themselves. It is interesting to see the development of this, and in the meantime, you can check out GOG Galaxy 2.0 here.
57 Comments on Epic Games Joins GOG in the Goal to Deliver Universal Ownership of Digital Goods
I think conflicting business interests and egos will surely keep this idea or "venture" from being what it aspires to be. At the end of the day, if origins and steam aren't on board this will only go so far for most people.
You pay for the right to use the product only.
How are they going to share the revenues on the those store exclusive titles? And as long as multi-layer online DRMs exist, players will never truely own the games.
But who cares about UX, these are only there to police your purchases.
Why would most companies want a customer that paid for their game on one platform get it free on another platform? That's my guess as to why it's not more widely accepted and used.
I don't purchase anything off EGS - just haven't had any need to use it. I hear that some games launch without EGS running and some require it to run. Hopefully in the not so distant future this would mean that EGS will also be completely DRM free (unless they already do this?) on any games they sell so people can so they can download and run a game whenever, wherever they want to without any kind of launcher required.
I love me my GoG Galaxy 2.0. My brother and I have been having a blast co-oping Divinity: Original Sin 2 that we picked up on GoG. When new co-op type games are coming out, we're checking out their availability on GoG or if it's Ubisoft, we're okay with buying through Uplay. We both greatly dislike Steam now that it's turned into a massive social media platform that's poorly coded and optimized. Anything that can stick a thorn in Steam's side is okay in my books. Here's hoping more jump on the bandwagon and Steam is brought down to their knees, making the crawl and change their ways and beg for customers to come back.
Let's not call a desire for higher degree of comfort 'a struggle' now. It doesn't work well on the scale of all the things that are actual struggles. Its a luxury problem. Was it a 'struggle' back in the day to insert a CD into your player for game X Y or Z? And let's not even mention the games that came on 4 CD-ROMs... Baldur's Gate 2, hi. Or the fact you'd need the disc to begin with.
We have, today, all our content on demand (literally at your fingertips) and NOT taking our storage space if we don't use it (its in the cloud ready to go/download), and we have applications that can simply pull all of that content into one nice list for you to click on thumb sized icons with a picture clarifying what game it is. You don't even need to be able to read. Fun fact: illiteracy percentage of population is also on the rise and has been ever since gaming is growing. Not saying cause > effect, but it is evident people can use some stimuli to keep doing things themselves, or we devolve into stupid. The first lines of this very article kind of underline it well. The above is now a 'struggle' :oops: It also detracts from the much more important matter at hand. Ownership.
I do like the idea: content usage is platform independant as it should be, and the seller/distributor is just that - it moves data around and gets money for it. The idea that there is some form of ownership tied to distribution is utterly ridiculous. And it will not hold in court, but we have yet to see that 'struggle' end up there :)
But yeah... said before, will say again... why reinvent the wheel and tie yourself to a NEW place with commercial outlook? As much as I like GoG... it really is just another tiny Steam with somewhat better conditions. The app below is not in beta but feature complete and will always work and you can put pretty much every exe in there that you fancy. Modded, unofficial, illegal, platform XYZ... whatever you want, and without the looming threat of telemetry or someone taking a peek at what you've got. Or constant UI changes.
playnite.link/
Also perhaps it might help people who want another client installed, but we never know what DRM creeps up in this so called "Online" "Digital" world, MP aspects of games are dead even on GOG, thanks to GaaS. Very few games have Local LAN MP. Shame that Halo MCC doesn't have it but instead have to bend over with XBL DRM.
1. Don't need to remember to launch the clients if you use GOG Galaxy.
2. GoG galaxy does exactly what you want, it detects you wanting to run the game and starts both the launcher and the game. It will even close the launcher for you after you're done, if you change some settings. You don't need to have any other launcher active if you use Galaxy.