GOG's Preservation Program Is the DRM-Free Store Refocusing on the Classics

Once upon a time, I loved buying my games on GOG, most of the time at full price.

But then I’ve been burnt more than I should by developers who then forgot that this platform exists and go all in on their Steam customers : cross play ? That’s for Steam. Announcement of mods support ? … on Steam Workshop !

The more recent example in my mind is Timberborn : I love this game and I bought it on GOG because I want my games as DRM free as I can. Boom, they recently added offcicial mod support … on Steam !

But ! I must say once again : Big up to Satisfactory devs who announced that they won’t support Steam Workshop to not harm their Epic customers. We have a good old semi official community managed mod loader (ficsit.app) and the modding community is thriving as much as it would on Steam workshop.

I just want to add : I have nothing against Steam, it’s one of the companies I still consider to be great (as a customer at least) and I have a huge Steam library. My issue is more with the developers selling their games on all the platforms then making anything non Steam second class citizens. And it’s especially infuriating with games who launches only on Epic Games because they have negotiated a temporary exclusivity (which was the case of Satisfactory, but for once they managed it well) and then release a Steam version with more features.

Patches are also often delayed on GOG compared to Steam (usually by a couple days, but in extreme cases even weeks). Achievements and changelogs are sometimes neglected as well.

There's a spreadsheet[0] named "Games that treat GOG customers as 2nd Class" that is being semi-regularly updated where you can find out about this. I've also made a Firefox Add-On[1] that uses this spreadsheet to add the data while browsing GOG.com.

[0]: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zjwUN1mtJdCkgtTDRB2I...

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/gog-2nd-class...

kudos to you for writing to the developers to complain then!

Something I've noticed 'accumulating' for myself over the years is the centralization on steam, which rubs me up the wrong way for PC which is a largely open platform. I'd say it's under the "this is a small/tiny problem" category in the present, but "this could be a problem" is possible in the future when it doesn't need to be. It's a huge sprawling issue though, involving all the different customers of steam/valve on the gamer/consumer side and developer/publisher, and what each of them gets out of it.

It's interesting to look at in the context of long term preservation though, as most games are going to do the majority of their business early in their lives then developers and gamers move on to something else. Whatever state the game (and the organization that made it) is 10+ years later is likely a low priority compared to shipping it and staying afloat.

Some modders only release their content on Steam Workshop and you cannot access it without a license for the base game.

Arma 3 server admins have to download mods on their gaming computer and then manually move those files over to the server computer.

I also remember a Total War: Warhammer mod creator calling Epic customers thieves when they asked Steam users for the mod files.

To cite a particularly silly example: while the Halo Master Chief Collection can be purchased from both Steam and the first-party Microsoft store, the modding tools are only available through Steam, and the Halo 2 and 3 tools require a license purchased through Steam[1].

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/halo-master-chief-collecti...