[Topgun]

http://twitter.com/#!/GOGcom/statuses/183222029988794368


notice the red valve on the knight's helmet. Poking fun at the competition I see

[jr2]

Put [url][/url] tags around that to include the entire link

[Mongoose]

I do so love those crazy Poles.  They're giving away another game for free right now.

[deathfun]

Ha! Why can't everyone have commercials like these?

[Ravenholme]

Anyone else feel that their oh-so-subtle stab is rather misdirected?

[Klaustrophobia]

no.  they just need more of them.

[BlueFlames]

Anyone else feel that their oh-so-subtle stab is rather misdirected?

Nope.  Steam is itself a DRM system, and they've been relaxing their old "no third-party DRM" policy.  (See Anno 2070 and the Borderlands DLC packs, if you need examples.)  The only difference between Steam and a retail store is the lack of physical media and pricing differences.  Valve, Best Buy, Walmart, Gamestop, and whoever else you want to buy games from are all just as happy to let publishers treat you like a criminal.

GoG, by comparison, doesn't have any DRM built-in (i.e. they don't bundle their games with an application that has to phone home before you can run your game), and while I haven't scoured their entire library to be sure, they're more well-known for removing the DRM from the current-era games they sell and not adding it to the older games they sell.

I'd say that GoG has every right to poke fun at (or outright call out) Steam for their practices with DRM.

[Topgun]

no.  they just need more of them.

this. sure valve isn't the worst offender, but they totally deserve it.

[Sushi]

Anyone else feel that their oh-so-subtle stab is rather misdirected?

Yeah. The commercial says "DRM makes playing games painful and frustrating" which is not actually the case with Steam (at least in my experience).

No DRM is better than DRM, but if you're going to imply that it's getting in the way of gaming, pick something other than Steam.

[BloodEagle]

Anyone else feel that their oh-so-subtle stab is rather misdirected?

Yeah. The commercial says "DRM makes playing games painful and frustrating" which is not actually the case with Steam (at least in my experience).

No DRM is better than DRM, but if you're going to imply that it's getting in the way of gaming, pick something other than Steam.

It is very, very nice that everyone in the world has always had the same experience with Steam as you, yourself have had.

I routinely have problems with Steam.  Plus, that freaking software ignores the option: 'don't auto-update this game'.

[BlueFlames]

Anyone else feel that their oh-so-subtle stab is rather misdirected?

Yeah. The commercial says "DRM makes playing games painful and frustrating" which is not actually the case with Steam (at least in my experience).

Steam just deleted all of the shortcuts I had to non-Steam games from my library for the second time in a week.  Yesterday, it kicked me from a TF2 game because my connection to Steam (not the server I was playing on) decided to flake out.  Every time I start Steam, I have to pause a download (one that I can't outright cancel, mind you), because Valve thinks they know better than I do what drivers my video card should be running.  When a patch comes out that utterly breaks a game on my hardware, Steam won't let me play an old but functional version of that game.  If my internet connection flakes out, I can't launch a singleplayer Steam game, and I can't switch Steam to offline mode, until my connection is restored.  Even if I do switch to offline mode, after thirty days, Steam demands that it be allowed to phone home again before allowing any games to launch.

I have a non-Steam copy of Borderlands, which came with SecuROM embedded.  Neither Borderlands nor SecuROM phones home after installation.  I can play singleplayer when my internet connection flakes out.  SecuROM doesn't **** with my video card drivers.  If a patch comes out that would break Borderlands on my computer, I can continue playing the old version of the game.  In fairness, SecuROM does cause a nasty crash, if I try to watch a movie on DVD that's longer than two hours and ten minutes, but in terms of my gaming experience, it's not a disruption.  Steam is.  Yet Steam can do no wrong, and SecuROM is poison, when it shows up on a popular title.

Of course, I have a GoG copy of Descent 3.  It doesn't phone home at all.  It doesn't **** with my drivers.  It doesn't auto-patch anything.  It doesn't cause any crashes in other software.  It doesn't shut down, if I lose my connection to the internet.

Notice that of the three, Steam is the only one that actually disrupts my ability to play the damn game.  Of the most prominent DRM systems in wide use right now, the only more appropriate target than Steam would have been Ubisoft's DRM package, and even that one won't try to **** with your video card drivers.

[NGTM-1R]

The fact that you've somehow provoked a nonresponsive program into hating you is, in fact, not germane to a discussion of what the average user deals with.

So please, rant on about what Steam has done to you, though it probably has more to do with what you've done to it or your specific computer, as though it has relevance to everyone else's experience.

For myself I find GoG less responsive and less useful than steam because it doesn't handle itself well as an all-in-one. I can't order, download, and launch from a single window, and the freaking downloader likes to get lost since it doesn't install itself on the programs list. (Which is a terrible design decision and does in fact affect everyone.)

[BlueFlames]

The fact that you've somehow provoked a nonresponsive program into hating you is, in fact, not germane to a discussion of what the average user deals with.

Sushi presented an anecdote about his experience with Steam, and I responded in kind.  So far, nobody has presented anything compelling about the average Steam user's experience, and since Valve doesn't publish any kind of data regarding Steam user satisfaction, there's no discussion to be had about "what the average user deals with."

The point is that Steam is capable of disrupting the gaming experience to a greater degree than some much more vilified DRM platforms, and so it is perfectly appropriate for GoG to take aim at Steam as a disruptive DRM scheme.

[Mikes]

Anyone else feel that their oh-so-subtle stab is rather misdirected?

Yeah. The commercial says "DRM makes playing games painful and frustrating" which is not actually the case with Steam (at least in my experience).

No DRM is better than DRM, but if you're going to imply that it's getting in the way of gaming, pick something other than Steam.

The moment you want to do some "mobile" gaming on a laptop, on holiday or on a plane/train etc., for instance... Steam becomes quite obnoxious and annoying. - if it lets you play at all. Offline mode is often rather spotty and sometimes having a bad 3G connection is worse than having no connection - as Steam will insist trying to log in for half an hour - and then instantly kick you out if you lose that connection.

Steam is pretty much trouble free to use on a desktop system with fixed internet access... but it is still DRM - and in the case of "mobile gaming" it is so annoying that I don't even bother installing Steam games on my "on the go" laptop (that I use on long train rides) anymore.

[jr2]

I usually find that as long as I've launched a game once while online, I usually can play it offline whenever I want.  But, Steam has given the HL2:CTF game that I downloaded (it's free, does not require HL2) no end of grief, constantly kicking me out because it couldn't validate some sort of "ticket" with Steam.. I've followed the directions for fixing this, and they do work, the problem is, every time you follow the directions, you have to re-verify Steam on your computer (type in a code that they send to your e-mail account).

So, as with most closed-source (and some open-source) software, 'your mileage may vary'.

BTW, NGTM, I don't see how you can say that BlueFlames' problem is most likely something he did to his computer (unless I'm unaware of something not present in this thread)... sometimes certain configurations just don't play nice with certain software.  I had a computer once that insisted on re-activating Windows XP (back when XP was new and everyone was still using '98) every time I shut down the computer... which, after you've used your three allowable auto-validations, gets old (as you now have to phone M$, read off a 30-character code, then listen to another 30-character code that you input into your computer).  I suppose it was my fault.