Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General Patch Strategy

There you have their patch strategy:

-> http://www.larian.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=514765#Post514765

Obviously...

Not always, but when a company is hitting hard times and getting close to folding, there are signs and some even give a warning as such. Point is, anyone who worries about such or is paying attention will have their entire catalog of games already downloaded. For steam, it really doesn't matter as you will have to do some heavy hacking to get those games to work, even if you do have them downloaded.

That's your opinion & you are welcome to it, but as a father of 4 gamers both the LAN game streaming as well as the Family View has been a really big deal.

Also, Steam Workshop.

You do realize this is exactly what GoG is moving to, right? It will be optional of course, time will tell if it stays that way.

Same can be said about DRM free games on Steam (like D:OS), no hacking needed at all. Just download them before Valve goes bancrupt and you're all good.

There is a price you pay for convenience. Some are willing to pay that price, others not so much. The worry is that when you get too many people willing to pay that price is that it eventually no longer becomes an option. When that happens, it isn't a feature, it is a dictation, a control by the industry. Ultimately, you really don't want that to happen.

Or you could ask Steam what would happen.



I'm assuming that Valve multi-player games would be left in a lurch, but the rest might not be.

That can't happen. Steam is dependent on demand. They can only "dictate" what happens to stuff you already bought there. They can't dictate what happens in the future. Also Steam and the indsutry are not the same. But you're right, the ones in power are the industry and not Steam. And in the end, the ones really in power are the consumers, no matter how big Steam is. Steam/Valve can never dictate the industry because in fact nobody needs them if not for the additional services they offer. If people decide that these services don't justify the costs anymore they will refuse to buy there. And the industry can just sell digital goods by themselves without any need of using Steam. You see, it's all kind of exaggerated...

True...

But not all games are DRM free on valve. While all games on GoG are. With Steam, there is still a way to get them to work. My point wasn't that you completely lost your games, rather that in both scenarios, you won't even notice a difference with GoG versions, while with your Steam games, you will be pulling your hair out dealing with all the hacking to get many steam games to run.

If it ever gets to that point I will happily go back to the way I did things before I started using Steam. I was dead against Steam until I had to use it for a boxed copy of Portal I was given as a gift. Since then it has made my (& my kids) gaming experiences better & better.

Actually not. Most games on Steam nowadays are "protected" by Steamworks CEG, Steam's own standard DRM service. You can circumvent that measure by changing/downloading a single dll file in most cases. So even if Steam goes down and they don't have any security net in place, you could still play your games without a big hassle.

Also, you could just download every game on Steam to your hard drive and stay in offline mode (and only go online for downloading/activiating a new game). That way, it would be exactly the same as with GOG in case the service goes down. Since you are in offline mode all your games will still work on your offline client even without Steam out of buiness. Multiplayer is a different story, but most games nowadays can't be played in multiplayer after a few years anyway, no matter if they are on Steam or not. Most "old" games on GOG are SP-only games for a reason.

Anyway, back to topic?!

Companies have been doing it for years. Banks are some of the most adept at shaping, driving, and building the public to a control point through monetary products and principals (hint: Consumer Credit), but many other industries do it quite a bit as well. Cloud computing is a control mechanism, shaping the public to a position to increase reliance on bandwidth and creating more services that people will be required to use. Once demand goes up, then slowly past means are pulled away. It naturally occurs and the result is that everyone is eventually forced to it. This happens a lot with politics and laws as well.


Though lets take a relevant example to this industry. Larian wanted to make a turn based RPG from the start. When they began, Diablo was the big craze and action systems were in high demand. During that time, publishers were becoming a problem, asserting too much dominance over the studios by dangling the purse strings. They controlled what type of games were to be made and they shaped the market (read about Brian Fargo and his problems with this). Larian was forced to make an action system for their game and again, forced in their continued titles. Heck, they had to go out on their own, take MASSIVE risks and bet everything they had on the fact that what we saw in the market was not what people truly were demanding.


For over a decade, good cRPGs have been nearly extinct because the publishers controlled what was driven in the market. Making numerous iterations of the same game over and over wasn't a demand in the market. The market complained about it, but they kept buying it because that was their choice. Larian proved this with the success of D:OS.

Consumers are part of the equation, but a large portion of it is controlling the market, controlling the consumer, dictating to the consumer their demands. It really is a mind trip and it is only possible with sheepish shallow people who are easily manipulated (that remind you of any types of gamers?)

You are right though, the market is the one truly in power, but that power is meaningless unless it is exercised and the public refuses to exercise it to any real consistency. So... they continuously get manipulated by industry because the industry doesn't fear and respect the consumer, they look at them as cattle on their way to slaughter.

All of that has in fact nothing to do with Steam.

I think this conversation is going over your head.


Good day!

What? There is no need to offensively end a discussion like that but if you want to...

You talked about the industry in your post. Steam/Valve is only the distributor. They don't decide or even influence which kinds of games were made (apart from the few they make themselves). That's totally up to the big publishers and not to Steam.

D:OS in fact proved that there is a demand for this kind of old-school isometric party RPG which hasn't be satisfied in the last years. But it's not Steam to blame for that, not at all. Also Steam's DRM policies have little to nothing to do with which games have been made in the past.

I think you're mixing up two distinct issues here...

I don't get the severe dislike for Steam! It has allowed a lot of small developers to get their product to market where they had no chance of being published by bigger companies!
It seems that as soon as anything is successful it is our duty to hate it!

Sorry, I mistook your response for being a TLDR, blah blah.... type of response to my points.

Steam is a distributor yes, but they enable the system and facilitate the control. The can provide digital distribution without facilitating DRM and proprietary mechanisms, they don't however by choice. So yes, they are part of the problem.

The control aspect is DRM. DRM doesn't exist to stop piracy (piracy proves this over and over), it is a means to shape and control the consumers to create more revenue channels (ie take something that costs the consumer nothing already and turn it into a service they pay for).

We used to own our games outright through the disks. Now they are digitally downloadable, but as you can see with Steam, Origin, and Uplay, there is a transition going on. With GoG, you can still claim you "own" the copy as you have it and can play it anywhere, install it anywhere, you choose.

With the others, you are leasing the game in most cases. You can only install as they allow on the things they allow and you have to be connected to their servers in order to play. Eventually, the shift of control will be to cloud computing, mainframe design where you no longer have a computer, but rather a dummy terminal and all of your processing is handled by them. This will open up more revenue streams such as charging per processing cycle, per bandwidth usage and per time to connect to services. When such happens it will be gladly done by the consumer base as they will rush off to chase the "convenience" aspect of it.

This is a long tirade, I know... my point as it concerns steam is a part of the industry they are a part of the problem.

Edit:

Oh, about your second point. I covered that in my previous comment. D:OS doing well doesn't disqualify my points. It actually proves it. The market was forced for a long time and it wasn't until Larian fought back, went out on their own and took the risks were they able to bring this to market, which as you said, people wanted. The market has been controlled for over a decade or more. All markets are to an extent.

Walmart was once a great company when Sam Walmart started it and took it into a major powerhouse. It didn't go south until he passed away and it was sold.

Steam can very well do what GoG has done. They could have refused DRM (as GoG does) because of the pointlessness of it. It doesn't stop piracy and it causes more problems to legitimate consumers. So, by them continuing to support it, they are part of the problem. While they aren't the main offender, they are not innocent either. They are guilty by association.

Funny then how I'm probably far older & wiser than the rest of you...:)

I did my due diligence & checked all the forums & online - several other similar problems/issues very recently. The fact remains, there's a game-breaking bug with the caching system in the game, whether a MS or DOS game update somehow contributed to it - none of you have disproven that. You can't prove a negative. If you don't have the problem, reserve your pop-wisdom for yourself & go 'contribute' in another thread where you actually, you know, have something to contribute. Have a nice day.

Spoken like a true dogmatist! You should work for CDP...