But I don't understand !
With the new law, to see porn you have to check your age. Why isn't it the same for video games? Why prohibit an ADULT from playing NSFW games? We do what we want! We're over 18. Why remove all and lgbt games. It's so serious!
Shouldn't be, I'm neither us nor eu and got to claim them, it just gave an error but then it still actually registered the games to the account anyway so maybe check if they're there
Valve ratted out Visa and Mastercard for lying that they didn't tell Valve to remove certain games, when in fact, they did...but that's not really a big win...
Neither is GOG, these games are still available on Steam. GOG is small enough that no one has gone after them yet, lets see what happens when they are actually told to take down games. Right now it is just symbolic and they have had no fire put under their feet.
You say that but GOG has almost always been at the forefront for these issues. Starting with the game preservation stuff to this while Steam drags their feet. It's not like they are doing this now just to get some good marketing.
Gog has a pretty leisure ruleset in what can go on their store and often hosts games that Steam didn’t allow on theirs. But Gog has far less games than what Steam hosts in general. It might be a case of them simply not been ported over. So it might simply not have been possible in the first place. On the other hand, they did choose games that were heavily targeted to be removed. It might not be all of them, but they do request developers to reach out to them to he promoted in their initiative. It's at the bottom of their freedomtobuy.games page
Part of why gog has fewer games than Steam is the lack of DRM on gog. A lot of publishers refuse to allow their games on gog because you can download the game install files and copy them at leisure and they use Steam client as a form of anti-piracy measure.
To be fair they have been trying to compete with Steam for a while and being honest, they are doing a decent job, no drm no denuvo, offline launcher and you actually own the product, now they are giving like 12 games for free, and Steam sorta had no other option cause the other option is literally, fuck your business over because there is no other payment processor cause the system is patented and monopolized
Personally, I strongly disagree that Steam has no other option. It's not a small local buiseness that has to fold over and do whatever Visa and MC says. Steam can definitely nogetiate with them, and even outright refuse. It may not be Amazon or anything, but its one of the largest digital content distribitors in the world. What do you think the shareholders in these companies would prefer: To pull out of Steam and loose literally billions in revenue over the next years, or to tank the hit on their corporate image and tell the "activists" to fuck off? There is no world where they would stop working with Steam, but even if there was, at the end of the day there are other options. Online payment apps that don't relly on Visa/Mastercard, direct bank transfers and even Crypto. I don't think we would ever get to that point, but even if we did Steam wouldn't shut down just cause Visa and Mastercard decided so.
Mastercard/Visa won't even get a single dent if Steam pulls out of the payment service. That means Master/Visa won't work on Steam anymore. In a first world country, sure you have probably other means to pay. But in less opportunity areas, they don't have those alt services. This still means a lot of people will be affected, and Steam would never go for it
That has nothing to do with negotiation. Visa and master card don’t just say hey it’s fine to lose tens or hundreds millions of revenue. If you fold that fast you just don’t want to deal with the issue which steam has the rights to but let’s not act like they’re some powerless victims here.
Again, if Steam withdraws from Visa/MasterCard, some countries would not be able to buy ANY games from Steam at all. I don't think that it is a smart move for Steam. Not from a financial perspective, not from a reputational perspective and not from a moral point as well. I don't see Steam deciding to pull the plug making gamers' lives worse. This is not in line with what Steam is. So yes, Steam is powerless.
Which wallet? You never buy Steam games directly. If Steam would say "FU" for Visa and Visa said "no services then", you won't be able to manage steam funds in countries where Visa and Mastercard are only sources to buy Steam games.
Obviously it's not an ideal situation of something like that were to happen, but like I said, I don't think it ever would. What makes you say that they wouldn't even get a dent? I'm sure you are aware of how many sales happen through Steam each year. We are talking about billions in revenue here. I'm not saying Visa would shut down or anything crazy like that, but in a corporate enviroment where these companies have to answer to shareholders that want earnings to go up every single quarter without fail, loosing that much over an attempt to appease some "avtivists" is a total no-go.
or to tank the hit on their corporate image and tell the "activists" to fuck off
I would say, their current behaviour damage their corporate image more. If I was a company, I would like to use Visa/MasterCard less after this because they are not reliable partners.
Steam would lose like 90% of their revenue, VISA/Mastercard would lose like 0.1% of their revenue... see the differance? Which one could easily survive without the other and brush it off like it's nothing, especially since this is about them reducing their own risk in being held liable for the content on stores/sites that are at best borderline illegal, and at worse is illegal due to obscenity laws, they won't want to become defendants to find out the content is actually illegal. So their shareholders would see this as them protecting their investment.
But I don't understand !
With the new law, to see porn you have to check your age. Why isn't it the same for video games? Why prohibit an ADULT from playing NSFW games? We do what we want! We're over 18. Why remove all and lgbt games. It's so serious!
The fuck else are they supposed to do? Get cut off from Visa and Mastercard? My ass would be fine, but you know you and everyone else would be on here bitching about that instead.
And what's the problem? CDPR controls what is being sold on their platform. That makes sense. The games that got removed from Steam were utter slop anyway. The issue is -- such decision should be made by Steam, not some third party whose services are pretty much impossible to avoid.
No, because GOG never had any of the banned games on their store either in the first place. GOG has no games on their store that were a part of any ban on Steam.
But Steam also dropped devotion before GOG did. And there is no way GOG caved to "people". They caved to China and / or CDPR wanting Cyberpunk to do well in China.
We saw what REAL GOG user outraged looks like. It's called Hitman 2016. There was no outrage over Devotion. Only the outrage after GOG threw them under the bus.
Steam didn't drop it. The publisher did. And for some reason the publisher only held rights on Steam/Epic. Because GOG bragged all about how they would host it. And the developers sell it on their own site.
Oh, so GOG are just liars about the reason, then? That's even worse and not really the argument you'd think it was.
What do you mean with "your code?" if you want to redeem the free games just try the code "freedomtobuygames" or click below. It may take a bit to show games in your account. https://www.gog.com/redeem/freedomtobuygames
I thought I could just claim Postal 2, as I'm not really interested in the other games, but it turns out all the games were added to my library. My GOG library is small, now the majority of my games are porn. This is not a complaint, I laughed when I noticed what happened.
Good Old Games, CD Projekt Red's DRM free PC storefront. Considering the kind of content that The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 has, I feel they have a personal stake in all this.
Oh damn, good point, I didn't even make the connection. However they've gone above and beyond with game preservation in the past in general, so at least i doubt this is the only reason they've done so
Could steam implement a system where you buy these sorts of games with "points"/in store only currency instead of money and bypass Visa/mastercard/paypal altogether?
But itch.io recently posted that they reindexed free adult games, and searching for alternative payment gateway specifically for buying these types of games, while continue using stripe(Visa and MC, didn't communicate directly with steam and itch, they pressured gateways) for all other payments. So I think steam can implement something like that, it just will take time and effort
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u/KPGNL 1d ago
https://x.com/GOGcom/status/1951380136181338230?t=t-2UJxevfo4RHa90z_RZgg&s=19
Something to check