Some idiot put some other idiot, kid, or incompetent bullshitter in charge of designing the network for a Financial company and they did what idiots, inexperienced kids and incompetent bullshiters do and put the Production machines in the same network and easily accessible by machines were users can install any random shit from the Internet.

Sooner or later something like what happened now would've happened.

The fault is entirely with the decision maker who chose to have somebody else other than a senior expert design the systems architecture of a business that is supposed to safekeep billions of dollars.

Indeed.

Any half way decent software designer, systems designer or IT security specialist always assumes at least some people are idiots, or naive, or make mistakes even though they know better.

And it only takes one of those doing their thing once for an attacker to get in.

So they design their stuff taking that into account, which in this case means DESIGNING THE FUCKING NETWORK TOPOLOGY SO THAT THE FUCKING PRODUCTION MACHINES DEALING WITH FUCKING BILLIONS OF DOLLARS AREN'T EXPOSED TO PCs WHERE USERS CAN INSTALL ANY SHIT FROM THE INTERNET!

(Sorry, got a bit pissed of with the tremendous incompetence displayed by whomever is their systems designer or whomever didn't hire a fucking senior systems designer to setup the IT infrastructure of a Finance company)

Mind you, in my career I've also worked in Startups and they think somebody who has 5 years experience is senior and put them in charge of shit they really shouldn't be in charge of or probably even touch, so this isn't surprising to me, even if it's still infuriating.

Their specialty is mass surveillance and monetizing the results of it, so it's a bit unfair to expect them to be competent in other domains.

I think the same "professional" environment where whomever made the decisions for systems architecture thought that Production systems that deal with a shitton of money should be in the same network as machines which aren't locked down like crazy and whose users can install whatever the fuck they want, is the kind of environment where people thinks vibe coding is great.

Incompetent idiots leading incompetent idiots.

Right, you're trying to make a "who are the good guys" judgement using money as the metric ...

Then let's do some cold hard business analysis on all this shit:

For starters, Valve does very little of the work in projects like Wine compared to the work done by voluntaries working on those Open Source projects. I vaguely remember that they had one person full time on it.

Further, judging by their yearly profits (more than $1 billion as leaked in 2021) they clearly "invest" very very little of the fee "onto improvements to wine, dxvk, FEX, as well as the features they offer like Steam client, cloud saves, etc." otherwise the profits would be much less.

Imagine how far something like Wine would go with just half a year of Valve's profits, enough to pay for a year of work of around 5,000 devs here in Europe (depends on the country - I'm using $100,000 per year per worker which is actually well above average dev pay in all of EE)

More Maths: say you would have to PAY directly for the software that lets you run games in Linux. Let's put a fair value per copy for that at €200 - well above a consumer price and actually a business price for software, though not a corporate price. Let's further say that the average price you pay per game is €40. Last but not least, lets simplify our math by saying that Valve paid for the entire development of all that open source software, which is nowhere near the case, and lets ignore taxes as they vary a lot from country to country.

Valve takes 30% commission per game sold, so even in this wildly pro-Valve imaginary scenario were Valve does all the work in those open source projects, if your game collection in Valve is more than 17 games, then you're already losing. Any further game you buy is just you delivering value to Valve for no extra value in return as you've already paid for the value you get from those open source projects.

The reality is that Valve aren't the good guys - if they were their profits would be way less because they would be truly "investing the fee onto improvements to wine, dxvk, FEX, as well as the features they offer like Steam client, cloud saves, etc." as you imagine they are. In fact the most reasonable explanation for them putting a small bit of their billionaire revenues into those projects is that it's a small strategical investment to reduce their dependency on Microsoft and the risks associated with Microsoft doing like Apple does with iOS and Google is on its way to do with Android - forcing all sales of software that runs in Windows to go through a Microsoft store. Valve is not a charity: they send a little bit of money that way that just keeps the projects rolling with volunteer work without actually putting so much money into it that they basically take over because it's the optimal business strategy that minimizes the cost for them whilst helping secure their market share against such a move by Microsoft.

Valve are there to make money for their owner and all they do is to make money for their owner, not help out the likes of you and me.

Mind you, neither are GOG or any of the other for-profit game stores the "good guys": they're all in it for themselves, not for us and anything they do which is good for us they do it because it's good for them and would otherwise not do it.

Ultimately if you really want to make this about "value", then you have to figure out how much "value" you derive from each feature that each store offers you - so how much are cloud saves worth it to you, how much is having a game store launcher in Linux and its features worth it for you, how much are offline game installers and no-DRM worth it for you and so on.

Personally I see little value in store launchers and cloud saves and more value in offline game installers and no-DRM, so my value consideration makes me lean towards buying more from GOG than from Steam. Yet I will still buy from Steam if a game is in Steam but not GOG and the value of the game for me is enough to exceed this imbalance, which is why I have a small collection of games in Steam - I actually tend make purchasing decisions based on value considerations since I have a background in Finance and as a business owner so naturally look at products and services as something that delivers value to the user.

However, it's perfectly valid that other people see different value for themselves in these things and that adds up to a preference for Steam over GOG - the value an individual derives from features of products and services is a personal thing.

Let's however not deceive ourselves by looking at small strategic investments of massive for-profit companies and think they're doing it for us.

PS: By the way, curiously of the 3 games you listed 2 of them I bought directly from the game makers.

You don't have to set up anything yourself in Lutris for games from GOG - you just go to the GOG view in Lutris where it lists all your games in GOG and click "Install" on the game you want to install and play: Lutris has scripts for the vast majority of GOG games that will automatically do whatever tweaks are needed to be done to Wine to run it so you don't have to do anything beyond that.

It's about as likely that you have to do anything further than clicking "Install" to get a GOG Windows game to run from Lutris as it is likely that you have to do anything beyond clicking "Install" to get a Steam Windows game to run from Steam, and even if you do get an issue, like with Steam in Lutris most of the problems are solved by just switching in a pull-down box in the config for that game to get it to use the latest Wine or Proton version.

As I said, I get no more hassle with running GOG Windows games in Linux with Lutris than I have running Steam Windows games in Linux with Steam.

If you run pirate games from Lutris, THEN you do often have to set it up yourself since Lutris doesn't have install scripts for such versions of the game at which point one does indeed need to dive into logs and poke around Winetricks to get the game to run (though you might get lucky, especially with DODI repacks).

Even if installing and launching GOG games from Lutris wasn't that convenient, you would be paying GOG rather pirating the game to pay the makers of the game for having made something you enjoy, and in fact I would recommend you to buy the game directly from the makers if you can bypassing the games stores (ANY games stores, GOG included) so that they get the maximum amount possible as they're the ones doing most of the work and the games stores are just middlemen taking advantage of market inefficiencies and networking effects in games distribution to get a disproportionate cut of the money for doing a tiny fraction of the work.

As a question of principle I actually chose to pay for games in GOG when I could just download pirated copies of the GOG offline installers for those games and install them just as easily - the Lutris scripts for the GOG versions of the game work for both direct download from GOG and for local offline installer files, and those local offline installer files can just as easily be pirated copies as they can be something you downloaded from GOG.

I use Lutris as my launcher in Linux and the level of convenience to run Windows games in Linux with it is slightly superior to Steam (superior mainly because I like to run my games inside a sandbox with networking disabled, which I can easily do in Lutris but not Steam, plus I don't have the launchers always running in the background and it's very rare that I have to wait for Lutris to update when I want to run a game and start it, whilst with Steam it's pretty common that I try to start a game and then spend a few minutes waiting for Steam to update itself and/or the game, when all I want is to run the bloody game and don't care about it being the latest version), though for most people it should be around the same or maybe even a bit more for Steam if you care about automatic updating of the games before they're run (which Lutris won't do for GOG games - it will fetch and install game updates but you have to tell it to do it) and certain Steam API facilities such as cloud-saves and showing achievements to your friends.

My total failure rate of running Windows games from GOG using Lutris as the launcher is about the same as that of running Windows games from Steam because Lutris too does the whole Wine + DXVK thing and has launch scripts for most games, though Steam does seem to have problems with AAA games from a certain generation (around the 00s) that won't run in Linux whilst the pirate version of the same game runs just fine from Lutris, which is probably due to the DRM for those games back then which I remember was a real pain in the arse and which is still present in the Steam version.

So my no-DRM thing is also a bit about running my games in Linux - because sometimes DRM gets in the way of that - though it is mainly about ownership and controlling myself when and how I run the games I bought and not actually losing access to a game because it was taken down from the store.

In fact I have no intention of using a Linux GOG Galaxy as my launcher in Linux, same as back when my gaming PC was Windows I didn't use the Windows one, I just hope GOG finally making one for Linux signals that they're taking Linux gamers more seriously and maybe they'll do like Steam and contribute some open source code to the gaming ecosystem in Linux, as that will benefit us all.

Yeah, they sometimes fail in enforcing their own stated policy.

While quite a number those things are so so, many are clear breaches of that policy (for example the Absolver one at the very start and the Cyberpunk 2077 one).

Personally in my 200+ collection of games from GOG I never had such problems, whilst my Steam collection of around 20 games has several titles with DRM to the point that one of them won't even run from Steam in Linux but the pirate version (which is cracked) runs just fine.

None the less, you make a fair point.

Personally I currently favor GOG because with their "No DRM" (except when they fail at it, as you pointed out) and downloadable offline installers, I de facto have the same ownership rights of the games I purchase as I used to have in the pre-Internet days when I bought a game CD (later, with the Internet, even physical games started having online validation), and if a different store was giving me that I would support them equally for that.

It's really about how far in practice do my ownership rights of a game go rather than store X or store Y, so stuff like blocking from playing a single player game in a machine which is offline or at any point the "game license" being revoked, the game removed from my collection and now I can't ever play it anymore (which, by the way, is also a risk in GOG if you don't download the offline installer) are big problems to me.

That's an outright lie.

For example, this has no "requires internet" disclosure and yet if you try and start it offline for the first time it won't run and even after that if you have it offline for more than a week or so it stops working (I know because it happened to me on vacations).

Most games integrated with the Steam API require the game to be online and able to reach the Steam servers both for first start and at least once in a while, something that's not disclosed in the Steam store page for those games.

Further, it doesn't get more consistent as disclosures on DRM go than GOG's "None of our games have DRM", so your "no other store" is also a lie.

If you're going to fanboy for Steam, at least stick to their true qualities and don't make shit up.

Often you don't know or care your game won't run offline until your Internet is down and you just want to play a game and it won't run. Also some kinds of DRM are totally invisible until certain conditions happen (say, you upgrade components in your PC and now the DRM thinks it's a different machine).

Even if without fail you install and test every single game you buy from Steam games for DRM before you actually play them (so as not to exceed the 2h), making sure you do so within 14 days of purchasing, and refund them if they do have such DRM, or for every single game you're considering buying, spend time trawling through support communities upfront to see if they have such DRM, you still won't know for sure if that game has some DRM that will stop you from playing it a later date - maybe the offline stuff only triggers after X days offline, maybe the DRM is doing the whole machine ID stuff and breaks only if you change enough or specific components in your PC, maybe it's just something that cause needless problems running it under Wine, and for all those things maybe nobody that had problems with it wrote about them in whatever support forum forum you checked.

Unreliable workarounds aren't actual solutions.

Meanwhile you can buy from GOG without such hassles or risks that you have when buying games from Steam to make sure they're free of nasty DRM, a totally unecessary massive hassle as Steam could easily list for each game if they gave DRM or not and which kind of DRM they have if they do, but they choose not to.

My point is that with its current stance Valve is at best purposefully supporting anti-consumer stances from some game publishers which would suffer in terms of sales if their bullshit DRM was prominently signalled in the store listing for their games.

Yeah, we're not yet anywhere close to wiping out the AI bubble price rises.

Once the last one or two years of stock price rises get wiped, that's when the fireworks really start.