For those of you who do not yet know, GOG's Galaxy is akin to Valve's Steam, with a few differences.
Moving on, this is what Destro had to say when answering what Galaxy's launch date is.
Encouraging? Or not so much? What this means to me is that there is still plenty of time to vote for GOG to make Galaxy open source! Make it so, folks!
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Moving on, this is what Destro had to say when answering what Galaxy's launch date is.
DestoThere is no such thing as release date for Galaxy because Galaxy is not a single feature that we can just release and say "done" but an ecosystem of features. That's also why the date is so vague. Other reason would be that we prefer to underpromise than underdeliver :)
Coming back to your question - I'd break it down into few parts
First, some of the Galaxy features were available in closed multiplayer beta of The Witcher Adventure Game (networking & backend, matchmaking, lobbies, in-game chat). FYI, we've sent over 150.000 beta keys as of today and while we will be soon concluding this beta, there will be many more Galaxy-powered games like that coming, one of them in the very coming weeks ramping up into many more in the months after (way over 40 devs have access to our SDK but here we're depending on developer release schedule).
Then there is also a Galaxy Client - some parts of it, like auto-updating, were already available in mentioned The Witcher Adventure Game, and the full app supporting entire library is also coming but keep in mind this is not a small task - all our games are being rebuild to offer installation and updating via Client while also keeping their standalone installers, which creation we'd like to automate as well rather than making the whole pipeline an overkill. Then, many other features - like achievements for example - also depend on having Galaxy powered game that supports them in the first place. And as you'd expect different games then require different features.
Finally - many other features which will be later needed to power other stuff are actually already released on GOG - good example here are Galaxy accounts system, which all of you are now using... maybe some of you noticed this when we've launched new login and signup forums. It sounds like no big deal but there are many dependencies here - friends system is just one example which is also linked to achievements somewhat, which might require some overlay which in turn depends on a Client.
Encouraging? Or not so much? What this means to me is that there is still plenty of time to vote for GOG to make Galaxy open source! Make it so, folks!
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competition is always needed.
Monopoly is never good!
DRM-free?
I never saw DRM-free as selling point. I had a lot games in CD-s which was DRM-free as they do not ask CD-key. By now I have lent (and never got back :(), lost or broke most of them so I do not see any point in CD-s or DVD-s now. And I do not see any point in DRM-free digital games never have problems with steam even when my Internet connection went down I could play most of them. I only hate heavy DRM which directly annoys me. I myself could care less about hidden DRM-s if they are not directly affecting me.
Competition is always good.
Steam monopoly scares me.
without competition there is monopoly
nothing forces to improve or innovate if theres no competition
And a lot of Linux users see it as a selling point and never buy games with DRM or use DRMed services. And GOG is targeted for such users.
Competition to Steam is needed double fold, because they tend to promote lock-in, and many developers fall prey to this when they make Steamworks mandatory to run their games (not for the DRM sake, but for example because they use some network features from it). Lock-in is very bad, and the only way to reduce it is stronger competition.