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Quoting: CaldathrasThe "you can back up your Steam games after they're installed" argument is spurious at best. It overlooks the fact that the game still requires the Steam client to install those games in first place.

It doesn't, you can download the game with steamcmd. It only requires a steam account, just like it requires a gog account to download the game.

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/SteamCMD#Downloading_an_App

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To be honest, I wouldn't notice. I am not really into searching every single image on the internet if it's AI generated or not (unless it's obvious).

As for the art: at this point with complaints about AI slop everywhere, I care less and less about that. Stress and anger does no good to me.

It's not cool that they use it in that way, sure, it's hard to agree that it's a good thing, but I'm not going to either condemn or praise them for that anymore.

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OK, aside from me not liking AI (and no, I'm not a fan in programming either), there's a basic stupidity here if GOG in particular does it. It's against their brand.

Look, GOG is Good Old Games. They're the store that's all about nostalgia for things like the games of yesteryear and your ability to own them like you did back then. All about reaction against new impositions of tech-bro-nology. Doing this breaks their theme and their customers' expectations of what GOG is suposed to be. If there is one company whose customers are going to react badly against AI, it is GOG. What are they thinking?

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I'm wary of Netflix these days as Trump has bought around $1m in bonds in Netflix.

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Quoting: KimyrielleMy feelings on that are clear: As long as people find it acceptable to use AI for coding (and they seem to), it must be okay to use it for everything else, too.

An equivalent number of people don't find it acceptable to use AI for coding as find it unacceptable to use AI for image generation. There's already been a lot of ink spilled on how AI coding causes problems, especially long-term.

AI codebases tend to have maintainers who don't know how the code works and cannot write updates, especially since the LLM is less competent at understanding the program's source as a whole as it grows more complex and especially outgrows its context window. Using it for documentation scraping tends to generate hallucinated entries, and the machine has a 50/50 chance of arguing with you that it's right if you decide to correct it. Studies show that AI chat coders believe they're working faster, but in reality are working slower - it's not even useful as a productivity tool.

On the ethical side, use of AI generated snippets has caused concerns over users accidentally violating the GPL by using regurgitated-but-correct code without properly licensing its source. When GitHub changed their TOS to grant a permanent license to all uploaded code for AI training, it experienced a mass exodus of programmers who didn't want their work being used as free unpaid training data for corporations who were subscribing to Microsoft.

So I don't disagree with your statement, but I do disagree with how you've framed the situation.

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I liked the demo! Will buy!

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Quoting: KimyrielleMy feelings on that are clear: As long as people find it acceptable to use AI for coding (and they seem to), it must be okay to use it for everything else, too.

The biggest difference with coding is that AI is rarely used to generate the end product. It's used for snippets or a starting point and then people iterate on it.

The artist equivalent would be using AI to generate a sketch and then drawing over it until happy with the result.

I personally think that's an acceptable use, but also that the result is usually of worse quality.

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And I've been holding off on 580.126.09 because someone here mentioned problems with XFCE.

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Annoying that the only way it is available on Ubuntu Linux derivatives is flatpak, snap or compiling. None of which I am going to use. I don't need a DEB file, but what about a binary?

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Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: CaldathrasThat's your opinion (one that I happen to agree with, mind you) but that doesn't make it right or wrong -- which is, after all, a value judgement.

Eugh. Spare me that relativistic stuff.
Having an opinion does not make that opinion valid.
There is such a thing as correct and such a thing as wrong.
Is 1+1 2? Are there clouds in the sky? Would fulfilling minimal end-of-life plans be expensive for publishers/developers? Etc.

Most opinions around this topic can be rather easily proven right or wrong - and honestly have been, plenty of times. Certain people just choose to ignore that and continue doubling down as if their opinions had not been proven wrong dozens of times over.
Maybe some day this will be known as PirateSoftware syndrome.

Quoting: CaldathrasHe may feel strongly that their strawmen have validity. Can you show him how those strawmen are not valid?

Engaging with strawmen or even validating them is pointless. They may well be valid, but their entire substance is not even being relevant to the actual topic.

The classic here is the "it would be too expensive for publishers to keep the servers infinitely".
Is that a correct statement? Yes.
Is that statement relevant to the initiative? No.

So, basically, your comments about his reaction to the cool-aid snip could just as easily be applied to yourself. Showing how they are irrelevant to the actual topic would be addressing their validity. Your example did this brilliantly (although more details would clarify it further).

As to the first half of your comment, a response would stray to far into esoteric philosophy than I suspect either of us would care to pursue. 😊

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Quoting: CaldathrasThat's your opinion (one that I happen to agree with, mind you) but that doesn't make it right or wrong -- which is, after all, a value judgement.

Eugh. Spare me that relativistic stuff.
Having an opinion does not make that opinion valid.
There is such a thing as correct and such a thing as wrong.
Is 1+1 2? Are there clouds in the sky? Would fulfilling minimal end-of-life plans be expensive for publishers/developers? Etc.

Most opinions around this topic can be rather easily proven right or wrong - and honestly have been, plenty of times. Certain people just choose to ignore that and continue doubling down as if their opinions had not been proven wrong dozens of times over.
Maybe some day this will be known as PirateSoftware syndrome.

Quoting: CaldathrasHe may feel strongly that their strawmen have validity. Can you show him how those strawmen are not valid?

Engaging with strawmen or even validating them is pointless. They may well be valid, but their entire substance is not even being relevant to the actual topic.

The classic here is the "it would be too expensive for publishers to keep the servers infinitely".
Is that a correct statement? Yes.
Is that statement relevant to the initiative? No.

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Quoting: SlayerTheChikken

Quoting: eggroleAs everyone has said, I see no issue with the 30% cut, but I think the more important part, that has a bit of merit IMHO, is the off-platform competition restriction. If my game is for sale on steam for $50, why can't I sell it direct on my website (or any other platform for that matter) for $40?

This *feels* very anti-competitive, but what do I know.

This part is true, I can agree on that.

I disagree. It is hardly "anticompetitive". Sellers are free to take their product to any other online store if they don't like Valve's policy. Contrary to apparent belief, Valve is in no way a monopoly. Other online retail options exist. The seller just won't get the level of exposure that Steam can offer.

Maintaining price parity on all stores is just good business. To paraphrase from my other post, if the seller is undercutting their own prices, it impacts their sales through Steam. This makes it somewhat pointless for Valve to provide their time and resources making the seller's product available on their store.

Besides, all evidence that I've seen is that price parity is not happening. The regular price is often very close ("Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price", anyone?) but I have never seen a matching sale price across all digital storefronts at the same time. For example, Fanatical sold a game I purchased on discount for lower than Steam has ever discounted that game. Green Man Gaming has done the same. GOG too. So where is the forced parity?

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If people would be as passionate about buying games on GOG as they are hating AI, they wouldn't have to generate those banners with AI.

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Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: Mountain ManFrankly, I have no time or patience for people who dismiss an opposing opinion as "drinking the cool-aid".

That is okay, not everyone can deal with honesty and rather just goes "lalala I can't hear you" when being called out on how wrong they are.

I have no problem with honesty. I just have no time for jackasses.

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Quoting: eggroleWhile pretending to be affiliated somehow is shady, I find it amusing that FOSS (built on other FOSS no less) is talking about IP and asking to stop using their logo and name.

Even if we lived in a world without copyright at all, we would still need rules against misrepresentation, such as by claiming that people said or wrote things that they did not say or write. If anything, our current laws about that are not strong enough, hence Bazzite being forced to approach the issue sideways by invoking misuse of trademarks and such.

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Quoting: TheSHEEEPEveryone who would actually give these things consideration would realize that the publisher's talking points are entirely wrong, with no basis in reality - because they are almost entirely strawmen.
Opinions are not equal - they can be right, and they can be wrong, and they can be in-between.

That's your opinion (one that I happen to agree with, mind you) but that doesn't make it right or wrong -- which is, after all, a value judgement. You may see the issue differently, but it does not follow that @Mountain Man not viewing the issue the same way is wrong. He may feel strongly that their strawmen have validity. Can you show him how those strawmen are not valid?

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Quoting: dren

Quoting: Frawo

Quoting: drenI love GOG because I can actually buy and own games, but they are still a corporation and corporate track records are pretty shitty these days.

You don't ever own games, neither on GOG, Steam, Epic or physical disk. You only buy the licence to use them. GOGs offline installers might give you the illusion of ownership, but you can more or less achieve the same thing by backing up your Steam common folder.

These are in no way remotely equivalent. GOG provides DRM free portable, self-contained installation packages designed to be backed up and installation can be configured. Steam backups are essentially snapshots of an already-installed, DRM-locked game directory. You don't have the freedom to install it where you want. Games used to be completey DRM free on installation media. Companies tried adding DRM to physical media but that met with issues for the end user. Steam made it easier for devs to lock down our software. GoG is the antithesis of Steam when it comes to ownership and user rights.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

The "you can back up your Steam games after they're installed" argument is spurious at best. It overlooks the fact that the game still requires the Steam client to install those games in first place. GOG's offline installers do not.

If it's an "illusion of ownership", I'll take it.

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. . . There are things that still use OpenGL?

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Quoting: ArehandoroMadrid isn't a city usually depicted in games, and lately Spanish studios are chucking a fair amount of point & click adventures of decent quality. It's on my wishlist 😊

Oh, Madrid, huh? I like Madrid.

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The version with the better CPU might be borderline usable. I have an ARM SBC with a A55 x 4 core + 4gb ram board and that is a bit slow but usable as a desktop. So a more modern A55 x 6 core with 8GB ram should be somewhat ok, although not great. Of course that top end version isn't exactly cheap anymore.

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Quoting: Mountain ManWatering down milk and adding thickeners without disclosing this to the consumer is fraudulent, so of course it's illegal. That's not at all the same as a developer using existing cloud services rather than expending the resources to create their own online infrastructure.

There is certainly an ethical difference, but in terms of justification for regulation, an externality is an externality.

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Quoting: pb

Quoting: drenThe amount of corporate bootlicking happening here is crazy. We are talking about a company that effectively has a monopoly on game sales

A natural monopoly is not inherently a bad thing and does not make the company evil. As a rule of thumb, if the general public would be better after the monopolist disappears, then it's beneficial to try and bring them down. Would it be the case with Valve? I very much doubt it. The games would not get any cheaper, and nobody - for years - would provide players with the ecosystem on par with what Valve has built. That in itself is worth putting up with some idiosyncrasies. Which means that anyone suing Valve does not represent the interest of the consumers - ever.

I quite like Valve, as companies go, but there are some real issues with this.

So, first, a natural monopoly is one where most of the costs of a product are associated with the infrastructure required to provide it, and so multiple concerns providing the same product need to build multiple redundant infrastructure, making it far cheaper overall to just have one provider of the product. Internet service provision is a natural monopoly; so are utilities like electrical, water and so forth; so are roads. Natural monopolies are best dealt with through public provision, second best by aggressive regulation of the monopolist, to among other things control their profits.

Now, first, Valve's business is not a natural monopoly. Valve does not build the wires the games are transmitted to your house over. Sure, there are some capital costs involved in Valve's operation, but no more than most businesses that are not natural monopolies. Valve's business model takes advantage of significant network effects, but that's not the same thing.

But if Valve were a natural monopoly, or if it is a monopoly of any kind that is not going to get broken up, it is best for the public for it to be heavily regulated and its profits limited.

Moving on, your argument is that Valve's continued existence is good, therefore lawsuits against it are bad. But this does not follow in any way. Lawsuits against Valve, even if they succeed, are unlikely to lead to its destruction. The basic question is whether the 30% cut generates windfall profits. If it does, then lawsuits that successfully reduce that cut will leave Valve in place but reduce costs for the consumer.

It might be better if, instead of a lawsuit, the determination was made by direct government action, imposing an auditor and going over the books with a fine toothed comb and deciding what cut was appropriate to leave Valve solvent but with a modest profit. But that is unlikely to happen, so the law is what remains.

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The endgame of people putting AI everywhere actual creation could have occurred will always be, to me, "why would I give you money when I can just generate it myself". Even for this; people were already wary of GoG, and although I really really want to support their initiative to archive old games and keep them available, I can't really put money in a structure that's likely to support infamous tech. Promises of "doing the right thing" be damned.

If someone felt they needed an image to describe their sale, they should have put some effort into it. Just look at how Steam handled this. People are still attached to a random sales mascot character way after it ended. If you can't be bothered to make something, as other pointed out, a collage of game art or a plain text message will do the job just fine. And won't attract the ire of people that are seriously getting tired of this shit.

If the goal is to pander to people that absolutely *crave* AI slop content, then, sorry to burst GoG's bubble, but these people don't care where it's from or what it is. That's not a great goal to run after.

As I see it, it's either "harmless" but normalizing such abuse of the tech, or downright disrespectful to people that wanted to support GoG.

Bad move.

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Quoting: eggroleAs everyone has said, I see no issue with the 30% cut, but I think the more important part, that has a bit of merit IMHO, is the off-platform competition restriction. If my game is for sale on steam for $50, why can't I sell it direct on my website (or any other platform for that matter) for $40?

This *feels* very anti-competitive, but what do I know.

I dunno, I've seen a bunch of games for which Valve isn't enforcing any kind of price parity clause on non-Steam versions, with some of those non-Steam versions being free while the Steam versions are paid, so I doubt such a clause actually exists.

And if there was such a clause, I think it's weird the various lawsuits against Valve are somehow unable to quote the relevant passages from the Steam Distribution Agreement.

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Quoting: Frawo

Quoting: drenI love GOG because I can actually buy and own games, but they are still a corporation and corporate track records are pretty shitty these days.

You don't ever own games, neither on GOG, Steam, Epic or physical disk. You only buy the licence to use them. GOGs offline installers might give you the illusion of ownership, but you can more or less achieve the same thing by backing up your Steam common folder.

These are in no way remotely equivalent. GOG provides DRM free portable, self-contained installation packages designed to be backed up and installation can be configured. Steam backups are essentially snapshots of an already-installed, DRM-locked game directory. You don't have the freedom to install it where you want. Games used to be completey DRM free on installation media. Companies tried adding DRM to physical media but that met with issues for the end user. Steam made it easier for devs to lock down our software. GoG is the antithesis of Steam when it comes to ownership and user rights.

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I have a soft spot for Xfce, so I'm very excited to see where this goes! I ran Xfce on Linux Mint many years ago, in a few years I could be toying around with xfwl4 on some older hardware I no longer use :-)

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Quoting: suchI disagree in that not paying for a few pieces of art isn't a proper saving, just one you report to particularly... challenged management to get them off your back. That goes triple if you're generating this much negative sentiment. That can have more of a sales impact than your sales banner.

Oh sure, I was honestly more referring to the other indications that they're going all-in on AI (such as that quote from the job posting that I'd pasted above). Having generative images as banners on the site is, I'm guessing, just the tip of the iceberg.

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Quoting: msmafraKyle Gospodnetich made things clearer today https://universal-blue.discourse.group/t/correction-regarding-gpd-win5-support-for-bazzite/11574

I find the following absolutely reasonable and correct though?

A GPD representative appears to be directing their users to a discord other than our own for support as well.

They shouldn't direct the users to the Bazzite people to do the support for GPD, right?!?

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Just when you thought GOG was done shitting itself...

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Quoting: apocalyptech

Quoting: suchIt's GOG. What profits?

I mean honestly it's possible that's at the root of the issue here. I actually have no idea what GOG's financials are like, but if they have historically struggled to turn a profit, latching onto the "AI" bandwagon is an unsurprising move, at least. The suits tend to see modern generative systems as a shortcut to Increased Productivity™ and they might just be assuming that this is the magical tech that's gonna turn a struggling company into a thriving one.

Whether that's true or not in either the short or long term is another question entirely, but if that's the thought process over there, then it's at least an understandable pivot.

I disagree in that not paying for a few pieces of art isn't a proper saving, just one you report to particularly... challenged management to get them off your back. That goes triple if you're generating this much negative sentiment. That can have more of a sales impact than your sales banner.

Unless GOG are playing 5D chess and doing this as part of a coordinated effort to boost visibility. Who knows anymore. I'll take my tinfoil hat off now.

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