Good Old Games Representative Discusses Customer Engagement and Game Streaming

cageymaru

cageymaru

Fully [H]
Joined
Apr 10, 2003
Messages
21,959
GOG.com is a digital video game storefront dedicated to bringing new and older games to audiences DRM free. Lukasz Kukawski, head of global communications at GOG.com, expressed his doubts about game streaming during an interview at E3. He says that game streaming is just another form of DRM and that hardcore gamers tend to monitor their frame rate in order to have an edge on the competition. With the increased latency involved with game streaming; why would a hardcore gamer choose that type of delivery service for gaming? He also addresses issues like games getting lost and forgotten on Steam during their launch window as there are simply too many games added to the platform monthly. He is prideful that all new game releases get advertising on and off GOG.com through various channels.

Speaking with GamesIndustry.biz at the event, GOG.com head of global communication Lukasz Kukawski downplayed the company's interest in streaming technology. "We don't see it as a thing that will take over games distribution," Kukawski said. "Out stance in digital distribution is to own the games because they are DRM free, and for many gamers this is very important. With streaming, there's another layer to it. You already have games with DRM, so it's more like licensing games than owning them. And streaming is more like renting a game, so it's another layer to this ongoing discussion.
 
But so many people don't seem to mind DRM or issues with ownership. There's a huge open market of indifference to sell such a service to. It's easy to sell something as a convenience to people who don't give a damn about the consequences.

I rememeber some friends started using game streaming in around 2009-2011 (I don't remember exactly when) via xbox as a way to try before your buy. That made some sense. However, using it as a primary method of playing games to avoid the lump sum cost of a powerful computer, or as a matter of convenience has always rubbed me the wrong way for what appear to be unpopular reasons; ethics surrounding ownership, control, and DRM, and the added latency which I simply can't cope with.
 
One of the major factors for me is and probably always will be consistency of image quality. It's the reason I canceled netflix many years ago, it was worse than cable in that regard, probably still is for a lot of people. If you can't guarantee a consistent delivery of quality throughout a film, show, game without compression artifacts and macroblocking, stutter, through bitdrop im not interested.. ever. It can happen even on a fast home network if your ISP decides you had too much cake. Which is why i prefer downloads or physical copies.

But im sure there are people that do not care. Not sure the PC community is the best place to target for streaming given that the overall quality of the experience will fluctuate down sub-console level quality at times.
 
Last edited:
Don't really watch much game streaming. Most of it has been here with Hunt actually. I do love watching 4k streams on youtube, compression issues aside, still loads more fun than watching some chunky low-bit 720p. I actually was watching some guys Monster Hunter World 4k stream he did with a Titan this weekend.

cageymaru said:
He also addresses issues like games getting lost and forgotten on Steam during their launch window as there are simply too many games added to the platform monthly.
Click to expand...

Have to totally agree. Their vetting process has tanked. There's been a number of times that a near AAA game was getting released and if I didn't actively search it was buried 3-4 pages in. I want to support the little guys, but small studios are also getting drowned by their sheer numbers.
 
i don't see it take of for the above reasons. If you think about who would want such a service, it is likely to be the FPS crowd, a genre that would be affected the most by these issues.
 
If GOG were smart they'd negotiate emulation streaming platform rights with legacy console platform holders and solve the whole preservation thing.
 
Honestly the biggest problem with streaming is the latency. Which is why no one uses the services that exist now. If a company can figure that out, I bet a lot of people would love to be able to all their games wherever they are. DRM is a non-issue for 90% of gamers. I mean most people on PC use Steam and/or buy their games digitally on Xbox, PS4 and/or Switch
 
For plebs, I can see it as an easy, cheap option. But local rendering will ALWAYS be where it's at for pure good, raw image quality.

Not to mention, In the USA, some people have access to awesome internet where streaming 4K60 is an everyday thing, but I have "Broadband" here in Australia, and I have 13Mbps download. Sure, I can stream 1080p60, but that's if its JUST ME, ad another person watching netflix in another room, or steam updating a game, or my phone updating apps over Wifi, forget it. Game streaming is like communism: it works in a perfect world with no blemishes, but in the REAL world, streaming for MOST people will mean decreased quality, even if they can get '1080p' it will have compression artifacts and greatly reduced dynamic range, and the increased latency will make a HUGE difference to action games. I have Steam in-home streaming set up in my house, and on a gigabit connection, there is still enough latency to notice a bit of a delay. Not prohibitive, but you would get quite frustrated playing a FPS or arcade fighter on that connection, and that's on like, 5-10ms. connections to servers in the same city can double that latency.
 
Ownership of game saves, mods, latency, image quality, performance (saturated servers), spying on clients, ... too much negatives.
 
velusip said:
But so many people don't seem to mind DRM or issues with ownership. There's a huge open market of indifference to sell such a service to. It's easy to sell something as a convenience to people who don't give a damn about the consequences.

I rememeber some friends started using game streaming in around 2009-2011 (I don't remember exactly when) via xbox as a way to try before your buy. That made some sense. However, using it as a primary method of playing games to avoid the lump sum cost of a powerful computer, or as a matter of convenience has always rubbed me the wrong way for what appear to be unpopular reasons; ethics surrounding ownership, control, and DRM, and the added latency which I simply can't cope with.
Click to expand...
People don't mind DRM, when it doesn't interfere with their gaming, but often it does. Many people here forget the first form of DRM was keeping your games CD or DVD in the PC. Not a problem for console gamers, but as PC gamers there's no need for game disc to be in the PC when the game data was on the hard drive. Especially when the hard drive is way faster than a CD or DVD. Some of the first game cracks were meant to disconnect the game disc DRM so players didn't need this clunky disc spinning in the PC.

Game Streaming though is just a wet dream by corporations to have the ultimate form of DRM. Why would anyone want to...

1. Pay a monthly fee
2. Deal with latency
3. Have lower image quality due to compression.
4. Lose the game over time, cause if the game isn't popular it obviously won't be kept running on game servers.

Also, nobody has ever used game streaming services. Anyone who ever has is definitely paid by said service they claim to use. People paid by corporations to troll forums is a real thing.
 
From the article:
"...GOG has been around for a decade now, and in that time, the service has seen publishers' attitudes toward such technological restrictions evolve."

"'It definitely changed from when we launched GOG back in 2008,' Kukawski said. 'Then we focused on old games only because we knew there was no way people would allow us to bring day one or modern releases out without DRM. But now we have indie games showing up on GOG day one on a regular basis. Of course bigger publishers are, I would say, very careful about it.

We're trying of course to convert them as much as possible, for example bringing up the example of Witcher 3, which launched on GOG day one and nothing happened. The world didn't end. The game is selling extremely well even nowadays. It's not like the DRM-free version killed the sales for the game. And we see that gamers appreciate this approach, and more and more publishers are open to at least talking to us and seeing what the concept is behind us doing it, and why it's worth it for them to do it. It's a more open discussion. It's an ongoing process, but we see definitely that publishers are more open to the concept.'"


Yyeeaahh I really hope they can turn more companies around. I'd like to get to a point where every game has a DRM-free release, preferably on day one. From time to time I still grab GOG copies of games I already own on Steam. I really appreciate it when devs let you buy a game on Steam and then give you a free backup copy on GOG (like CDPR did for The Witcher 2), or those times when GOG can scan your Steam library and add games you own on Steam to your GOG library. Some real handy shit.

In the end DRM only hurts the paying customer. There would be no need for crap like Denuvo if every damn company just threw their shit up on GOG. Steam, Origin, uPlay, Bethesda Launcher, Epic Games Launcher, so many damn clients today, geezus. With your GOG games, If you want the convenience of a client (like auto-updates), GOG Galaxy got you covered. If you don't wanna bother with it, no problem. Galaxy is completely optional. Install your games the traditional, fully-offline way if you wish. If I wuz a dev and released games on Steam and such, I would make damn sure there was a copy available for sale on GOG.com as well. There always needs to be a DRM-free option.

As for streaming games, I'm not interested in that shit. I don't know what the future holds or what kind of crazy network connections are out there, but right now I can tell you that most of us do not have Internet connections that can match the bandwidth of a SATA-3 (or USB3) connection with a local HDD or SSD, or a PCIe NVMe SSD. Plus a connection that goes on for miles and miles across vast areas of land tends to be way less stable and reliable than the connection from my internal storage drives to the motherboard. I'm not interested in dealing with the latency associated with playing a game that is not running directly on my PC but on some system miles away somewhere. No thanks. Let me run my games from my local storage drives directly on my PC, thank you. When I go through effort to cut down on frame-times by a few ms in order to get an even better feel and response from the game controls (see UT2K4 and UT3 at 2-3ms, or Doom 4 at 5-8 ms), or if I shop around for monitors with the lowest response times, I'm not looking to see all of that work undone by latency from my Internet connection. I'm not trying to extend the connection of my mouse, keyboard and controllers past the direct device-to-PC connection. I don't wanna see my mouse movements travel from my mouse to my PC and then all the way out across the Internet to a game running on another PC in another location. Fuck dat noise.

GNUse_the_force said:
One of the major factors for me is and probably always will be consistency of image quality. It's the reason I canceled netflix many years ago, it was worse than cable in that regard, probably still is for a lot of people. If you can't guarantee a consistent delivery of quality throughout a film, show, game without compression artifacts and macroblocking, stutter, through bitdrop im not interested.. ever. It can happen even on a fast home network if your ISP decides you had too much cake. Which is why i prefer downloads or physical copies.
Click to expand...
Yeah that's another big concern for me. I hate that shit when watching video on streaming services, and I sure as fuck won't tolerate it with either PC or console games. Sorry but I have trouble believing that the game I am streaming is gonna be anywhere near the same kind of image quality as the graphics card in my system directly drawing the frames and sending them to my display. I also trust my DisplayPort, DVI and HDMI connections more than my Internet connection.
 
DukenukemX said:
Game Streaming though is just a wet dream by corporations to have the ultimate form of DRM. Why would anyone want to...

1. Pay a monthly fee
2. Deal with latency
3. Have lower image quality due to compression.
4. Lose the game over time, cause if the game isn't popular it obviously won't be kept running on game servers.
Click to expand...
They would do it if it was a good game that ONLY was available via streaming. So if EA, Ubisoft, Activision, etc. all came out with new games available via only streaming, I think that's how they would hope to rope people in.
 
DrezKill said:
Yeah that's another big concern for me. I hate that shit when watching video on streaming services, and I sure as fuck won't tolerate it with either PC or console games. Sorry but I have trouble believing that the game I am streaming is gonna be anywhere near the same kind of image quality as the graphics card in my system directly drawing the frames and sending them to my display. I also trust my DisplayPort, DVI and HDMI connections more than my Internet connection.
Click to expand...

yea, it's like:

PCGamer - "Hey [insert streaming corporation] can i stream my games at 1080p ?"

MegaCorp - "Sure, at a full 29.7fps ! "

PCGamer - "wait, what? not 60fps ?.. "

MegaCorp - "Sure that's in our 'pro-gamer speed booster pack' for an extra fee, and at least 5 of our .. (cough) i mean your games a month will be allowed to support it ! "

PCGamer -" Sheesh, i guess that might be okay but what about mods, ultrawide, 144hz, 4k, VR etc.. "

MegaCorp - " .... ... more booster packs will become available shortly "



Not great for the consumer. As for what limited privacy there is when gaming you could kiss that good bye aswell :peeking:
 
Kor said:
If GOG were smart they'd negotiate emulation streaming platform rights with legacy console platform holders and solve the whole preservation thing.
Click to expand...
Without the streaming part, sure. That sounds like their market. Just bundle the emulator with the binary.
 
DrezKill said:
From the article:
"...GOG has been around for a decade now, and in that time, the service has seen publishers' attitudes toward such technological restrictions evolve."

"'It definitely changed from when we launched GOG back in 2008,' Kukawski said. 'Then we focused on old games only because we knew there was no way people would allow us to bring day one or modern releases out without DRM. But now we have indie games showing up on GOG day one on a regular basis. Of course bigger publishers are, I would say, very careful about it.

We're trying of course to convert them as much as possible, for example bringing up the example of Witcher 3, which launched on GOG day one and nothing happened. The world didn't end. The game is selling extremely well even nowadays. It's not like the DRM-free version killed the sales for the game. And we see that gamers appreciate this approach, and more and more publishers are open to at least talking to us and seeing what the concept is behind us doing it, and why it's worth it for them to do it. It's a more open discussion. It's an ongoing process, but we see definitely that publishers are more open to the concept.'"


Yyeeaahh I really hope they can turn more companies around. I'd like to get to a point where every game has a DRM-free release, preferably on day one. From time to time I still grab GOG copies of games I already own on Steam. I really appreciate it when devs let you buy a game on Steam and then give you a free backup copy on GOG (like CDPR did for The Witcher 2), or those times when GOG can scan your Steam library and add games you own on Steam to your GOG library. Some real handy shit.

In the end DRM only hurts the paying customer. There would be no need for crap like Denuvo if every damn company just threw their shit up on GOG. Steam, Origin, uPlay, Bethesda Launcher, Epic Games Launcher, so many damn clients today, geezus. With your GOG games, If you want the convenience of a client (like auto-updates), GOG Galaxy got you covered. If you don't wanna bother with it, no problem. Galaxy is completely optional. Install your games the traditional, fully-offline way if you wish. If I wuz a dev and released games on Steam and such, I would make damn sure there was a copy available for sale on GOG.com as well. There always needs to be a DRM-free option.
Click to expand...
These are the reasons GOG is my primary source for games.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top