Submitted 1 day ago by PerfectDark@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/0d077204-979f-4bfe-a7e6-23c2cb3ac9ae.jpeg
This could be the case, or could not be. They shared a post on Reddit 19 hours ago from their official account, and I thought it might be nice to share that here, at least to spark some discussion.
They simply shared a post titled:
Shall we? 📦💿
With the following image:
Link to the Reddit post is here if you want to see what others are saying about it!
Maybe for certain Collector’s Editions, but overall I don’t need optical media when the games are DRM-free anyway.
Makes sense to me, actually.
It’d be an easy way to get and also store the DRM-free offline installer, in where you don’t have to permanently allocate active storage to keep the installer around.
do it. I don’t care about the practicality of it all I loved those big boxes. But they also need to have the big manuals inside also.
Some of those manuals were absolutely awesome. Like the one for the first Heavy Gear. or the old flight sim games. Or like the original release of Final Fantasy 7 on PC by Edios came with a brady’s strategy guide. Heck bring back strategy guides too! I remember when World of Warcraft first came out I picked up the strategy guide with it cause it was full of WoW related Penny-Arcade comics in it and I was (heck still am) a massive fan of Penny-Arcade.
100% feel you I miss picking up a game with a phat manual, I am smell the fresh ink from the manuals when I think about it hard enough lol
Or buying a large paged, glossy, color printed, gorgeous strategy guide I would read for pleasure and enjoy as a piece of art as well as a walkthrough
Ahh fuck I miss being younger. The late 90’s and early to mid 2000’s were an incredible time for video games
What I miss is cloth maps. I don’t know what I did with mine, but if I ever open a moving box and find one, I’m framing it and putting it up on my wall.
yes! the maps were awesome. Or some other stuff you’d get with the game. Like with the first Max Payne you got a really cool mousepad. used that thing for years. Also had one that I believe came with Star Wars Rebel Assault.
PR guy does PR
G*mers who’ve spent two decades buying digital only games and killing brick and mortar stores go mild.
Maybe this is just a ‘thing’ I don’t understand (super likely), why are you censoring ‘gamers’? Or any word on Lemmy? Being a mod here, I can tell you with 100% certainty that if you follow our rules, you don’t have to censor any word you’re using like you have to on TikTok.
Did GOG ever end up meaningfully addressing that neonazi shit?
No. At least not to my satisfaction.
That’s disappointing to hear.
Guess I’ll continue to not use them any more.
They said it was a bank holiday and they were understaffed and that is most of the root cause of it going out as well as suspecting of using AI to make headers for their emails which is not uncommon.
They apologized and explained it that way
No.
Because they don’t feel sorry about it.
I don’t think we should create more waste in our world, so I’m voting against it.
I’d want GOG to focus more on Linux and on getting more games on their store.
Those would be collectibles, and as that more or less art pieces, so not really waste, unless you classify all art as waste which would be sad in my eyes.
I understand this.
Still plastic waste is a huge problem.
Dependeing on the price, anyone could be tempted by collecting these, where collecting psintings would be too prohibitive.
Every time I read this fake ecological motivation I aks myself why people think we can save the planet without some plastic and paper jn a little box of human art, instead of considering real problems like big industry procedures and food packaging. Priorities.
I’m a vegetarian, using my muscular bike a lot and trying to buy as much local food as possible, so I’m trying to do what I can.
I’m sorry if I offended people, by saying these physical dics would be an ecological problem for me. I agree that just a few people would probably buy them and it wouldn’t be a big deal.
It’s just that, as long as we have a DRM free digital games, I don’t really see what physical games would bring except easier resale (and collection/decoration).
If it helps GOG bring better features and games, I’m not really against it then, even if I wouldn’t buy their physical games.
Please don’t team up with Limited Run Games to do this.
Who are they?
A scum company. They got caught using burned CD-Rs for their 3DO games instead of actual pressed discs, insanely long wait times, used to openly cater to scalpers. Insanely expensive for what they offer, and are playing a hand in the death of physical games by creating false scarcity.
mrixrt’s videos on them
While this is something I’d love to see I have a hard time fathoming how they could do this to any level of scale. They would have to pick a few games and probably a language or two.
I think GOG would be best suited to just offer cover art as a download and maybe build tools right into GOG galaxy to let you burn games to DVR.
But I do love GOG if I can I always buy through there store front. Sadly it’s rarer then I’d like
If they do a print to order thing, I could see it maybe working out as a cool side business. Or it could be a chance for them to go really harder into the vintage games market if they can get some publishers on board or get the rights to some older stuff. Doesn’t seem like a winning market though on a mass market front, more just a form of advertising or a specialty service for physical collectors.
Print to order is the best way I was wondering why they “announced” this and then your comment made it click I bet that is how they do it.
Actually super cool I won’t lie.
Optical media? Maybe not.
Custom flash drives? That would be gravy.
Ugh, I would love a portable/offline launcher/installer for my GoG game files.
GOG already offers offline installers for all games they sell.
You do realize that flash drives are not near stable enough for long term storage, much less archival storage, right?
Not to take away form your point at all, but optical media degrades, too. Usually much slower, though. In the long run, regular transferal between backups is the only option. ~In the long-long run, we will succeed in preserving nothing and all traces of our existence will be obscured!~
One time programmable flash could be a good a solution to this
I’d kinda love to see a comeback for optical given the supply issues for flash memory, but I’ll about that a custom USB ROM stick or SDCard style carts for PC would be kinda sick
Anyone know what was up with the Nazi symbolism they emailed purposefully? I would really want to support them but I need to know that it wasnt something terrible they did. Physical releases is definitely a plus as well.
The explanation which makes most sense to me - but which hasn’t been confirmed by GOG - is that the newsletter person did a web search for “slavic emojis”, for which the top hit is a horribly racist website masquerading as an emoji site, which lists all the used glyphs on the first line of the results. (There is no “Slavic” unicode block or anything similar, and the characters used are from Malaysian, Greek and Cameroon script blocks, so not something you’d easily assemble on your own, no matter what your intentions were.)
That site (or at least the users contributing its content) intended all the dog-whistling which was picked up on. However, with a default macOS font installed, the most objectionable “SS” (presented on that site as a single glyph) shows all curly and non-objectionable (5th ‘character’ in the screenshot). So with the newsletter person in a hurry and never scrolling down to the more obviously racist content (or using an AI-assisted interface?), the characters they saw didn’t trigger any alarms. As GOG is perpetually understaffed plus it was a long-weekend, QA was nearly non-existent and communication fumbled.
This was their final apology and communication about it: gog.com/…/c1cdf9fda39aaa5532ee375b38abb04376c7505… - so an apology about the newsletter, but nothing about the tone-deaf first followup from the new-on-the-job “community specialist” who was posting the heritage stuff on reddit and ineffectually trying to make sense of the rendering differences without any proper understanding of unicode characters and glyphs and thus muddying the waters further.
They released a standard non-apology claiming it was part of their culture and that people just didn’t understand. They also stated their German team raised issue with the email and that they just ignored it
It was not Nazi symbolism, well not intentionally at least. They used Slavic runes that, in the intended fonts, looks very different from the Nazi symbols. It came to the issue because in some fonts the Slavic runes are displayed without serifs and with hard lines which makes them appear problematic. So it was kind of a self inflicted homographic attack.
Except their excuse that it was part of their culture and why they use it in the first place holds no water according to the developers of the game (part of said culture) as well as many others.
Well, I know the cause now but it’s still not that good a reason if they were warned and decided not to use it in Germany…
I can’t say I want to pay extra for these large boxes with extra stuff, but smaller and regular disks like this I would definitely consider:
I never liked the jewel cases. Not enough space for anything interesting inside other than just the disc.
please forget we are Nazis! we promise we won’t let it slip again.
It would be fucking awesome. I can totally see others doing this in the future but GOG is the perfect player for selling drm-free physical stuff at the moment. People who think “full digital is the inevitabile future everything” are just sad analysts watching their own garden, we already know PS5 selling datas were manipulated from Sony, people need physical like any other art medium.
It’s fun for nostalgia but my pc doesn’t have a disc drive, nor even the space for one. Depending on your internet connection downloading is faster than reading from a disc even. If they were to somehow re-release old collector edition boxes that would become tempting.
For what it’s worth, an external disc drive is not very expensive and they are quite small.
Why not just sell it in a cheap little thumb drive? Most games like this are very modest in size, would save people the cost of a disc reader.
The way to go. I have two of those haha.
I know but that doesn’t change the reality. Most PCs don’t come with disc readers anymore. Anyone who does have an external disc drive can already burn a GOG game to disc if they so choose. Or put the game on a usb-stick/SD-card/external drive all of which are more convenient options than using a disc. Shipping boxes for an outdated technology is a purely wasteful exercise for a company like GOG because most of their games are older releases and have no DRM. I see the benefit of discs for new console releases because it allows people to offset the cost of a game by trading it in. That has always been one of the aspects of console gaming. But that doesn’t hold for GOG
Yeah, they can keep the disc, but I’ll gladly for a box, book and map or whatever goodies they came with
Most GOG games already allow you to download a pdf of the manual and extras if they had them
~thinks about cloth maps from Ultima games
~ heavy breathing
They used to make them out of cloth???
you used to get all kinds of really cool and amazing shit when you bought games, maps, manuals, pewter figures, and more.
I still have my cloth EverQuest maps framed on the wall.
I interpret it more as preserving those big box games from the past, not releasing new boxes.
They aren’t a publisher They won’t make a dent in the market.
I just want transferable perpetual licences.
Fuck Gabe, fuck Sony. Scumbags.
Much rather have them create read-only (or semi read only to import patches?) flash-storage USB sticks.
Who the hell has a built-in CD player or even a BD-player in this time and age?
I have an external USB-CD player but only so I can digitize the CDs I buy online.
Who the hell has a built-in CD player or even a BD-player in this time and age?
The answer is nerds. The specific answer is the type of nerds who would buy this sort of thing.
You’re looking at one right now, in fact — I have an internal 5.25" Blu-Ray burner in the lone singular bay in my current case. (The machine with the conga line of nearly every type of floppy drive ever created down the front of it lives in the basement.)
Automatic Ripping Machine doeant count ;)
Idk if ripping CDs every few months counts towards nerdy tasks :D
I would prefer them to focus on bringing more games to the Store. If people want CD everyone can print them by themself with the already DRM Free games.
I don’t care about the disc, but I would happily pay 20 bucks to get a map and 80 page booklet for some games.
If they came with manual, posters, artwork and all the goodies of old game boxes could be a win.
Also better done with completed games that are no longer to be updated.
For an empty box with a cd that once installed you need to download a 50Gb patch for it to be playable would make no sense.
Discworld (1995) came with an actual t-shirt in the box. But there was an insane period in the early 2000s where they’d stopped doing manuals, maps and other extras but still packaged the disc in a box the size of a 450g cornflakes packet.
I’m ok with manuals not being a thing, because it’s a reflection of improvements in both software and game design where you don’t need to read 24 pages of text before you can play a game. But I’m not ok with publishers basically killing the secondary market.
I really don’t want more packaging. Just give me a download to the file.
I see zero reason to want more plastic like a disc, but I could understand why someone might want a box with a book, a manual, maybe some items from the game.
My kids order stuff like this all the time from the independent game makers they like to support. Their book shelves have their favorite books and box sets of games, and they like it.
I guess my point is: for indy game makers, this is already a thing.
GoG already does this though, so presumably it would just be the consumers choice. Some folx just like bookcases and collectibles.
Gog already makes books and collectibles like I mentioned?
Publishers have proved time and time and time again that they can’t be trusted to keep that download available to you after you’ve handed the money over.
I mean in a way this is exciting, sure.
In particular if they do this in a somewhat eco-friendly fashion, that is, it’s just about the box and the manual and all that. No actual disc/thumbdrive/whatever. Granted GOG in particular would be in a position where they can do this due to their installers, but it’d still be absurd materials and logistics-wise, in particular old-style big box PC releases.
To add, I just recently finally got rid of the last of my old PC games boxes like DAoC or the ME games. I had already thrown out most older games such as Homeworld or Battle Isle years and years prior when I moved where I live right now.
Was it a kinda cool-looking collection in the living room? Yes. Did it take an absurd amount of space for no reason and it’s not like I even had a disc drive in the past 20 or so years? Yes. I nowadays have a pretty large board games collection, and that needs the space the books and video games previously took. So I donated books to hospitals and jails and so on, and games I gave away, sold or in some cases just tossed. Fond memories, but not enough to justify the amount of physical space used for a physical medium I cannot even use.
Maybe for collector editions? Otherwise digital via GoG galaxy client is preferable
Yeah, I could see this too. I see a lot of other devs / indie devs doing Design Works for their games and GoG offering something like this could be cool.
I think physical copies are still important, and if I ever go as far as selling my own games, I plan to sell them alongside the digital copies. I’ll see how much I can put into it after losing the 30% Gaben tax, likely a small box with installer DVD (or optionally USB stick if I will be able to find quality ones for cheap) + printed manual will be the baseline, then a Big Box edition for more money with some more goodies (soundtrack CDs + artbook + posters + other tats).
That’s the thing. Steam caught on in part because compared to physical retail “only” 30% was a massive improvement for the average game company. I’ve heard 60-70+% going to buying/printing floppies/CDs, packaging, distribution, etc. at the high end. I’m sure the big companies got bulk discounts or multi-year deals for supplies.
Yes that meant that since those aspects were a significant amount of the cost anyway you could do stuff like the StarCraft Battlechest that was crammed with extras. But it also did a lot of gatekeeping in it’s own right.
Now you could probably do some kind of limited run thing that would be a lot more viable, but it’s definitely a luxury step up.
I don’t have the fancy boxes and art, but I’ve been taking all my offline installers and burning them on cds and dvds.
My little USB disc drive has been working overtime this year.
I’m hoping to get a desktop with cd storage framing the monitor like I used to have.
Practical? Not really. I just think it’s neat.
I mean box art is kinda cool, but who even wants to use optical media? It’s not the 2000s anymore.
Possible idea, memory stick? Faster transfer speeds. Downside is it would cost quite a bit extra. But then posting internationally is probably going to cost a fair bit too so for a collectors item it might not be too bad and makes it actually usable.
They’re DRM free, so why not burn it to physical media with a label? Even so, I’m ok with GOG downloads. What’s fun is you can share your account with your partner or your kids and no one will care.
PS controller peeking through 👀
A jab at Sony’s recent announcement with completely ditching physical games!
As long as it doesn’t raise prices of the regular digital games
tixooo@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
If they so that, I’d re-buy all my got games instantly collectors edition. As long as they have no DRM, no internet requirements and I can play them whenever, wherever, I’m buying.
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
Gog already are no drm and you could write it to a disc if you really wanted to. It’s been like that for a very long time. Given you would be writing a data disc you can even put multiple games on a single DVD in some cases.
Their windows installers are usually split at 4GB - huh, guess what fits nicely on a 4.7GB DVD…
tixooo@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
I know that, but I’d like to buy the cool disk with official box and all that why not.
daggermoon@piefed.world 1 day ago
Why am I the only one that has a BD-R drive?