I can’t find any articles or posts talking about this anywhere, so I just wanted to share a post about it. I received an email on July 2 from Afterpay about an upcoming change to the privacy policy which will take affect on August 1, 2024. I used a website to compare the text of the old policy with the text of the new, and found that they are now introducing targeted advertising. They harvest personal information about you and share them with third-parties and partners in order to serve you with personalized ads within the Afterpay app. They track information such as your spending habits and how you interact with their marketing messages, and they now also combine all of your personal information they have collected about you to profile you, they also get information about you from third-parties. Quoted from the updated policy:
Information from third parties about you, such as identity, preferences and inferences about you…
Just wanted to share this, since I can’t find any discussion of it online. Here’s a link to the policies if you want to check it out. These are Wayback Machine links.
Well I’m not rich enough to have a console. And wait there are DRM-free copies? But aren’t they like 10x the price of normal ones?
That’s fair. I’m not sure about Ubisoft games in terms of pricing comparisons. But no, most games are the same price on GOG as other places like Steam, though unfortunately GOG doesn’t have regional prices so that may not be the case for you. Some publishers decide to up the price a bit, annoyingly, just because they know that users are willing to pay more.
Have you not heard of GOG? They only sell games DRM-free, and have similar sales to Steam. Ubisoft particularly don’t seem to like publishing much from the past 10 years though.
If we’re talking in the realm of privacy, it’s technically better than the other popular PC storefronts because they provide an optional offline installer for the game that, once downloaded, can be preserved into an archive and installed at any later date without internet (and can still be used if the game is taken down from the store). As far as I remember, they collect far less private data too, so that’s a plus. They have a giveaway going on at the moment that ends in 10 hours for an old game called The First Templar if you wanna try out the platform.
Steam has sales with ridiculously good discounts which is very important for me as a poor person.
I know about GOG but Steam’s integration with Proton and ease of use on Linux are just too good. Probably I should try configuring Bottles manually but I still think I’ll have to spend 2 or 3 days to make one game work through it. My machine isn’t that powerful so the performance will suffer too. Also I really didn’t know someone except small indie devs made DRM-free games nowadays. I only ever saw one (the original Kerbal Space Program) that had a DRM-free version.
I have a separate gaming machine (if you can call an RTX 3050 a gaming card) so privacy isn’t that much of a problem in my case but ngl I would love to have a better option.
Yeah, I’m on Linux too, and you’re right that GOG isn’t as convenient as Steam on Linux, but you don’t have to mess around with bottles to get them working. Heroic Games Launcher is excellent and has Wine and Proton built in, so installing GOG games and playing them through that is almost as convenient as playing through Steam on Linux.
I find that compared to Steam, I have to tinker slightly more often than Steam to get them working; otherwise, most games install and play perfectly just like on Steam. There’s an official GOG client called GOG Galaxy, but it’s only on Windows and Mac, so third-party launchers like Heroic are the best options on Linux. Plus, somewhat recently GOG officially partnered with Heroic Games Launcher which improved the compatibility quite a bit. There’s no achievement support in Heroic yet, but they are working on the feature for it, as far as I’m aware.
I can’t remember where the option is, but you can also add the GOG games from your library in Heroic to Steam as a non-steam game.
As for sales, like I was saying before, the sales across GOG and Steam seem to be very similar to each other, having the same price cuts at the same time as each other.
One thing to be weary of when buying games from GOG on Linux is when you buy games that are playable online, such as No Man’s Sky and Divinity: Original Sin II. These games rely on GOG Galaxy to connect you online, which currently isn’t functional on Heroic Launcher (but may get support in the future). One other thing to note is that occasionally I’ve noticed that a game publisher releases an official Linux port on Steam, but ignores it on GOG. I was disappointment when this happened to me. I bought the whole Metro series in a bundle from GOG, but I only found out afterwards, that on Steam their are actually official Linux ports for the whole trilogy. I use ProtonDB to quickly check which Steam games have Linux ports