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Comment on GOG seems to be considering paid membership option

codexarcanum@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

What if I told you that there are roughly 4 million steamdecks in existence. Ref

And that this is about 1\3 of the Steam Linux market. Ref and about half of the entire handheld PC market. Ref

Of course, we dont know how many MAU GOG has so maybe 4 million new customers is baby numbers, but Steam seems enamored enough of that market segment to commit huge new UI and store features (deck verification, “Runs on Deck” filters, other deck specific stuff) including the game controller mappings which do help with non-deck also but were clearly a necessary element for handhelds. Maybe deck users, it being a committed gaming platform, spend more on games?

Anyway, trying to get subscribers (always a teeny fraction of your free users) ahead of converting new non-customers into customers, seems like bad econ to me.

If GOG is so hot for game preservation why not see if they can score an emulation deal to bring lost handheld titles to PC\deck? Sega might be down, NeoGeo is owned by the Saudi’s, I’m sure they’d love some free money for their back catalog. That’s in line with Lutris’ mission of being the one game launcher for your entire library. A few strategic investments and partnerships could open up GOG as the gateway to classic gaming across devices, but that would require some vision to carry through.

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Ashtear@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Steam’s investment in UI and store features are part of the onus of hardware platform growth. Steam isn’t just a storefront anymore. GOG has no such interest.

I do think indicators are good for the future of Linux gaming, but it’s just not good business right now to go chasing it.

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UnfortunateShort@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
1/3 of the Steam + Linux market, that accounted for an incredible 1.45% of Steam installs in February. This means there were roughly 67 Windows gamers for every Linux gamer (using Steam) that month.

So even if Linux gamers are 10 times more likely to care (and pay for) for game preservation, you are not even approaching the number of Windows users that might. Suppose 90% of Linux gamers care, while only 9% on Windows do, you still have roughly 6 Windows users for every Linux one. And this is a very generous assumption to make.

Maybe, eventually, at some point, this makes sense financially. But if your goal is to be profitable, you grab the low hanging fruits first, not invest in maybe 10% more potential users.

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