All Stories Tagged: Digital distribution

As delightful as digital distribution is, you're less likely to get your money back if a game's wonky than you would be with a physical disc. That old DRM-free rogue GOG has upped its customer-friendly practices with a new money-back guarantee, letting customers get a refund within 30 days of buying a game if they can't get it to run properly.

It was delightful enough that GOG managed to drag some of the beloved Bullfrog's classic games out of mothballs and make them available again, but now it's dug up expansion packs too. And GOG being the happy friendly folks that they are, they've added them for free. The good news, in short: Dungeon Keeper and Syndicate are now even better.

In its ongoing missions to be known as anything other than "the company that made the game for unconventional virtual reality cybersex," Second Life developer Linden Lab has bought digital distribution platform Desura. It may not be a huge name, but the site is awfully popular with lesser-known indie developers as it's entirely open, which fits in with Linden quite nicely.

Origin seems to have few fans fighting in its corner, but surely everyone can be glad that the Mac is being taken more seriously as a gaming platform. Electronic Arts today launched the Mac client for its digital distribution platform with 45 Mac titles from EA and other publishers, some of which are automatically given to users who own the Windows edition.

Origin has done little to distinguish itself from other digital distributors, beyond hosting fewer sales and being required for newer EA games, but it's finally getting a feature the competition hasn't had for yonks. A coming patch will bring built-in livestreaming through Twitch, along with the option to add non-Origin games to your library and an assortment of fixes.

Steam Greenlight was flooded with hundreds of games, including countless hoax and illicit entries, within hours of launching last Thursday, which apparently makes it quite difficult to fulfil its purpose of filtering Steam store submissions. To bring the volume down and ward off trolls, Valve has added a $100 fee for submitting a game and improved the selection users are shown. Though Valve donates the $100 to charity, it's rubbing some indies the wrong way.

The Origin client was in a sorry state when EA relaunched its digital distribution platform, but it has improved slowly. Thirteen months later, version 9.0 of the client is coming, and what can we expect from this revision? User interface changes, mostly.

Valve has muttered and murmured about bringing Steam and its Source engine to Linux before, and now it's revealed the plan--port Steam and Left 4 Dead 2 to Ubuntu 12.04, then work from there.