FYI, I bought two older games from GOG today as an experiment. Neither of them work. I’ve tried everything I know and looked up a few other troubleshooting methods. Nada.
Oh? Would you like any help attempting to troubleshoot them?
If so, which games, and which OS are you on?
If not, you can at least refund them: https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/360011314978-How-do-I-refund-a-game?product=gog
I’m on Windows 10 and both games are from about 20 years ago - Star Wars Jedi Knight II Outcast and Return to Castle Wofenstein. In both cases they download, but when I try to launch them it appears to try and then nothing happens. Same if I try to launch them from the root folder.
So while I do dislike Steam for the never-really-own- anything model, at least their system works. I haven’t bought anything from them ever, but I do have my old Half Life games there and they are playable on my system.
Ah, oldies but goodies!
Sorry you had that experience with GOG. To be fair, though, Steam also occasionally has issues like that. The Half-Life series is Valve’s flagship baby and the Source engine is still frequently updated (since it’s used in Counterstrike, Team Fortress, their VR games, etc.), so it has a better-than-average chance of running on modern systems, compared to less popular games from other companies. If you play enough old games on Steam, you’ll also run sometimes into the same problems. But they’re relatively rare on both platforms.
It’s often up to the game’s publisher (if they’re even still around) to patch older games to work on newer systems (on either storefront) and that doesn’t always happen =/ GOG actually goes out of their way to manually add compatibility fixes for some of their titles, but apparently not those two…
Anyway, I’ll take a look and see if I can find a fix. I’ll DM you if that happens…
Kind of you, thanks.
Fortunately, I spent less than $6.
I’m certain they want to minimize contact, and prevent users from making deals on the side that they don’t get a cut of. But they’ve been doing that for years, and if their fees are reasonable, it seems fair.
Some might say recorded music started “enshittifying” when the industry switched from cylinders to discs, which introduced inner-groove distortion.
Note that “enshittification” has a more specific meaning than just “getting worse.”
Thank you. That was indeed the point I was trying to make that @bump seemingly missed.
I think my point is that eBay doesn’t really work the same way that say… Amazon does, where there are retail customers, suppliers/business customers, and shareholders.
Rather you’ve got buyers and sellers, but they’re often (usually?) the opposite side of the same coin. So there’s no advantage to abusing buyers to enrich sellers, and then vice-versa. If you’re enriching one and screwing the other, you’re generally enriching and screwing the same people.
So their model is going to need to find a balance between making it easy to buy AND sell, and enshittification, if it happens, is when they basically screw buyers and sellers for their own benefit.
Which doesn’t seem to be what’s happening- if anything, it’s becoming more convenient to buy and sell stuff on eBay than it used to be. And some of the things like trying to discourage side-deals outside of their platform aren’t uniformly shitty; if someone fucks you around on a side deal you’re out of luck, but if you go within the platform, there are protections in place.
So I’m not convinced that eBay is succumbing to enshittification, or if they are, it’s not in a way that’s readily obvious or that fits the standard definition, mostly because their business model doesn’t match that of the standard retailer.
I’m also not quite sure how enshittification is a uniquely on-line phenomenon either. All businesses do this, but the main difference is that most reach an equilibrium where they can only enshittify things so much. They can only screw their customers and suppliers so much before they stop being profitable, and shareholders don’t like being unprofitable. You see Walmart putting the screws to their suppliers and also often failing to be the lowest cost vendor to customers. But they only go so far with either before it starts being counterproductive.
I wonder if there’s something else going on with web retailers/vendors that makes them die, rather than reach that equilibrium?
Lack of experience, maybe? Combined with a selection effect? There are a lot of brick-and-mortal stores, and have been for a long time. Those that try to enshittify too much go out of business, and the ones that didn’t are the ones that are still around. But online businesses are still relatively new, and people are still figuring out new ways to make money online, so they haven’t yet reached the equilibrium where all of the shitty ones are gone.
For retail in particular, I’d argue the web makes a “winner take all” situation more likely. With local brick-and-mortar stores, they have a limited radius in which they would compete. That’s national (or multinational) with the web.
Between Amazon.com eating all the small merchants and subsidized dropshipping straight from China, there’s not really room for resellers that are just “tinier Amazon”. They wouldn’t have the same economies of scale, meaning no name recognition, no network effect, and no pricing power.
The surviving online resellers tend to be, in my experience, one of:
- Manufacturers like Anker or Teenage Engineering or CushionLab who sell their own goods. But even then, probably more of their sales come from Amazon than their own sites.
- Focused on a specific niche with an emphasis on customer service within that niche, like Sweetwater or Best Buy.
- Doing some illicit or shady trade (drugs, porn, gambling, etc.), often with crypto
- The online presence of some other huge company (Walmart, Costco, Target, etc.) — but even those frequently go bust, like Borders or Bed, Bath & Beyond
- Just a sloppy storefront for their Amazon shop (as a third-party merchant there)
There’s not really much of an equilibrium to be reached when Amazon can undercut you, provide faster and freer shipping, have a much bigger selection, have a long return period and superior customer service. They can sell things at a loss for decades just to put you out of business. No small business can compete with that.
It has to do with competition and market forces. If the market is healthy, with plenty of competition and customers can easily go someplace else, then it is much harder to enshittify. If the market is broken due to a monopoly or by locking customers to one specific vendor, then it is much easier to enshittify.
The hard part for me in thinking of a .com I use that hasn’t enshittified is just trying to think of non-major .coms that I interact with. Discourse is probably the only small .com I routinely use.
One of the Christmas presents I bought was a relatively niche product, for which it looked like there was really only one major supplier. I looked on their site for the product, and the prices were crazy. Then I looked for exactly the same product on Amazon, and found it, from the same manufacturer, with both a list price and shipping less than directly from the company, with the total coming to about half of the direct-from-the-company price. And that’s even with Amazon obviously taking some margin from the sale.
I am a very light eBay user. So totally not an expert. But I wonder how much any given individual is really both a buyer and a seller? I’ve bought a few things but can’t really imagine screwing around with trying to sell anything, much less anything regularly. I’d also wonder how / why a regular seller would be buying things there?
Ultimately the way a middleman market maker enshittifies is simply to charge a high fee. The process may be very painless for everyone on both sides, until they look at how large a vig the middleman is taking. That’s the pain point.
The finance industry has historically operated that way. Make it very easy to buy, sell, trade, but also expensive. And rake in the loot on those commissions no matter which way the market is moving.
I don’t know enough to say anything intelligent about eBay’s fees or profitability. But if they’re making bank, it’s a good bet their fees could be halved and both buyer and seller would be happier. But only the emergence of a direct competitor at the same scale could push those fees down.
@Reply. Yeah. The “network effect” is much stronger in online than in IRL. All the advantages accrue to the biggest player, so they just keep getting bigger and more advantaged. Then once they get big enough, that it’s only pipsqueaks left, then they can put the screws to either or both sides of the transaction and there’s no practical alternative for vendors or customers to go elsewhere in any meaningful volume.
This. Ultimately, Smithian competitive capitalism works great when everyone is small. So each individual seller is barely larger than each individual buyer. And no seller is much larger than any other.
The competitive market just isn’t (and can’t be) competitive when it’s buyer me against seller Amazon.
I don’t think one necessarily implies the other. Some people only sell and others only buy. But if you decide to do both, certainly having an existing eBay account already makes it easier (and plus, you get the benefit of your combined feedback score from buying and selling together). In the early days, it used to be common advice for would-be sellers to buy a few items first just so they don’t have a feedback of 0. From there they would graduate onto selling a few lower-cost items to accrue better feedback (into the teens or so). After that they are perceived as more trustworthy amongst buyers, and can begin selling higher value items.
But these days the platform is much more mature, and while there are still plenty of items from small-time individual sellers, there are also a lot of bigger stores with tens of thousands of feedback on there. If you ever search for a book on eBay, for example, goodwill books (and other similar used book resellers) will often pop up. Presumably those are big shared accounts for all their corporate warehouses, and their employees would use other personal accounts for their own buying and selling.
This “marketplace of sellers” was and is eBay’s model, but annoyingly, others have copied it too. Now when you buy something from Amazon, Walmart, or Best Buy, it’s often from other third-party merchants instead of them themselves. And it’s not always easy to tell from the listing without reading the fine print. The main drawback of this is that those third parties often have less quality control (possible counterfeits or returns) and you can’t bring them back to the brick and mortar store for returns.
Interview with the author of Enshittification, Cory Doctorow. LONG but good.
It occurred to me today, while getting good service at a brick-and-mortar store, that another reason that B&Ms are slower to enshittify is probably that the people there interact directly, face to face, with their customers. It’s easier to screw someone over when that someone is just a number in your database than when they’re an identifiable individual.
For a store where you’re interacting with the owner or a managercwith policy authority, sure.
For a national chain big box where every decision of consequence is made by an MBA at HQ looking at a database, probably not so much.
ISTM scale is the problem. It’s also the source of our GDP per capita so greatly exceeding that of e.g. 1800.
I think you only need to look at Apple to see this. They’ve perhaps enshittified a bit less than other giant tech companies, but all you need to do is look at the games they play around their app store to see prime enshittification. However, their in-store service is excellent (in my experience).
Sure, it’s crowded, and maybe you have to wait a long time for your turn. When you do get helped, someone will clean the lint out of the charge port on your 4 year old iphone, and then help you pair it to the 3 year old Apple watch you received as a hand-me-down, all completely for free.
ETA: I’m sure Apple could implement a policy of no service for out of warranty devices, and charge geekbar time by the minute, but they haven’t yet. The store employees are allowed to provide good service.