So to summarize, ZOOM is a legitimate and official DRM-FREE store but since nobody cares, not even the publisher who sells their games there, they all forgot to remove their expired catalog ?

The only reason why they still have 3D Realms and Codemasters titles for sale is because everybody forgot about the existence of ZOOM and the Jordan Freeman Group ?

What a joke.

I doubt anyone contacted, gog, either. I'm sure GOG has lawyers that stay in the loop, given that CDP has become a semi-large corporation.

How is listing the man's holdings and properties evidence of wrongdoing?

You mean the baseless stuff people keep posting and speculating about? If not, then what else?

Some businesses, legit ones that is, run like that....or even out of PO boxes. Tbh that proves nothing(by itself I mean).

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My thoughts exactly.

I'm no fan of censorship, but it seems a strange hill for the Devotion devs to die on. Isn't the material just a single note in the game which has a small reference to Xi looking like Winnie the Pooh. If it was a political game full of that kinda stuff then it would make more sense to take this stance, but having your game risk being rejected all all the big stores just for a a single sentence?

They already took out the ONE political joke in the game, ages ago - China doesn't care. They pretty much want it to never be released now, because it at one point contained a single joke... "You offended us once, so we'll make sure your game is never released", it's nothing but a petty grudge. Red Candle have been extremely apologetic and humble about the whole thing, this is not them "dying on a hill" at all.

I still say they should put it back in and have an accidental "breach" that only affects the game and it's source. I know they want compensation, but if their ship starts to sink over this, please go down swinging.

If Taiwan game makers and companies want to "stick it to the CCP" they often (from what i've heard) do it in more subtle ways, so as to slip it by the CCP censors and officials who monitor game content and content of other media & also to avoid too many problems as a result of making a more overt criticism of the CCP.

Also as the post after yours stated: They removed it, and China didn't care....they now seem to hold a grudge against the company(and are likely pressuring them to pull the game from stores, as well as pressuring stores not to carry it).

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(To others: Clip is sfw Yt music clip)

Just dropping in to say that:

a) Trying to release Devotion there seems like the logical move to me.

b) Odd how determined people are to throw trash at Zoom Platform. It's a small store that was probably more of an afterthought so far, first appearing in 2014 just to sell one game, Mr. Travel, which was developed by them, and gradually adding titles to become an actual store at some point after that, some of those titles also being fixed to work on modern systems.
There was actually a conflict between them and GOG over TrickStyle, where they accuse GOG of simply stealing their fixed build and adding it here, it became public when they refused to be added to GOG's FCKDRM.com over it. GOG said at the time that they reached out and are discussing the matter, but no more was heard of it.
Either way, the Zoom Platform store seemed to have mostly remained an afterthought over the years, the team's main focus apparently being remastering the Megarace games, not counting various other behind-the-scenes matters, until this year they planned a relaunch and started gradually adding what they said were hundreds of new games. However, the redesign is taking a very long time, and while initial estimates were to have the new site up in summer or so, it was months later when they just put up a barebones new site (which is also missing the large "DRM-FREE" badge at the top, which they said is just an oversight which they plan to fix - their (largely abandoned) social media pages still have it in the cover images though), saying that they'll slowly add more to it over the next half a year or so. Now it remains to be seen how that will go, if at all.
As for selling games that were pulled from elsewhere, my understanding is that what was posted is true, they have some notable people from the industry in the team and managed to obtain distribution rights with no expiration date (unlike GOG which is saying that titles are up for renegotiation frequently), so unless there's a firm order canceling that, they're in the clear.
At least at the moment, they claim to stand firm behind DRM free, just distributing plain offline installers, no client or anything, and also told me before that they stand behind what used to be GOG's second clear, specific principle, namely flat pricing. But they also said they plan to add more payment methods, including Paysafecard, and then went back on that, so who knows.
As for the name clash, when asked they tend to say that they existed before Zoom became well known and will stick to their name. Whether they'll stick to that decision after they'll properly relaunch and actually mean to become a notable store, remains to be seen. But what remains to be seen is first if they even mean to become a notable store. They may well prefer to remain small, niche, for people in the know, and therefore not draw the sort of crowd and also the sort of attention from the top dogs in the industry that changed GOG the way it did...

(sorry for repeating myself, but nobody reacted on the previous post where I've described this, so I have no idea if it was considered as not convincing, or if nobody seen that post)

In case of Duke Nukem games I've made my own "checking".

2,5 year ago I've sent email to Gearbox (3D Realms guys adviced me to do so, if I wished to learn about "legality" of the offer) to ask about Zoom and Duke Nukem games in their offer, as I was interested in buying Duke there.

Aside from receiving rather standard reply (quoting" We've passed this information along to the members of our Team who specialize in this area and they should be able to take any actions if necessary.") I received immediately after that info, that they've closed my inquiry.

Nothing else has happened since that moment. I highly doubt that they would wait so long to take any legal steps to take Duke games from Zoom's offer.

Disclaimer - I didn't do it to make any "nasty surprise" to Zoom, just wanted to be sure if it's legit to buy game here.

For some reason, i vaguely remember seeing something like this. I forget what i said at the time, but a lack of response basically means that they don't care. Doesn't confirm or deny anything, but it obviously wasn't a big deal (that you were concerned or that they were selling improperly licensed copies, whichever is the case). If they gave you a support ticket, you could try again and drag that up from the mud and see what was eventually said.

Then again, no one would even know about the company and their game(s), without this debacle.

It is the same as with CP2077. No one would even know about the game, if it wasn't for the disastrous launch. Now it is on everyone's lips, NYT and Washington Post and even our national YLE and Helsingin Sanomat is writing articles about bugs in the game, in their culture sections no less! The same section where they write about the latest paintings of Picasso and Da Vinci, or gossip about what Beethoven and Mozart has been up to lately!

https://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2020/12/19/vuoden-odotetuin-videopeli-cyberpunk-2077-julkaistiin-rikkinaisena-tekijat

https://www.hs.fi/kulttuuri/art-2000007693344.html

In the BEST case, CP2077 will become "The Room" of the video games of this generation. Everyone will want to see it and its makers and people who acted in it will become celebrities, e.g. some Keanu Reeves.

Who are you kidding? CP2077 damned game has been everywhere. Hell, PSN embarrassingly notified me that my non-existant pre-order of the game was going to be delayed.

Really?!? At least I haven't heard about the game before, until you mentioned it in your message.

Maybe my memory is failing me, dunno...

Cyberfunk what? 2007? Is that some obscure indie game? I love indie games. I'd get it if it's under a fiver.

Anyway, I'd buy Devotion if it shows up on Zoom. I'm not expecting it to happen though for pretty much the same reason it's not happening here...

So I was mistaken about how old the store was, but that doesn't automatically mean that they were selling GRID before it was pulled from the other digital platforms and even if it was, one must wonder how could Codemasters not react when they received a single penny from the continued sales of that game after the car licenses expired as the risk of getting sued by the car brands would surely be greater than what little they could gain by turning a blind eye to this?

Either they don't get any money or their accounting somehow has not noticed this or the car licenses actually are still valid, but that would then raise the question for why wouldn't Codemasters agree to sell this game again on the other stores? I guess one could attribute this to incompetence on the developer's side, but if that is the case, then I personally would choose to let them pay for their incompetence by not buying their game from a store that prompted me to question the developer's competence in the first place.

Just to be clear, I wouldn't mind at all right now if there could be a real alternative for GOG, but unfortunately it seems that all of the contenders for becoming the next best hope for DRM-free gaming are making it really hard for me to determine which if any of their games are DRM-free, so as my time is nowadays too valuable to waste it for googling third party sources for that information I must ignore the alternatives until I have gotten fed up enough with GOG to buy less and less games long enough that I may eventually theoretically end up clearing my backlog.