I’d certainly love to hear that they’re at least turning a profit. It’s my default store now, but given the ambiguity of what I’m buying in the multiplayer space, and the lesser experience I get as a Linux customer, they’re not making it easy.
“GOG regularly adapts its structure to its strategy and ongoing projects, sometimes this means eliminating certain roles — as was the case recently.”
Yeah, but firing 30% of your entire contract workforce reveals that you don’t give a flying fuck about sustaining the lifespan of the storefront and prefer to pad the executives golden parachutes from the stock valuation.
perhaps - i didn’t read the article, but going by your comment: if it’s your contract workforce rather than full time then sometimes you just want to transition from expensive “temporary” employees to permanent positions
No permanent positions were created or filled, if you read the article. The article also says you need to PM me your credit card info. Don’t worry about reading shit for yourself anywhere, just believe what we say about anything in the comments without question so that you dont need to formulate an independent opinion.
Fucked over Unreal fans by dropping the new Unreal Tournament the moment Fortnite took off (this one is personal, I was looking forward to that)
Fucked over people who bought Fortnite Save the World (the original paid PvE mode of the game) by dropping that the moment the Battle Royale mode took off (this is objectively worse than UT because people paid for this)
Edit: Also want to mention Timmy’s frequent trash talking of Linux on Twitter
Not nearly the same degree. GOG sells actual Linux games with no 3rd party software necessary to play them. The same cannot be said about EGS, one simply cannot launch an EGS game in an officially supported way.
For a very limited subset of games, they provide linux binaries. For the rest? You are up a creek and in the realm of “Figure it out”. Which… is generally the Heroic Launcher (or Lutris for a subset) which puts you in the same boat as Epic.
If you insist upon saying one store is more virtuous than the other… okay? I personally don’t like defending companies but you do you.
But for the vast majority of games? Epic and GoG are in the same category as basically everything but Steam. And both are in the exact same category regarding launchers and download services since they both heavily rely on the Heroic Launcher (which is awesome).
And, to be clear, neither should be applauded for Linux support.
Well, to be clearer. The folk behind the Heroic Launcher (and Lutris) SHOULD be applauded. And I think there is actually a very strong argument that store fronts should not be expected to build out entire social media ecosystems with attached updaters (what launchers basically are). But both Epic and GoG have decided to half ass that so they should be called out for not doing it “right”.
If you insist upon saying one store is more virtuous than the other… okay? I personally don’t like defending companies but you do you.
Could you please not put words into my mouth? Neither is “virtuous” and I am not defending them. Let’s stick to the facts instead. It’s clear that EGS is being actively hostile towards Linux, while GOG is merely negligent. EGS actively removed Linux support from previously supported games on at least one occasion (Rocket League).
As a publisher: Yes, Epic stopped the Rocket League devs from continuing to build Linux binaries. To my knowledge, they have not disabled “support” for Proton in any of the anti-cheat solutions.
Similarly, the development branch of CD Projekt (the parent company of GoG), apparently had Linux binaries for The Witcher 2. They do not for The Witcher 3 or Cyberpunk.
Both companies decided it was not worth internally supporting Linux and instead rely on Proton/Wine to do it for them. Whether that is good for gaming is debatable, but both are “actively hostile towards Linux” in that regard.
If you do want to criticize the handling of Linux then I would suggest looking into the Unreal Engine marketplace (or whatever they call it now) being a complete shitshow for Linux developers. Which is ironic since the UE documentation is actually great for Linux devs. I cannot speak to the CDPR efforts with their modding SDKs since I haven’t opened one since The Witcher 1 (when it was either a hacked version of the NWN toolkit or an officially hacked version of the NWN toolkit).
GOG sells actual Linux games with no 3rd party software necessary to play them.
Ah yes, stand-alone binary installers that work only on a very tiny set of Linux versions because they rely on specific version of system libraries, sometimes contain distribution-specific hardcoded paths, and so on. I especially like those older Linux ports that exclusively target Nvidia drivers because why would anyone just have coded to the OpenGL standard back then…
We have Flatpak Runtimes and Steam Linux Runtimes since years. CD Project / GOG can’t even be bothered to pick these existing open source solutions.
Steam, for all of the good it did still normalized digital distribution of games. Its normal now that we dont own the games we play they exist on corporate servers, and can be rescinded at the drop of a corporate whim.
The approved competitor to a monopoly is… checks notes a wannabe monopoly that’s trying to buy their way into the position by providing less for the customer and instead bribing the publishers for exclusivity?
No, thanks. I would rather stick with the existing monopoly than reward Epic’s anticompetitive and anti-consumer bullshit.
I guess, yeah. I will say, though: it feels morally wrong to acknowledge their existence as anything other than a anti-consumer cashgrab, and thus give them legitimacy as a competitor to Steam, GOG, and Itch.
At the same time, GOG hasn’t been able to pull many, and Itch has much better indie coverage, including for the higher-end indies, due to its much smaller royalty fee. I’d say they’re pretty even overall, with Itch catering to Indies and GOG to old games.
GOG has been closer to offering the more mainstream indies and big studio titles that interest me. I guess itch library doesn’t really appeal as often to my tastes.
That’s completely fair. I personally really like the site because it feels like being part of a creative community, but that also makes the selection of games that are available more eclectic.
Shit I really like GOG as it’s the only competition to steam
There are plenty of competing PC game online stores, it’s just that they all suck monkey balls when you’re not using Windows. Microsoft is currently using their old monopolist playbook and release Blizzard games to the fucking Microsoft Store and Game Pass and not a single 3rd party store.
And don’t forget that the other publisher-owned storefronts like EA’s and Ubisoft’s are also still alive. They suck hard but they exist and apparently they do well enough to continue to be around.
Steam is the only PC games store that fights Microsoft’s Windows monopoly. GOG Galaxy has been written using the Qt framework. Making a Linux version of an existing Qt application is relatively easy (at least compared to a full port). Do that, integrate umu-Launcher for Windows games, bundle everything up and release GOG Galaxy on Flathub. Boom, done. But they don’t do that despite their massive pile of Witcher and Cyberpunk money.
So plenty of competition exists but if you happen to not be Windows-exclusive, everyone but Steam is bad.
This is a real shame, I used to buy all my games on GoG and had high hopes for the galaxy 2.0 client. Hopefully they keep going because we need a viable competitor to Steam that isn’t awful.
Especially competition that actually delivers something unique a segment of the population wants as opposed to simply existing. Their DRM free stance and standalone installers are a pro consumer move giving control back to the consumer once they download the files.
That’s too bad. No doubt I appreciate it Steam for what it is, even knowing that I don’t actually own any of the software I buy from them. That being said, I try to support GOG where/when I can.
Is there any “easy” way to get GOG games running on a Steam Deck? It’s been awhile since I last tried to look into it, but back then it seemed like a lot of steps and a lot of places to potentially mess up the process. I believe I kind of got something working at one point, but I’d honestly have to go back and double check.
I’ll give that a try. I don’t game much, so that launcher was not necessarily on my radar. Is that something you always have to switch over to desktop mode in order to use it?
I switch over to desktop to install new games, but that isn’t strictly necessary - you could run Heroic in game mode and install from there.
Once a game is installed through Heroic it will automatically add a shortcut (I.e. Non-Steam game) to Steam. For the shortcut to be visible, however, the Steam client needs to be restarted. This is why I switch to desktop for all my installing needs then reboot in to game mode. When playing, I never need to leave game mode.
Download Heroic Launcher from the Discover app in Desktop mode and add it as a non-Steam game. You can log into your GOG account there. In a best-case scenario, which is more often than not, you just hit download, and you can play the game on Steam Deck.
But sometimes it doesn’t work like that. Steam will often bundle dependencies with your download, like DirectX versions or Visual Studio runtimes. To get these working, you’ll need to run “winetricks”, which can be done on a game-by-game basis from within Heroic, and then install the dependencies you need. To find out which dependencies you need, if you had trouble launching the game in the first place, you can check SteamDB and see what other “depots” the game has. This resolves the problem about 99% of the time, if there’s a problem at all. In one case, Phantom Fury, I was unable to get the same compatibility with the GOG version that I was with the Steam version, and I don’t know why. Also, at this point in time, I don’t think you can rely on cloud saves working, and you might need to rely on a solution like SyncThing, but it looks like cloud saves working reliably via Heroic is imminent, if it isn’t already since the last time I checked.
Gracias. I will give that a try. Still sounds a bit complicated, but for sure that sounds better than opening up a terminal and copy/pasting commands, some of which I’m not super knowledgeable about.
It is for sure more complicated, but you have to weigh that against actually owning the thing you buy. Also, I forgot a step in setting up Heroic launcher. You need to also go to the Wine Manager section and download the latest stable version of Wine-GE. It’s pretty straight-forward, but you’ll need a version of Wine to play Windows games.
I’m really happy with my experience with GOG, but they put a lot of effort into their Windows app and i ws pretty blunt with my feedback, it is pretty useless to me and I find it unhelpful. Heroic game launcher on Linux great and cost GOG $0.00. My thought is that they have been focusing on the wrong things, fundamentally I love their strong DRM stance and when I am travelling internationally,the games I bought off GOG work, unlike Steam😡😡😡😡. So if they have come to this realization, then nothing about these changes are disturbing as a customer, but sad to hear their employees taking the hit. 😢
If I understand this correctly, you value Steam’s honesty over a few instances in which GOG hypocritically violated their own DRM policy. That sucks, for sure, and GOG should be called out for it – but at the end of the day, the vast majority of games in my GOG library can be downloaded as offline installers that don’t need to contact a server, while the vast majority of the games I own on Steam can’t (barring, of course, circumventing Steam’s fairly weak DRM scheme, which is illegal).
the vast majority of the games I own on Steam can’t
People keep making this claim, but I don’t think this is true, I’ve made backups of lots of games, even played some in lan with some friends from just a single copy to convince them to buy the game. DRM has to be enabled by the developer, so the majority of games don’t do it, but also lots of games are badly coded and assume steam will be present so they fail to start without the steam library, but any game that’s released somewhere else besides steam probably will just work (and any game that’s only released on steam can’t be found anywhere else so they’re irrelevant).
I don’t follow the logic here. You said it yourself – GoG has only allowed DRM onto their platform four times. This is a violation of their anti-DRM policy but it still means like 99% of games on GoG have no DRM. It’s good to be principled about these things but I don’t see how this merits a knee-jerk response to run to Steam (a platform where 99% of games do have DRM and no guarantee other than an informal promise that they’ll do “something” to make their games available if Steam were to shut down).
Not the person you’re replying to but there’s a big difference between: “We allow DRM, but don’t force it” to “We strongly oppose DRM, but allow it and even put it into our own games”. One is just business, the other makes you a hypocrite. And the issue with GOG is that they’re the latter.
See my other reply, they have allowed this much more than 4 times, and their own games have some form of DRM. Plus the amount of games with DRM on steam is much less than 99%, as a general rule if the game is on both platforms it has the same or equivalent DRM. So it’s essentially up to the publisher whether a game will have DRM or not, and because the vast majority of games have the same stance on DRM regardless of platform of purchase citing GOG stance against DRM becomes a moot point.
In short, games on GOG can have DRM and games on Steam can be DRM free. And as a general rule a game’s DRM stance will be the same regardless of store. So if you want to play game X and it’s available on both GOG and Steam, chances are pretty high that it is DRM-free on both, and if it has DRM on steam chances are pretty high it also has DRM on GOG.
Which games from steam don’t work? I’ve never had any issues at all and I have traveled internationally for years while playing my whole library. I think that might be something specific to some game and that game wouldn’t be available on GOG anyways so it’s a moot point. In other words games work or don’t by their own stance on DRM, and I’m sorry to tell you but
I love their strong DRM stance
That’s a myth. They do allow DRM on their store, there’s a huge thread discussing which games have DRM: www.gog.com/forum/general/…/page1
And that’s just focusing on SP, any MP game has DRM. So I’ll ask again, which game didn’t work on steam when traveling?
Not the person you asked, but one game I had problems with on Steam that I did not on GOG was the OG Riven. It was still playable, but the various animations associated with pressing buttons and suchlike were completely broken. Very rare experience though and I have played many retro games on Steam.
Yeah a lot of retro games on GOG were fixed up with patches and stuff like that (often by GOG themselves) and sometimes regardless of any fixes applied, there are version disparities between the two platforms where usually the Steam versions is a slightly older release of an old no longer updated game compared to the GOG version though I’ve seen it happen the other way around, too.
Never heard of that game, but I can definitely believe it, old games are where GOG really shines. But that doesn’t seem like a DRM thing, more like the game is abandoned on Steam but not on GOG, sometimes GOG patches some old games with their own runtime, curiously if that is the problem running the steam version on linux using proton (and especially proton-GE) is also very likely to work.
Note, if you actually look at that list you’ll see it’s a very loose interpretation of DRM. All of the games on that list work without any kind of phone-home security check, or unlock code, or anything like that. The list is stuff like “getting the DLC requires a third party account”. It’s definitely a list of things people don’t like, but whether it is or isn’t ‘DRM’ is not so clear cut.
GOG’s official position is that the store doesn’t allow DRM at all. They describe what they mean by DRM on that same page, and it sounds fairly reasonable; but its certainly understandable that some people would prefer a stricter set of rules.
All of the games on that list work without any kind of phone-home security check, or unlock code, or anything like that.
You didn’t scroll down the linked forum post, did you?
DEFCON - Linux: Game contacts a key verification server as described here. Win and Mac have offline executables that skip the verification. But under Linux there is no DRM-free offline executable.
F.E.A.R. - arguably a bug that stays unfixed. Securom remnants weren’t removed and can cause the single player game not to start.
Well, that’s not true either. I hate this trend of developers only relying on the platform-provided servers for multiplayer, but you have to find a game with LAN. That limits your selection a lot, but I for sure played Star Wars: Episode I - Racer from GOG in LAN without talking to their servers at all.
I can’t say conclusively that every LAN game on GOG is DRM-free on Steam, but there are times where Steam’s DRM has caused annoyances for me when trying to play offline on Steam Deck that I would not run into with side loaded GOG games, which I detailed in another comment here.
You can’t also say conclusively that every LAN game on GOG is DRM-free on GOG either.
I read that other comment, that’s an issue with the specific game. I’ve played dozens of games without connection and not putting it on offline mode, if that specific game tries to phone home on login that game is wrong. I wished Steam would have a DRM-free tag to be able to differentiate them easily.
I’ve traveled domestically and had the Steam Deck randomly decide that the games I preloaded need to be authenticated again because I didn’t explicitly put the device in “offline mode” before traveling. A GOG game sideloaded through Heroic would just work.
This year I was in three foreign countries with my Steam Deck. Once per flight, the other two by car. On the plane I activated airplane mode because duh but outside the plane airplane mode was always off.
By default Steam downloads shader caches off Valve’s servers. So if Steam saw before that an update is available and you didn’t download it, Steam wants to be online to download them. You can disable shader cache downloads in desktop mode but then the games have to compile the shaders by themselves which takes time computing resources, and in turn wastes battery power.
Also, pretty recently there was a bug in Steam that messed up authentication in general. It required me to log in twice (!) on every power on. The bug is now gone. It wasn’t a feature.
Nope, this is something different. I booted up Metaphor: ReFantazio, and it just about made it to the main menu before telling me I needed to be in offline mode, but you can’t explicitly put the device in offline mode if you don’t have an internet connection, funny enough. Fortunately I was on an Amtrak with Wi-Fi, but I shouldn’t have needed to do that. As far as I can tell, the reason I needed to authenticate the game again is because the Deck ran a “validating install” step on boot, but I have no idea when that step is going to happen, and once again, I shouldn’t have to plan ahead for being offline.
I booted up Metaphor: ReFantazio, and it just about made it to the main menu before telling me I needed to be in offline mode
Sounds like a game bug.
but you can’t explicitly put the device in offline mode if you don’t have an internet connection, funny enough
“…” button --> Airplane mode.
the reason I needed to authenticate the game again is because the Deck ran a “validating install” step on boot, but I have no idea when that step is going to happen
When you do something to bork the game data. It’s either user error or a bug but definitively not regular behaviour.
Airplane mode is not offline mode. I found that out explicitly this year due to how Ubisoft’s launcher interacts with playing offline in Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. Offline mode is found from the Internet menu in the Steam Deck interface and is very much not the same thing as just not having an internet connection, as much as that would make sense.
I didn’t break any game data. This is an OS level feature, and it just does it sometimes on boot. I’m glad you’ve never been inconvenienced by these things yourself, but this is the intended functionality.
Funny how you got hit by that on an domestic train trip and I traveled abroad several times and not got that weird behaviour even once. I simply never use offline mode. On the plane I was in airplane mode and when not on the plane I was on hotel wifi, personal phone hotspot, or just not connected to any wifi. Steam also never just out of the blue validated my game data. Must be a problem on your end.
Yeah, this is the gist of the problem. When a PC is connected to airplane WiFi, but it is limited, Steam decides it is online, but some sort of validation fails and then no games will play until I get back to a full internet connection and reboot. I don’t even try anymore, hence my comment about GOG, and yes, I know some games on GOG have DRM, but most don’t and they don’t hide the fact. The Steam DRM bootlicking combined with GOG hatred because they were forced to sell a few games with DRM is so bizarre. Are Steam fan boys a thing? What a weird hill to fight for.
DRM is the heart of most technology pain for paying customers since it’s inception. For pirates, the experience is much better since the DRM is removed.
What they mean is that technically you still are being granted a license to use it. The same was true for things like DVD movies. They’re technically correct, but missing the point.
How is that different from backing up the game folder on steam? In both cases it’s true that:
You’re not doing anything illegal at the moment you do it
You can use it to play the game on a different computer (as long as the game is DRM free which is not granted on either platform)
The company (Valve/GOG) can’t remotely erase your copy
If the company removes the license from you your backup is now technically illegal but it’s unlikely to be enforced
I fail to see how GOGs approach is any different, they still sell you a license and you’re backing up the installer in case the license gets removed and/or you’re forbidden from redownloading the game.
On most games yes, like I said before I’ve copied games from my computer to others to play in lan to convince friends to buy a game.
Then there are badly implemented games, where you need to either delete the steam library from the game folder or replace it with an open implementation.
And the rest are the ones that have DRM (which are not available on GOG anyways so they don’t matter for this discussion).
Actually, some games have DRM on steam and have a DRM free version on GOG. I even saw a game that had a DRM free epic and gog edition but the steam version had DRM. Might be a edge case, but still exists
I totally understand your point, but when people talk about “you own nothing” they don’t really mean you “own” the content on physical media, they mean it doesn’t have DRM that requires an online service. You’re technically correct, but your pedantry is making you miss the forest for the trees, basically.
but your pedantry is making you miss the forest for the trees, basically.
No. People here claim, that just because GOG cannot remote wipe your drive, people buying off GOG have a perpetual right to the games they’ve bought. But they don’t because that’s not how copyright works. If a game’s license is revoked, to keep playing the game is copyright violation.
Not only do so many people not grasp basic concepts of copyright, they claim Valve could take away all downloaded games. No, Valve cannot remote wipe my drive either. I can back up my Steam folder. Many games on Steam don’t have DRM at all. It’s opt-in and the actual Steam documentation outright says not to rely on Steam DRM because “it is easily removed by a motivated attacker.” If games rely on crap like Denuvo, 3rd party launchers, or invasive anti-cheat, the publishers are required to clearly state so on the store page in one of those orange boxes. Users can make an informed decision on a per-game basis even with Steam. And those games that ship crap like Denuvo aren’t on GOG in the first place.
So in the end GOG is a store that stretches the truth about game ownership in their marketing and despite all their Witcher and Cyberpunk money, they don’t care about users of platforms competing against Windows at all.
I think it’s pretty clear from context that they mean they have the ability to perpetually play the games because of the lack of DRM, not the right.
Plenty claim it’s their right and with much ferocity while as vehemently ignoring that there are plenty of games on GOG that offer reduced content when playing offline (an extensive list was posted by someone). Also, because games on Steam must disclose their use of DRM (and anti-cheat), people can just buy DRM-free games which can be backed up just as well. Goldberg is a drop-in library for games that use Steam APIs. So everything is fine there as well for people who actually make informed buying decisions.
This is a thread where someone claimed that you don’t own the games on Steam but you do on GOG, this is the comment the person was replying to:
In case of Steam.
With GOG I get an actual license key & terms that state my ownership.
So yes, that’s exactly what the person is saying. So the fact that GOG can’t remotely wipe your drive is a strawman fallacy, because neither can Steam, and the differences between GOG and Steam is what’s being discussed, so anything that is the same has no bearing on the discussion.
If you backed up your game folder yes you can. Most games on Steam have no DRM, so just copying the folder is enough to play it on another computer. Then there are badly implemented games which you would need to replace the steam library with an open implementation (which doesn’t involve cracking the game). And finally there are games with DRM which are not available on GOG so they’re irrelevant to the discussion.
We give you and other GOG users the personal right (known legally as a ‘license’) to use GOG services and to download, access and/or stream (depending on the content) and use GOG content. This license is for your personal use. We can stop or suspend this license in some situations, which are explained later on.
Which is very similar to Steam. In both cases you can keep the files you’ve downloaded on your machine, and on most cases you can copy those files to a different machine and keep playing it. GOG has better marketing on this regard, but they’re both very similar, neither enforces DRM nor forbids it entirely, although GOG does tend to be a bit stricter (but they still allow it) whereas steam is a bit looser but knowingly implemented a weak DRM and let’s you know in the game page if the game has any stronger form of DRM.
@Nibodhika@Evil_Shrubbery Stop Killing Games opened my eyes to the software "ownership" situation. In USA, apparently, noone ever owns any software. It's always licenced. Even if on physical media. Quite bizarre.
@Nibodhika It's freaking evil, but in their defence, it's more America's evil than any one business. They have set about systematically reducing freedom for decades.
@Nibodhika@dbat Steam did the exact same thing when it was new when they would say "If Steam ever shuts down, we'll give you perpetual licenses to the games in your game library." Probably around the same time in their existence as GOG hyping DRM-free.
@obsurveyor@Nibodhika from what I have heard, they cannot give licences to Americans, at least. Perhaps to other countries, but they prob never will. I mean if Steam ever was closing down, they wouldn't care.
Neither do I but it is. GOG doesn’t support Linux. Heroic is a 3rd party community effort. Valve is currently the only company making financial investments into Linux gaming.
It does support Linux: it lets you download Linux installer for games that have a Linux port.
GOG lets publishers upload various installers but GOG does nothing to support them, let alone offer something like Proton (which is open source, so they could take and integrate it for free).
No one needs to “offer” Proton. It’s available freely for anyone. I think some people think Proton is a Steam thing. It isn’t. Yeah, Valve did a lot of work on it, which is great, but it isn’t limited to them. Vlave has essentially unlimited resources, and I’m happy they spent some making improvements for WINE, but GOG does not have nearly the same resources. I wouldn’t expect them to put their effort into that. Valve only did because they were building hardware that they wanted to run Linux.
No one needs to “offer” Proton. It’s available freely for anyone.
And that’s how GOG does not support Linux: Paying customers need to figure it out on their own. They don’t even value their customers to a degree to take and integrate existing open source solutions.
On steam I can click install and run and most games windows and Linux just work without further effort. This makes gog worthless to me. I could just use wine I don’t know why I’d bother.
Many more companies than Valve are making financial investments into Linux gaming, including companies that own various Linux distributions (Red Hat, Canonical, etc.), CodeWeavers (who amongst other things have been contracted by Valve on a lot of Proton work) and to a lesser extent Humble Bundle.
GOG is a side project of CD Project, the makers of The Witcher and Cyberpunk. They are massively wealthy. If GOG goes down, it’s because CD Project lets it happen, not because there is no other way.
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