GOG was good for acquiring and re-releasing OLD GAMES. somewhere along the way they decided they wanted to compete with the big platforms and be “We’re just like them but without DRM”
I haven’t used GOG for years, they allowed me to relive a few of my old adolescence favorites, but stopped being useful to me a long time ago :/
Let’s be honest, this was apparent for a long time. Steam, a centralised platform, has been making strides in Linux gaming and has been making innovation after innovation together with its steam deck. Gog, a forefront to freedom in gaming, barely did anything for the Linux gaming scene. No innovation either. Its just the simple (and well needed) premise of no DRM. It’s necessary, but not enough. It didn’t cater to its niche, it just committing to creating one under a premise. That’s not how you go forward. How does this connect to bad management? Well, I think that with good management gog would make different moves. And wouldn’t rest on its laurels so much.
An official Steam Deck mod would probably be nice. Heroic Launcher kind of works.
It’s pretty hard for GOG. Many of the things people don’t like about GOG are not really GOG’s fault, they are just a result of small market share. Steam is the bigger platform, and so naturally it gets priority for basically everything.
You game doesn’t work on Steam? Then you’d better fix it immediately, because that’s where the bulk of players are. But if your game doesn’t work on GOG… well… maybe fix it when you get some spare time. (Or maybe don’t have a GOG version, because you don’t want to have to keep multiple platforms up-to-date.)
So publishers and developers are generally less cooperative with GOG. And GOG themselves obviously have much more limited resources to do stuff themselves.
Steam’s recent work with Linux has been great. And I do wish GOG would have something like that. But again, Valve has vast resources for that kind of thing - and they’ve been working on it ever since the Windows 8 appstore threatened to wipe them out. (That threat fizzled out; but nevertheless, that was what got the Linux ball rolling for Valve.) I’m in two minds about whether GOG should try to boost their Linux support. On the one hand, GOG is all about preservation and compatibility… and so it makes sense to have better Linux compatibility. On the other hand, it would be leaning further into a niche; and working on a problem that is kind of solved already. i.e. We can already run GOG games on Linux with or without a native linux version… it just could be nicer… Maybe it’s not a good use of GOG’s resources to go for that.
(That said, when I look at their linux
start.shscripts and seecd "${CURRENT_DIR}/game" chmod +x *it makes me think they could probably put at least a bit more effort into their linux support.)
The launcher that they have is pretty rough. I downloaded it for Mac OS and it just wouldn’t run right. Kept closing down. If I could just download right from the website they’d have some money.
If they draw is drm free games why only allow purchase through a custom launcher like everything else?
If I could just download right from the Website
You can.
I don’t use their launcher at all.
It’s kind of a convoluted process but you can definitely download every game you own through gog without it.
Yeah galaxy is sadly a bit of a mess. Back when i was still running windows it broke its own update capabilities once or twice.
Can you not download from the site on mac?
There’s nothing wrong with the business model of selling older games at affordable prices. This is about poor management. (Or deliberately bad management by a “CEO” who was hired to destroy GOG to remove a popular choice from us).
People talking about money kinda missing the point this is a culture issue. They need to sort themselves out clean house if people can’t be reasonable for their staff.
Thankfully if GOG goes down I don’t lose anything.
Now if Steam goes down, I lose my entire library
Gabe Newell has promised that if Steam goes down you won’t lose your library, but we only have his word as assurance.
No doubt the corporate drones that take over after his death will shit all over his legacy.
It’s one of my biggest fears, but I guess there’s always piracy especially for old games.
Do you have a source for this? People like to repeat this rumour but I’ve never found out where he promises anything like that.
In addition to that forum archive, here’s a Steam support response via Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/18mzcn/i_asked_steam_support_what_happens_to_my_games_if/
There’s this, the original comment lost to time, but a link to an alleged direct quote from GabeN.
As great as Gaben and Valve are his word doesn’t mean anything (it’s not a personal attack either, it’s just that it isn’t anything binding). Luckily if they fail to keep their promises (or legally cannot) then the crack community will step in. I’m pretty sure they cracked Steam DRM ages ago. I remember a friend using it for Left 4 Dead back in the day.
Anything that uses steam apis and services won’t work without steam and steam offers a lot of that to game devs
But the APIs are public, so they can be reimplemented in open source. There just hasn’t been any reason for it since currently that would only be used for piracy (in fact some “cracked” games have a mockup of the steam API that just returns the expected things as if it had contacted the servers). But the moment steam goes away I give it a couple of weeks until there’s a GitHub implementing most of the basic stuff.
But the APIs are public, so they can be reimplemented in open source.
And have been since years: https://mr_goldberg.gitlab.io/goldberg_emulator/
If steam goes down I’m sailing the high seas from then on.
A lot of steam games dont have drm
You would lose only most of your library, not all of it
I would lose some of my library, but I think most of it would still work.
If a game has multiplayer, it most likely has DRM
Terraria and Cuphead are games i know dont work because of that
Can you not connect by IP in Terraria? I had though I had multiplayer running without even starting steam at one point…
Because steam multiplayer is implemented into the game, you cant open the app if steam is not installed
deleted by creator
But he’s not talking about those ones.
If you can’t play the game without the steam client then it still has drm.
Plenty of games don’t rely on any Steamworks API at all. For the remaining goldberg_emulator exits.
You can play the game without the steam client
As a result, no one on the team has the courage to express their opinion. Under Gołębiewski, GOG typically makes business decisions that may be profitable in the short term, but may not contribute to the platform’s long-term growth.
Why half ass things when your the good guy?
I hope they stick around they are great for gaming. I need to buy off there more often.
The publication added that CD Projekt cuts jobs at its subsidiary every two to three years, with annual staff turnover reaching around 30%.
As summed up by another former employee, “GOG has been acting well tactically from a financial perspective, but poorly strategically, and the current business model is likely running out of steam.”
So nothing burger? Other than a corpo being anti-worker which is not news…
I really like GOG so it would be highly unfortunate to see them go under. I guess we really can’t have nice things in this day and age.
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.
Are they publicly traded?
“no pun intended”
Too bad, I use Steam and it works wonderfully on Linux, but i don’t want it to be the only option.
i don’t want it to be the only option.
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.
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.
It does support Linux: it lets you download Linux installer for games that have a Linux port.
The lack of GOG Galaxy on Linux just means you have to manually manage your games.
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.
Valve only did because they were building hardware that they wanted to run Linux.
That was part of it clearly but I think more so they wanted an escape route as Microsoft enshittifies (further)
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.
Is proton entirely FOSS? I do know that they are built on wine, but now that I think about it, I am not sure.
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.
GOG is the only big option if you want to own the games you purchase.
That’s not how copyright laws work anywhere. You don’t own anything, it’s just a license.
GoG Vault would disagree with you on that.
You can download the full installers and keep them, nobody can take them away or disable it remotely
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.
GoG Vault would disagree with you on that.
They are free to disagree on laws but they are still bound by them.
You can download the full installers and keep them, nobody can take them away or disable it remotely
That’s true but if your license is revoked, you’re illegally in possession of the game assets.
It’s less clear than you say.
In principle the First-sale doctrine should apply but it has not caught up with reality yet.
That’s not how it works but hey, you do you
It 100% is how it works. Read that EULA next time you install one of those games via the installer you downloaded from gog.
Yeah & we still get to keep the installers, but hey I seriously do get your point
and?
In case of Steam.
With GOG I get an actual license key & terms that state my ownership.
No you don’t. You get the same license as you do on Steam, here’s the license btw https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/16034990432541-GOG-User-Agreement-effective-from-17-February-2024?product=gog :
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.
With GOG I get an actual license key & terms that state my ownership.
No, the intellectual property is not transferred to you. You have no clue how copyright works.
For most people that is a distinction without a difference.
Yes, but the same is also true for Steam, so it’s a moot point.
For most people that is a distinction without a difference.
So what’s the difference to making a backup of my Steam folder? The games I play have no DRM either.
Nothing at all. Most people are not creating derivative works.
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.
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.
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.
Who says you have to respect the laws? Just pirate if publishers mess with players
Just pirate
What’s the point of GOG then?
Morals
Morals
Nothing moral about a store that affirms Microsoft’s Windows monopoly.
People have different morals. It’s ok, it’s personal
Same reason we have Barnes and Nobles in the states. I like to browse before I hit zlibrary.
Not everything is on GoG
We have itch.io
I see what they did there. groan.
The word choice is certainly not accidental.
NOOOOOOO I LOVE GOG
