I like GOG a lot but it's wild to me that their GOG Galaxy client doesn't work on Linux! A lot of gamers who care about preservation and availability are spending money with Valve because Steam's DRM is mostly inoffensive and the Linux support is so good.
The addressable market segment of people who play PC games and also care about DRM-free accessibility would be larger if GOG's launcher ran on Linux and targeted Linux users. It seems like a logical overlap to me.
Valve is eating GOG's lunch in this segment but it could easily change. Sure it might be small but it's bigger than ever, still growing, and seems to fit GOG's mission.
I would definitely start repurchasing my Steam games DRM-free on GOG if only they provided a launcher with the tooling necessary to download & run them on my system.
As things stand now, and for all the good GOG does... it's not enough to be DRM-free but only distribute Windows installers. You've just outsourced the DRM scheme to Microsoft. If the software doesn't run on a DRM-free OS, the job is only halfway done.
And in the meantime, GOG's product is tragically subject to piracy, (I believe) partially enabled by their decision to _only_ package games for the OS upon which most piracy traditionally takes place! :( I hope this could be offset by packaging for a crowd with more ideological overlap.
I'm a Linux user who buys a lot of games on GOG and I've never had a problem running them using Wine stable, with the only exception being games that supposedly don't even work on Proton yet.
Majority of the games there don't even come in a native Linux form, and those that do can be a hit or miss when it comes to compatibility - at least one game I tried needed a dependency from a no longer available package. Alternatively a few titles come shipped with some kind of wrapper that's really just an outdated version of Wine surrounding a win32 EXE.
Also, isn't the point of buying something DRM free that you don't have to use a client or any other online feature? The offline installer has always been GOG's killer feature in my book, that's how you make sure the game gets truly preserved.
> Also, isn't the point of buying something DRM free that you don't have to use a client or any other online feature?
Agreed. I thought this was the whole point of GOG.
The problem with buying movies from streaming providers, games from Epic and Steam, etc. is that you don’t own them. They say you do, but even something like Movies Anywhere isn’t guaranteed for life. Downloading digital content is the surest way to ensure that in-theory you could against use it someday. Anything else is a false promise of forever.
How do you download the games? I tried logging in to download cyberpunk which I purchased on gog, and they wanted me to download tons of files individually! I couldn't even just click a "download all" button.
Every installer there comes with an executable and those files you mentioned, for some reason they are always split into 4GB chunks, that’s why there’s so many.
AFAIK download all is not available, you will have to get them one by one. But after that they’re yours to keep forever.
There is a third-party downloader that uses an API to grab binaries for all games in your library. I just download the individual files one by one, though.
Apples and oranges yes, but to most users (even Linux users) there's only a very blurry line between these concepts. I admit this is not ideal.
I believe choice of storefront is more a service and support problem, and less about the product itself.
Game licensure and game ownership are equivalent products at the end of the day in most instances. Rugs could be pulled, yes, but thus far haven't been very often or to any significant extent (that I know of).
Most paying customers are fine to run proprietary code, accept DRM, or buy a license instead of owning a game. Even Linux users will do this if the company (Valve) has a decent track record at practicing "don't be evil" (they do).
As a Linux user, when you purchase a game from GOG (and I concede that this is ideologically superior to a license from Valve) you are on your own afterwards. Windows users can get a bit of help from Galaxy and I think GOG even does tech support now but this doesn't apply to our segment.
You must now divine a scheme whereby your game is made runnable. Cue fighting with distro repositories and Wine versions/prefixes/winetricks, or depending on a third party launcher (Bottles/Lutris/Heroic/pick one), or adding the game to the Steam client (that you probably have installed already anyway) because Steam knows how to run things with Proton... and then you must maintain this going forward.
This might not bother you or you may even find it therapeutic (and I do, for certain games). But the majority of the segment doesn't like it, and it won't scale as well as a first-party solution, not even for an individual user.
My assertion is that exchanging game ownership for game licensure currently looks like a pretty fair deal if I receive first-party support for running the game on my OS. But GOG could change that!
That is quite false, especially if you mean "out of the box". And it's likely a temporary situation - there's no guarantee whatsoever that people will maintain x86 and some specific Nvidia Pixel Shader emulation support 50 years from now.
This has already happened, PC Gaming Wiki has entries for lots of games where support for various old methods of doing things no longer work, on real hardware on windows, and you need to use a variety of workarounds like dgvoodoo or a fix by a random third party modder to get the game to operate correctly. And that's before you consider defunct copy protection or trying to add improvements.
nVidia has dropped 32-bit PhysX support in 50-series cards, significantly impacting some older-but-not-old games, and there’s no real solution yet except to own an older card.
Given the amount of work emulator authors go to supporting consoles like the Neo Geo CD, with 8 not very good games (they had to do serious work, over many years, breaking the encryption), and the amazing cycle accurate emulators for consoles like NES and SNES, I’m confident we will continue to have good emulators in the future for any system anyone cares about.
> 1. The single-player mode has to be accessible offline.
> 2. Games you bought and downloaded can never be taken from you or altered against your will.
> 3. The GOG GALAXY client is and will remain optional for accessing single-player offline mode.
> Having said that, we believe that you have the right to make an informed choice about the content that you choose to enjoy and we won’t tell you how and where you can access or store your games. To make it easier to discover titles that include features like multiplayer, unlockable cosmetics, timed events, or user-generated content, we’re adding information about such functionalities on product pages. In short, you’ll always know.
If you want to play multiplayer HoMM3, you can. That's how the game was commercially released and it hasn't been updated to add DRM.
Modern releases DRM the game as a matter of course, and GOG defied their user base to say that that's fine with them. Do you want to play with your friend? You need an internet connection and multiple accounts registered with the vendor.
For a concrete example of Galaxy being the DRM implementation, the Gloomhaven executable you can download from GOG has the button to play multiplayer disabled. It will still work if you get around that - the functionality itself doesn't check anything. But the executable will only enable the button if you start it with Galaxy running and logged in to an account that, according to GOG, has purchased the game.
That doesn't sound like "digital rights management" to you?
I don't know about the overall market analysis so I'm not commenting on that. But I do know that personally, GOG meets my needs in spades and Valve doesn't, so I've spent a lot of money at GOG and will for the foreseeable future. I am a Linux guy and don't own any Windows machines. I couldn't care less about the Galaxy client. To be honest, I'm not even sure what it does -- I just know that I get along just fine without it.
the unification of other game stores is just largely broken. They haven't maintained their plugins for many years and as the stores change, functionality breaks in weird ways.
Bad QA for actual Linux games was the main reason I stopped buying on gog. Even when a game had a (gog exclusive) Linux port using their weird "game inside a shell script" approach[0], often times I would run into more problems than just using wine/proton on the Windows build.
I agree. Game devs are better off targeting proton as a platform, but Linux purists complain if there is no native port and you don't get the brownie points for putting in the effort.
I think there's plenty of brownie points to be had for making sure a game runs well under Proton... There's very little reason that GoG cannot do what Steam does with Proton for Windows games.
Linux has a very stable ABI. It's considered a bug if userland breaks.
If you want a stable userland, you can try using flatpaks. When I tried it, it downloaded entire root filesystems for Fedora and Ubuntu just so the applications would run.
It does work. The application appears to be unaware of the outer, incompatible distro.
I don't quite see how this approach wouldn't work for games.
I only run Linux at home, but on GOG I download the Windows versions and run them via Wine. This for me has had a higher success rate than keeping the native Linux versions around.
Don't conflate mobile free to play games (i.e. gambling simulators with a thin veneer) with actual games. I wouldn't be surprised if there were fewer actual games playable on Android than the full catalog for Sony PSP. Mobile free to play games are exclusively a way to prey on people's addictions in the hopes of finding enough "whales".
The Android version of the game Fractal no longer work (So I use the Windows version). And the only way to play the Steam version of Dungeon Defenders on Linux is to use the Windows version instead of the native one.
Even if Windows ever did disappear as an OS, it would remain as a backwards compatibility layer apparently...
I agree that GOG needs to port their client to Linux for all the reasons you stated, but as a workaround you can use Lutris which lets you log into your GOG account and download+install games (Windows games too).
It's not as pain free as Steam, because you sometimes still have to apply wine fixes, but it works well with the most popular games.
1. it doesn't (at least recently?) always do a great job of handling multiple displays, either launching games on my second monitor, which I orient vertically or getting confused about which monitor to use and switching back and forth until eventually the instance (but not the Lutris client) crashes
2. I find myself getting into launcher hell where I'll use a different wine version for one game and when I switch to a different game, it's using this new wine version and stops working
Not sure if Heroic solves these issues but I would try it again (didn't have any luck setting it up initially) if it does
If you are using KDE then there is a global Window rules setting and Heroic actually obey those rules, so you can force to launch a game always on X display, always minimized etc.
I've been using Lutris on i3 with multiple monitors. Enabling gamescope has been extremely helpful. I just get a window that tells the game to render at some fixed resolution, and it is happy to scale fullscreen or any size. I've been using i3's fullscreen toggle, it goes to the current monitor, or I can move it to another with my regular i3 binds.
It looks like gamescope has it's own fullscreen shortcut (super + f), but people complain about it about it going to the wrong display. Maybe your window manager offers a more consistent full screen option like i3 does.
I believe the problem is that most of the games they host are Windows games, so in that regard, Linux doesn't make sense.
And maintaining something like Proton is pretty complex, there's so many different distros. Actually ensuring the game works probably was too big of a task for them.
You can always add your gog games to Lutris though.
> I believe the problem is that most of the games they host are Windows games, so in that regard, Linux doesn't make sense.
The vast majority of games on Steam are Windows games, yet the Linux Steam client runs them fine via Proton.
I don't think people are asking for GOG to make Linux-native games. People are asking for an official GOG client that can handle installing games via Proton/Wine, handles cloud saves, account management, etc.
If a bunch of open source hobbyists can create a viable multi-platform client (see Heroic Games Launcher), then so can GOG.
It would be great if everyone could release Linux binaries, but smaller studios are extremely stretched and with no shortage of work as it is. Considering the quality of Windows emulation today, it's quite possible that the windows API simply becomes the new "Java for games", where studios test their games on Linux and never release a native binary.
It really does seem like the idea of DRM free games and Linux goes hand in hand. I would be really interested to hear about why they don't currently offer Linux support for their launcher.
I'm in the same boat here. I would be more than willing to rebuy some games on GOG if they supported Linux.
The idea of running old Windows games definitely doesn't go hand in hand with Linux. And I think GoG simply has way more Windows experience, lots of work to do, and little realistic chance of tapping some huge market if they spent all the time you need to support 2-3 major Linux distros - especially when you need to offer things like Multi-player support as well on those, plus maybe game recording and whatever else the overlay offers (GoG Galaxy is not just a storefront).
Heroic launcher works great and also doubles up as an Epic client and you can just run your own installers with it too (this is how I install Battle Net and Diablo 4).
I give GOG a lot of leeway, because in my heart of hearts, I know I will eventually curse steam lockin ( that day may be far away, but it is in our collective future ) so I throw them some money every now and then.
Still, you do have a point, by comparison Steam is a lot more polished on that front. I would complain more, but my personal hangup is very niche to begin with so it does not seem fair ( remote view in vm ). It is small things, but small things add up.
A bigger problem for me is not lack of Linux Galaxy client, but that a bunch of developers only release Linux versions on Steam (Larian with BG3 is a recent example).
But I agree in general. The issue is probably that GOG is a smaller store than Steam and Linux segment for them in result is also way smaller than for Steam, so they don't see it as a priority.
Meanwhile you can use lgogdownloader.
It's sort of interesting that they support Linux as platform for games sales to begin with. Besides them, Steam and itch.io who even does?
>Linux versions on Steam (Larian with BG3 is a recent example)
Not just on Steam but only for Steam Deck
But I think that's an understandable position. One single distro with one single hardware (okay two because the LCD and OLED versions has some differences).
Once you go down the "full Linux support" way it's a hellhole of different distros, compositors, proprietary and open source hardware drivers etc. This is where Flatpak, AppImage, snap etc. could actually play a good part imo if done well but I'm not sure I've seen any games released on Steam for Linux in those formats (maybe Steam not even allow it)
Edit: you can download BG3 for any Linux distro not just the Steam Deck
Good chance that this version will run on most up to date distros without much issue. So I don't see it as a reason not to release it.
> proprietary and open source hardware drivers etc
Somewhat of a problem, but not so much anymore, most Linux gamers know to use AMD and Mesa. So I'd say their focus on SteamOS is a good base of support.
> A bigger problem for me is not lack of Linux Galaxy client, but that a bunch of developers only release Linux versions on Steam (Larian with BG3 is a recent example).
It's because building for Linux expects specific versions of system libraries like glibc, if you compile your game on newer glibc, it may not run on older version of glibc at all. Steam solves it with Steam Linux Runtime compatibility layer which forces the game to run with specific glibc (and others) shipped with Steam on Linux, other video game stores have no equivalent solutions.
Those are sometimes related. I know Tooth and Tail never released on Linux on GoG because they use the stores networking for multiplayer. So you can't do that on Linux without Galaxy but can on Steam.
Honestly thanks to Lutris, I have no want of a native linux GOG client and would rather GOG and others contributed to an already excellent solution and for there to be less distributor owned clients.
>Paczynski says they once hired a private investigator to find someone living off the grid in the UK. He had unknowingly inherited the rights to several games
My grandfather was a "landman" for oil companies tracking down mineral rights and has all sorts of stories like this. It can all get messy and weird fast.
Stuff like tracking down people you'd assume would be dead but are in fact ancient and alive at 103 in a nursing home. Convincing a bank that through a series of mergers and acquisitions that they are the rightful owners of the mineral rights to a piece of land foreclosed on in the great depression by a bank that itself failed. Generations of poor people dying without wills or settling probate. Inheritance battles spanning generations until no one alive was around for the start. Step mother that swooped in and married a man at the end of his life, inherited everything, remarried, had kids and left everything to them instead of the step kids.
I work for an oil and gas brokerage company. What you say is absolutely true (Especially your last sentence!). Some wild stories. We've certainly dug up some family drama throughout the whole process.
> Convincing a bank that through a series of mergers and acquisitions that they are the rightful owners of the mineral rights to a piece of land foreclosed on in the great depression by a bank that itself failed.
What's the goal of convincing the bank that they own some land? Is this a case where the original bank foreclosed on the property, resold the surface while carefully keeping the mineral rights, and then failed? And the current owner of everything-but-the-mineral-rights is fully aware of not possessing them?
If you determine that someone else is the owner of some land, and they deny it, you can just start doing whatever it is that you want to do on the land, and you'll become the owner.
>What's the goal of convincing the bank that they own some land? Is this a case where the original bank foreclosed on the property, resold the surface while carefully keeping the mineral rights, and then failed? And the current owner of everything-but-the-mineral-rights is fully aware of not possessing them?
Pretty much exactly. It's pretty common if not the norm. Splitting the rights is normal when say a large ranch is broken up into plots. It would be very rare for say the deed to a suburban home to include the mineral rights.
Maybe we should bring back copyright renewal. If you had to file a renewal with the government every 20 years it would solve a lot of the problems with abandonware.
You also have to charge a fee/pigouvian tax on the renewals. When renewal is free, there's a substantial deadweight drag on society as a result from everyone renewing by default.
Even without a fee, requiring renewal at least means stuff that people have totally forgotten about doesn't get renewed, and stuff that does get renewed at least has a recentish owner on record.
It would be a large improvement over the status quo of having a term of 70 years after the death of the author.
This is why copyrights should need registration and renewal. They used to, and things dropped out of copyright when nobody paid for the renewal.
There's a similar problem with mineral rights. US states register land ownership, but not mineral right ownership is not as well tracked. Litigation over abandoned mineral rights is not rare.
I briefly worked at Microsoft xbox back compat where we made the Xbox OG and Xbox 360 games work on Xbox one and newer generations and I know the PMs spent considerable time and effort doing similar things for the earlier Xbox games to be allowed for us to have them work on newer Xbox generations. It's really surprising that sometimes IP changes hands enough in some cases the owners might not have even known they owned something. I think the legal and permission always definitely one of the harder problems. I know music in some games were also particularly challenging, a few games had to have sound tracks removed or replaced.
A lot of contracts are for a specific release, and a lot of IP gets contracted out (music, art, sometimes even game engines). Especially for music, it's not uncommon for the license to be very specific: you can use our music for this particular game, on this particular console, released in this particular region.
Which inspired someone to straight up offer it for free[0]. Essentially saying, "If you own the rights and have a problem with it, here is your chance to do something about it"
That being said, I am not sure why an interested party could not make their own knock-off version of the game. The game is a parody 60s James Bond with a female lead. Would anyone care if it was functionally the exact same game, but everyone was wearing a funny hat?
Then it would be a game with a funny hats - maybe a good game but with a funny hats and not the original one.
You can look Freedom approach to that idea. I tried it a couple of times and as someone who had it in original way, in DOS 6.22 and wtih ESS Blaster - it doesn't click for me.
I'm sure this was alluded to in NOCLIP's YouTube documentary on GOG[0].
It was said then that half of the battle was tracking down rights holders as IP had sometimes been absorbed through multiple acquisitions by the time they came to restore some games.
That's a weird comment. I'm on GNU/Linux, I can just go to the website, log in, go to my library, and download any game I want. What part of it isn't working for you?
Lame journalism. If they're struggling with spelling of basic surnames like Paczyński, Brzęczyszczykiewicz or Gżegżółka then what will they do if they come across harder ones like Stółzpowyłamywanyminogami or Chrząszczbrzmiwtrzciniewszczebrzeszynie.
Sigh, "bought" a copy of Dark Reign which I had a lot of fun with back in the day, but is doesn't run. Click on 'Play' and it briefly says "Syncing 0%" then the play gets shaded for 3 or 4 seconds and then lights up again like it has never been selected. Not a lot of direction on the 'support' page about where to go from there. So not a great initial experience.
Monitoring system calls (on Windows, that's a type of DLL call) is a good way to debug confusing processes that only last for a few seconds. I expect the launcher is launching some program, which is saying "I started successfully!" and then hitting an error state before it draws a window, so the launcher concludes you must've finished playing.
Sysinternals Process Monitor ("procmon") is your friend.
As much as I like the idea of GOG, it annoys me that they don't offer versions for the original hardware, as it would take little effort for them to do so.
Agreed. Playing VGA games in a DOSBox is nice, but I recovered my 386sx clone from my parents' garage that still boots DOS 6.22 on 5-1/4 floppy and I very much wish I hadn't given away all my disks (diskettes :) before I moved.
I was annoyed that I purchased Civilization III, and it came with a readme saying that by default it would launch the game with all expansions, but if I wanted to play an earlier, unexpanded version (which I did), I could just go to the install directory and start the earlier .exe.
They don't actually package the earlier .exes. You get one choice.
I like GOG a lot but it's wild to me that their GOG Galaxy client doesn't work on Linux! A lot of gamers who care about preservation and availability are spending money with Valve because Steam's DRM is mostly inoffensive and the Linux support is so good.
The addressable market segment of people who play PC games and also care about DRM-free accessibility would be larger if GOG's launcher ran on Linux and targeted Linux users. It seems like a logical overlap to me.
Valve is eating GOG's lunch in this segment but it could easily change. Sure it might be small but it's bigger than ever, still growing, and seems to fit GOG's mission.
I would definitely start repurchasing my Steam games DRM-free on GOG if only they provided a launcher with the tooling necessary to download & run them on my system.
As things stand now, and for all the good GOG does... it's not enough to be DRM-free but only distribute Windows installers. You've just outsourced the DRM scheme to Microsoft. If the software doesn't run on a DRM-free OS, the job is only halfway done.
And in the meantime, GOG's product is tragically subject to piracy, (I believe) partially enabled by their decision to _only_ package games for the OS upon which most piracy traditionally takes place! :( I hope this could be offset by packaging for a crowd with more ideological overlap.
I'm a Linux user who buys a lot of games on GOG and I've never had a problem running them using Wine stable, with the only exception being games that supposedly don't even work on Proton yet.
Majority of the games there don't even come in a native Linux form, and those that do can be a hit or miss when it comes to compatibility - at least one game I tried needed a dependency from a no longer available package. Alternatively a few titles come shipped with some kind of wrapper that's really just an outdated version of Wine surrounding a win32 EXE.
Also, isn't the point of buying something DRM free that you don't have to use a client or any other online feature? The offline installer has always been GOG's killer feature in my book, that's how you make sure the game gets truly preserved.
> Also, isn't the point of buying something DRM free that you don't have to use a client or any other online feature?
Agreed. I thought this was the whole point of GOG.
The problem with buying movies from streaming providers, games from Epic and Steam, etc. is that you don’t own them. They say you do, but even something like Movies Anywhere isn’t guaranteed for life. Downloading digital content is the surest way to ensure that in-theory you could against use it someday. Anything else is a false promise of forever.
How do you download the games? I tried logging in to download cyberpunk which I purchased on gog, and they wanted me to download tons of files individually! I couldn't even just click a "download all" button.
You could always use something like Heroic Launcher. https://heroicgameslauncher.com/ It can connect to GOG and other services.
Also https://github.com/arelate/vangogh
Every installer there comes with an executable and those files you mentioned, for some reason they are always split into 4GB chunks, that’s why there’s so many.
AFAIK download all is not available, you will have to get them one by one. But after that they’re yours to keep forever.
There is a third-party downloader that uses an API to grab binaries for all games in your library. I just download the individual files one by one, though.
> Valve is eating GOG's lunch in this segment
I think you are comparing apples and organges
valve will give you a game license, gog will sell you a game.
you can download, install and play all gog games forever with no drm.
(I use lgogdownloader and download all games to linux)
Apples and oranges yes, but to most users (even Linux users) there's only a very blurry line between these concepts. I admit this is not ideal.
I believe choice of storefront is more a service and support problem, and less about the product itself.
Game licensure and game ownership are equivalent products at the end of the day in most instances. Rugs could be pulled, yes, but thus far haven't been very often or to any significant extent (that I know of).
Most paying customers are fine to run proprietary code, accept DRM, or buy a license instead of owning a game. Even Linux users will do this if the company (Valve) has a decent track record at practicing "don't be evil" (they do).
As a Linux user, when you purchase a game from GOG (and I concede that this is ideologically superior to a license from Valve) you are on your own afterwards. Windows users can get a bit of help from Galaxy and I think GOG even does tech support now but this doesn't apply to our segment.
You must now divine a scheme whereby your game is made runnable. Cue fighting with distro repositories and Wine versions/prefixes/winetricks, or depending on a third party launcher (Bottles/Lutris/Heroic/pick one), or adding the game to the Steam client (that you probably have installed already anyway) because Steam knows how to run things with Proton... and then you must maintain this going forward.
This might not bother you or you may even find it therapeutic (and I do, for certain games). But the majority of the segment doesn't like it, and it won't scale as well as a first-party solution, not even for an individual user.
My assertion is that exchanging game ownership for game licensure currently looks like a pretty fair deal if I receive first-party support for running the game on my OS. But GOG could change that!
You have an executable with gog, but playing it forever requires long term support.
I don’t expect whatever windows may or may not be available in 2060 to be able to support such a download from 2025 in a playable fashion.
I think this is a moot argument, especially for x86 arch. I can run nearly almost any game built for windows 98 - till now, on linux.
I fully expect windows to not support such games.
And I also fully expect wine on linux to support them all. I like a lot of old games, and they run much better under wine than in windows these days.
Any game ever can run very well on any modern hardware using emulators or virtual machines.
That is quite false, especially if you mean "out of the box". And it's likely a temporary situation - there's no guarantee whatsoever that people will maintain x86 and some specific Nvidia Pixel Shader emulation support 50 years from now.
This has already happened, PC Gaming Wiki has entries for lots of games where support for various old methods of doing things no longer work, on real hardware on windows, and you need to use a variety of workarounds like dgvoodoo or a fix by a random third party modder to get the game to operate correctly. And that's before you consider defunct copy protection or trying to add improvements.
nVidia has dropped 32-bit PhysX support in 50-series cards, significantly impacting some older-but-not-old games, and there’s no real solution yet except to own an older card.
Given the amount of work emulator authors go to supporting consoles like the Neo Geo CD, with 8 not very good games (they had to do serious work, over many years, breaking the encryption), and the amazing cycle accurate emulators for consoles like NES and SNES, I’m confident we will continue to have good emulators in the future for any system anyone cares about.
There was an awkward period of 3d accelerated games that required 16-bit framebuffers; I've had no success getting them to run in emulation
> you can download, install and play all gog games forever with no drm.
Many games that GOG sells and a very large share of the new releases are DRMed. The Galaxy client is often how the DRM gets applied.
Want to play HoMM3 with your friends? You can still do that.
Try doing the same thing with a more recent "DRM-free" game.
> Many games that GOG sells and a very large share of the new releases are DRMed. The Galaxy client is often how the DRM gets applied.
Can you explain that assertion?
That's not in any way what gog says. Even california law says gog sells you games (while steam only licenses them)
https://www.gog.com/about_gog
I have a disconnected windows 11 vm, and install and play gog games in it all the time. Never an issue.
> That's not in any way what gog says.
Jesus Christ. It's exactly what GOG says. Compare https://www.gog.com/en/news/bgog_2022_update_2b_our_commitme...
> 1. The single-player mode has to be accessible offline.
> 2. Games you bought and downloaded can never be taken from you or altered against your will.
> 3. The GOG GALAXY client is and will remain optional for accessing single-player offline mode.
> Having said that, we believe that you have the right to make an informed choice about the content that you choose to enjoy and we won’t tell you how and where you can access or store your games. To make it easier to discover titles that include features like multiplayer, unlockable cosmetics, timed events, or user-generated content, we’re adding information about such functionalities on product pages. In short, you’ll always know.
If you want to play multiplayer HoMM3, you can. That's how the game was commercially released and it hasn't been updated to add DRM.
Modern releases DRM the game as a matter of course, and GOG defied their user base to say that that's fine with them. Do you want to play with your friend? You need an internet connection and multiple accounts registered with the vendor.
For a concrete example of Galaxy being the DRM implementation, the Gloomhaven executable you can download from GOG has the button to play multiplayer disabled. It will still work if you get around that - the functionality itself doesn't check anything. But the executable will only enable the button if you start it with Galaxy running and logged in to an account that, according to GOG, has purchased the game.
That doesn't sound like "digital rights management" to you?
There is also minigalaxy
I don't know about the overall market analysis so I'm not commenting on that. But I do know that personally, GOG meets my needs in spades and Valve doesn't, so I've spent a lot of money at GOG and will for the foreseeable future. I am a Linux guy and don't own any Windows machines. I couldn't care less about the Galaxy client. To be honest, I'm not even sure what it does -- I just know that I get along just fine without it.
For me, GOG is as close to perfect as I've found.
it's like the steam client but for gog + all the other markets like epic/xbox apparently including messaging.
the unification of other game stores is just largely broken. They haven't maintained their plugins for many years and as the stores change, functionality breaks in weird ways.
Yeah, I just looked it up. It doesn't look like it does anything that I need, so I'm not troubled by the absence of a Linux version.
Bad QA for actual Linux games was the main reason I stopped buying on gog. Even when a game had a (gog exclusive) Linux port using their weird "game inside a shell script" approach[0], often times I would run into more problems than just using wine/proton on the Windows build.
[0] apparently using this https://icculus.org/mojosetup/
Linux doesn't not prioritize backwards compatibility. It's time to stop trying to make linux native gaming work without a stable ABI.
I agree. Game devs are better off targeting proton as a platform, but Linux purists complain if there is no native port and you don't get the brownie points for putting in the effort.
I think there's plenty of brownie points to be had for making sure a game runs well under Proton... There's very little reason that GoG cannot do what Steam does with Proton for Windows games.
Linux has a very stable ABI. It's considered a bug if userland breaks.
If you want a stable userland, you can try using flatpaks. When I tried it, it downloaded entire root filesystems for Fedora and Ubuntu just so the applications would run.
It does work. The application appears to be unaware of the outer, incompatible distro.
I don't quite see how this approach wouldn't work for games.
I only run Linux at home, but on GOG I download the Windows versions and run them via Wine. This for me has had a higher success rate than keeping the native Linux versions around.
Steam provides the Steam Linux Runtime, which gives a stable environment to compile games against.
Android is Linux. It has loads of users and loads of games.
Don't conflate mobile free to play games (i.e. gambling simulators with a thin veneer) with actual games. I wouldn't be surprised if there were fewer actual games playable on Android than the full catalog for Sony PSP. Mobile free to play games are exclusively a way to prey on people's addictions in the hopes of finding enough "whales".
The Android version of the game Fractal no longer work (So I use the Windows version). And the only way to play the Steam version of Dungeon Defenders on Linux is to use the Windows version instead of the native one.
Even if Windows ever did disappear as an OS, it would remain as a backwards compatibility layer apparently...
It has a stable interface on top of Linux, which desktop linux does not have.
Android is not backward compatible. Many old apps are crashing or refuse to work on newer Androids.
I agree that GOG needs to port their client to Linux for all the reasons you stated, but as a workaround you can use Lutris which lets you log into your GOG account and download+install games (Windows games too).
It's not as pain free as Steam, because you sometimes still have to apply wine fixes, but it works well with the most popular games.
Heroic is way easier to use imo, but both are good options https://heroicgameslauncher.com/
My primary gripes with Lutris are:
1. it doesn't (at least recently?) always do a great job of handling multiple displays, either launching games on my second monitor, which I orient vertically or getting confused about which monitor to use and switching back and forth until eventually the instance (but not the Lutris client) crashes
2. I find myself getting into launcher hell where I'll use a different wine version for one game and when I switch to a different game, it's using this new wine version and stops working
Not sure if Heroic solves these issues but I would try it again (didn't have any luck setting it up initially) if it does
I can answer the first on at least:
If you are using KDE then there is a global Window rules setting and Heroic actually obey those rules, so you can force to launch a game always on X display, always minimized etc.
https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/kwin/kcontrol/windowspecific... (not sure that's the most up to date manual)
I've been using Lutris on i3 with multiple monitors. Enabling gamescope has been extremely helpful. I just get a window that tells the game to render at some fixed resolution, and it is happy to scale fullscreen or any size. I've been using i3's fullscreen toggle, it goes to the current monitor, or I can move it to another with my regular i3 binds.
It looks like gamescope has it's own fullscreen shortcut (super + f), but people complain about it about it going to the wrong display. Maybe your window manager offers a more consistent full screen option like i3 does.
I hadn't heard of Heroic before. I'll check it out. Thank you.
Heroic Games Launcher and Lutris both authenticate with GOG and allow you to install their games.
How long has it been? Like a decade? That's when I bought my last GOG game and decided to wait for a proper Linux client.
Having a nice way to view and manage a game library is essential at this point. I don't want to do it manually.
I believe the problem is that most of the games they host are Windows games, so in that regard, Linux doesn't make sense.
And maintaining something like Proton is pretty complex, there's so many different distros. Actually ensuring the game works probably was too big of a task for them.
You can always add your gog games to Lutris though.
> I believe the problem is that most of the games they host are Windows games, so in that regard, Linux doesn't make sense.
The vast majority of games on Steam are Windows games, yet the Linux Steam client runs them fine via Proton.
I don't think people are asking for GOG to make Linux-native games. People are asking for an official GOG client that can handle installing games via Proton/Wine, handles cloud saves, account management, etc.
If a bunch of open source hobbyists can create a viable multi-platform client (see Heroic Games Launcher), then so can GOG.
Proton runs GOG Galaxy well too, so what exactly do you want?
Just use Heroic launcher. Works great.
I use https://lutris.net for this. One starter for all.
It would be great if everyone could release Linux binaries, but smaller studios are extremely stretched and with no shortage of work as it is. Considering the quality of Windows emulation today, it's quite possible that the windows API simply becomes the new "Java for games", where studios test their games on Linux and never release a native binary.
It really does seem like the idea of DRM free games and Linux goes hand in hand. I would be really interested to hear about why they don't currently offer Linux support for their launcher.
I'm in the same boat here. I would be more than willing to rebuy some games on GOG if they supported Linux.
The idea of running old Windows games definitely doesn't go hand in hand with Linux. And I think GoG simply has way more Windows experience, lots of work to do, and little realistic chance of tapping some huge market if they spent all the time you need to support 2-3 major Linux distros - especially when you need to offer things like Multi-player support as well on those, plus maybe game recording and whatever else the overlay offers (GoG Galaxy is not just a storefront).
Why not? My experience has been that old games run easier and better on Linux than Windows thanks to Wine and Microsoft's stupidity
Does it work with wine/proton? anecdotal but even in apps/games where they make a linux port the wine/proton version sometimes works better.
I have Linux GOG games which refuse to run for one reason or another. Some outdated library, compiler, whatever that is not on a modern distribution.
If you want easiest future proofing, you have to use the windows release.
Heroic launcher works great and also doubles up as an Epic client and you can just run your own installers with it too (this is how I install Battle Net and Diablo 4).
I give GOG a lot of leeway, because in my heart of hearts, I know I will eventually curse steam lockin ( that day may be far away, but it is in our collective future ) so I throw them some money every now and then.
Still, you do have a point, by comparison Steam is a lot more polished on that front. I would complain more, but my personal hangup is very niche to begin with so it does not seem fair ( remote view in vm ). It is small things, but small things add up.
The client works very well on Linux via Proton.
I don't think a niche store like GoG has to put a massive investment into marginal platform like Linux when Proton makes it work very well by itself.
A bigger problem for me is not lack of Linux Galaxy client, but that a bunch of developers only release Linux versions on Steam (Larian with BG3 is a recent example).
But I agree in general. The issue is probably that GOG is a smaller store than Steam and Linux segment for them in result is also way smaller than for Steam, so they don't see it as a priority.
Meanwhile you can use lgogdownloader.
It's sort of interesting that they support Linux as platform for games sales to begin with. Besides them, Steam and itch.io who even does?
>Linux versions on Steam (Larian with BG3 is a recent example)
Not just on Steam but only for Steam Deck
But I think that's an understandable position. One single distro with one single hardware (okay two because the LCD and OLED versions has some differences).
Once you go down the "full Linux support" way it's a hellhole of different distros, compositors, proprietary and open source hardware drivers etc. This is where Flatpak, AppImage, snap etc. could actually play a good part imo if done well but I'm not sure I've seen any games released on Steam for Linux in those formats (maybe Steam not even allow it)
Edit: you can download BG3 for any Linux distro not just the Steam Deck
Good chance that this version will run on most up to date distros without much issue. So I don't see it as a reason not to release it.
> proprietary and open source hardware drivers etc
Somewhat of a problem, but not so much anymore, most Linux gamers know to use AMD and Mesa. So I'd say their focus on SteamOS is a good base of support.
> A bigger problem for me is not lack of Linux Galaxy client, but that a bunch of developers only release Linux versions on Steam (Larian with BG3 is a recent example).
It's because building for Linux expects specific versions of system libraries like glibc, if you compile your game on newer glibc, it may not run on older version of glibc at all. Steam solves it with Steam Linux Runtime compatibility layer which forces the game to run with specific glibc (and others) shipped with Steam on Linux, other video game stores have no equivalent solutions.
Those are sometimes related. I know Tooth and Tail never released on Linux on GoG because they use the stores networking for multiplayer. So you can't do that on Linux without Galaxy but can on Steam.
Yeah, that's a good point.
To be fair I could have sworn that BG3 had a Linux version.
Using heroic and wine is so seamless that I don't even remember if I have been running a game natively or not. It just works.
For now I rely on Heroic Launcher and it does a decent job for my GOG games on Bazzite.
Honestly thanks to Lutris, I have no want of a native linux GOG client and would rather GOG and others contributed to an already excellent solution and for there to be less distributor owned clients.
Honestly Heroic Launcher is way better than Galaxy, integrates with Proton, and includes other shitty launchers like Epic
> I like GOG a lot but it's wild to me that their GOG Galaxy client doesn't work on Linux!
The client is a bad thing. What you want is for it to stop working on Windows.
Why would you want it to work on Linux?
>Paczynski says they once hired a private investigator to find someone living off the grid in the UK. He had unknowingly inherited the rights to several games
My grandfather was a "landman" for oil companies tracking down mineral rights and has all sorts of stories like this. It can all get messy and weird fast.
Stuff like tracking down people you'd assume would be dead but are in fact ancient and alive at 103 in a nursing home. Convincing a bank that through a series of mergers and acquisitions that they are the rightful owners of the mineral rights to a piece of land foreclosed on in the great depression by a bank that itself failed. Generations of poor people dying without wills or settling probate. Inheritance battles spanning generations until no one alive was around for the start. Step mother that swooped in and married a man at the end of his life, inherited everything, remarried, had kids and left everything to them instead of the step kids.
I work for an oil and gas brokerage company. What you say is absolutely true (Especially your last sentence!). Some wild stories. We've certainly dug up some family drama throughout the whole process.
Tracing ownership of land back 400 years to some Spanish land grant…
> Convincing a bank that through a series of mergers and acquisitions that they are the rightful owners of the mineral rights to a piece of land foreclosed on in the great depression by a bank that itself failed.
What's the goal of convincing the bank that they own some land? Is this a case where the original bank foreclosed on the property, resold the surface while carefully keeping the mineral rights, and then failed? And the current owner of everything-but-the-mineral-rights is fully aware of not possessing them?
If you determine that someone else is the owner of some land, and they deny it, you can just start doing whatever it is that you want to do on the land, and you'll become the owner.
>What's the goal of convincing the bank that they own some land? Is this a case where the original bank foreclosed on the property, resold the surface while carefully keeping the mineral rights, and then failed? And the current owner of everything-but-the-mineral-rights is fully aware of not possessing them?
Pretty much exactly. It's pretty common if not the norm. Splitting the rights is normal when say a large ranch is broken up into plots. It would be very rare for say the deed to a suburban home to include the mineral rights.
Maybe we should bring back copyright renewal. If you had to file a renewal with the government every 20 years it would solve a lot of the problems with abandonware.
Copyright was 20+20. MOST problems with it come from endless extensions and no format shifting exemption.
Fix those and we’d be muuuuch better off.
You also have to charge a fee/pigouvian tax on the renewals. When renewal is free, there's a substantial deadweight drag on society as a result from everyone renewing by default.
Even without a fee, requiring renewal at least means stuff that people have totally forgotten about doesn't get renewed, and stuff that does get renewed at least has a recentish owner on record.
It would be a large improvement over the status quo of having a term of 70 years after the death of the author.
Even if all it required was one to sign an affidavit saying they are the current copyright holder, that would solve a LOT of archiving problems.
This is why copyrights should need registration and renewal. They used to, and things dropped out of copyright when nobody paid for the renewal.
There's a similar problem with mineral rights. US states register land ownership, but not mineral right ownership is not as well tracked. Litigation over abandoned mineral rights is not rare.
Link to the actual article instead of a page summarizing the article: https://www.thegamebusiness.com/p/when-we-launched-resident-...
I briefly worked at Microsoft xbox back compat where we made the Xbox OG and Xbox 360 games work on Xbox one and newer generations and I know the PMs spent considerable time and effort doing similar things for the earlier Xbox games to be allowed for us to have them work on newer Xbox generations. It's really surprising that sometimes IP changes hands enough in some cases the owners might not have even known they owned something. I think the legal and permission always definitely one of the harder problems. I know music in some games were also particularly challenging, a few games had to have sound tracks removed or replaced.
Why would you need permission to make a game work on a newer platform? Were the changes made to the code of the game, or of the console?
A lot of contracts are for a specific release, and a lot of IP gets contracted out (music, art, sometimes even game engines). Especially for music, it's not uncommon for the license to be very specific: you can use our music for this particular game, on this particular console, released in this particular region.
Special shout out to the No One Lives Forever (NOLF) series of Spy-parody FPS. Stuck in rights purgatory for 25 years now.
https://www.thegamer.com/no-one-lives-forever-the-operative-...
Which inspired someone to straight up offer it for free[0]. Essentially saying, "If you own the rights and have a problem with it, here is your chance to do something about it"
That being said, I am not sure why an interested party could not make their own knock-off version of the game. The game is a parody 60s James Bond with a female lead. Would anyone care if it was functionally the exact same game, but everyone was wearing a funny hat?
[0] http://nolfrevival.tk/
Then it would be a game with a funny hats - maybe a good game but with a funny hats and not the original one.
You can look Freedom approach to that idea. I tried it a couple of times and as someone who had it in original way, in DOS 6.22 and wtih ESS Blaster - it doesn't click for me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_modding#Freedoom
I'm sure this was alluded to in NOCLIP's YouTube documentary on GOG[0].
It was said then that half of the battle was tracking down rights holders as IP had sometimes been absorbed through multiple acquisitions by the time they came to restore some games.
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffngZOB1U2A
A weird quirk of the system. PIs are the only private-sector way to get certain kinds of information about people, including corporate entities.
Most voted comment on the last YouTube ad, which I liked by the way: where's the Linux support?
I support gog, I've been buying games from them for a long time. By yeah, where's the Linux support?
That's a weird comment. I'm on GNU/Linux, I can just go to the website, log in, go to my library, and download any game I want. What part of it isn't working for you?
Call me naive but I think that's some good news.
Lame journalism. If they're struggling with spelling of basic surnames like Paczyński, Brzęczyszczykiewicz or Gżegżółka then what will they do if they come across harder ones like Stółzpowyłamywanyminogami or Chrząszczbrzmiwtrzciniewszczebrzeszynie.
/s?
More like irony, perhaps.
I actually think perhaps not.
kudos for the effort, really.
>Of course, this will never happen because executives don't care about preserving games.
It happens with Denuvo because executives recognize licensing DRM software costs more than the revenue the game brings in.
I play on Linux only. It's a shame GOG doesn't support it.
lookup heroic launcher. all gog games run just fine signed into that.
Sigh, "bought" a copy of Dark Reign which I had a lot of fun with back in the day, but is doesn't run. Click on 'Play' and it briefly says "Syncing 0%" then the play gets shaded for 3 or 4 seconds and then lights up again like it has never been selected. Not a lot of direction on the 'support' page about where to go from there. So not a great initial experience.
Can you get more info by launching the game from a terminal?
Also, shot in the dark, but maybe try the solution from this old thread: https://www.gog.com/forum/dark_reign_series/dark_reign_2_not...
Monitoring system calls (on Windows, that's a type of DLL call) is a good way to debug confusing processes that only last for a few seconds. I expect the launcher is launching some program, which is saying "I started successfully!" and then hitting an error state before it draws a window, so the launcher concludes you must've finished playing.
Sysinternals Process Monitor ("procmon") is your friend.
As much as I like the idea of GOG, it annoys me that they don't offer versions for the original hardware, as it would take little effort for them to do so.
Agreed. Playing VGA games in a DOSBox is nice, but I recovered my 386sx clone from my parents' garage that still boots DOS 6.22 on 5-1/4 floppy and I very much wish I hadn't given away all my disks (diskettes :) before I moved.
I was annoyed that I purchased Civilization III, and it came with a readme saying that by default it would launch the game with all expansions, but if I wanted to play an earlier, unexpanded version (which I did), I could just go to the install directory and start the earlier .exe.
They don't actually package the earlier .exes. You get one choice.