Official client and support for my platform of choice is a big plus only Steam bothers to have.
I have recently realized that I could claim tons of games from amazon with prime subscription that are claimed in GOG. And it seems GOG has some games available for Linux. There usually are couple of download links for different OSes
Shit buggy client you can’t customize and with integrated ram-eating webbrowser you are forced to launch to play the game. Vs. native hubs that integrate GoG, itch & co seamlessly, setup and runners and all.
I get both sides of this. I understand wanting GoG to have an official Linux client, but the Steam Client is such garbage.
I purchased Outerworlds on Steam and could not get it to load.
I pirated it and run it through WINE and have no problems.
Call me when GOG Galaxy supports Gnu/Linux.
Unofficial:
Minigalaxy and Heroic are both clients which support GoG
And when GoG does regional pricing.
So much more expensive if you don’t live in the US/Western Europe.
I use Lutris with GOG works great
Bought northgard on GOG, it turns out the game needs GOG galaxy for the multiplayer. It has the icon for “supports Linux” though. Really pissed about GOGs marketing there.
(I use Lutris as well, but it sadly does not solve everything)
Meh, Proton alone makes me like Steam a bit more than GOG. Itch.io is also nice, but for some shitty reasons, they have some problems with my debit card. While it is nice to support small devs, I hate to support Peter Thiel the absolute piece of human garbage with my payment.
I’m on Linux as well and I just use heroic for my gog library
I like both Heroic and Lutris
I use both Steam with Proton (for Steam store games) and Lutris with Wine (for the rest, mainly GOG) and the rate of one-click-setup success in both is about the same (maybe slightly better for Steam), with Lutris with Wine being more easy to tweak for solving the problems for those games that won’t just directly run, plus Lutris lets me do way much more configuration customizing, so for example all my games under Lutris run sandboxed with networking disabled by default.
Granted, I am a Techie so I can more easilly figure out how to tweak all those configuration options and how to track launch problems in the logs.
Maybe Steam with Proton has a slight advantage for non-Techies (or Techies who just don’t have the patience to even try to tweak things when a game won’t run and just give up on it and move on), but it’s not really that amazing - I get the impression it’s more of a problem of misinformation (people hear about Steam and Proton and how it’s all great, so try it and stick with it, but they don’t hear enough about Lutris and the Heroic Launcher so end up not even trying either of them): it looks a lot to me like an instance of the usual “open source vs commercial software” marketing problem.
Mind you, without Lutris (or, as others mentioned, the Heroic Launcher which is similar) with all the nice install scripts properly configuring Wine for the specific game being installed, trying to game on Linux by directly configuring Wine (+DXVK) would be as an experience bad as gaming on Linux was a decade ago.
PS: That said, using the GOG client on Linux is a hassle and best avoided. both Lutris and Heroic integrate with GOG, listing the games in your account and seamlessly downloading the installers when you chose to install a game.
Imagine what happens if
SteamValve just stops developing Proton.Oh, haha, well, then uh, in not too much time, linux gaming for all future games beyond that point goes back to being roughly where WINE was a decade ago, future games that work on linux goes back to being a really weird, esoteric, niche thing.
People really don’t understand that Proton basically is the most important project in the history of linux, of free software, in terms of getting an actually sizeable chunk of people to use linux regularly, to abandon corporate OSs.
Corporations aren’t your friend.
Gog doesn’t have lower prices for poorer regions. Paying 20-50% more for noDRM is no-no for me.
I’m not trying to defend anyone here, though it might seem like that, but I’m not sure why valve is lumped in with this, especially since that’s the steam logo.
Steam, as a platform, hasn’t released much of anything, ever. Valve has been sitting mostly on the sidelines since half-life 2 episode 2 and HL:Alyx.
Steam itself is just a marketplace.
I get that a lot of publishers on steam will fall into the categories of games that are the subject of the meme, but I have a hard time piling steam with the games that are published on it.
And yes, corporations are not our friends, and all billionaires are bad billionaires, eat the rich and all that… I’m just saying. There’s a lot of bigger, much worse, fish to fry than gaben, valve, and steam in this discussion. That could have been EA’s logo, or the Xbox logo (or ms game studios or whatever) or any number of massive publishers that are relevant here. Using the steam logo is lazy at best.
Well, steam isn’t just a marketplace. A marketplace would be just a place to buy keys, or similar. Steam is an ecosystem, with a market, and a launcher, and a community hub, and a modding platform. The multiplayer integration that many games rely on for matchmaking/lobbies.
And every game on steam uses at least steam’s DRM, where you are required to connect to the Internet every now and then to verify ownership of your library.They have been the only platform to really try to support Linux though, and have made huge strides in the last few years. Steam is a big enough influence on the games economy that some of their choices become industry standards. And the 30% cut is the price devs pay to get into their system.
Like the previous poster, I’m not defending steam. No good billionaires, fight for the proletariat, down with the elite, etc
Not all steam games use steam DRM. It’s opt in by the developer. Lots of steam games you can literally just copy out of steam onto a USB key and run it. No DRM at all.
Don’t get me wrong they are skeezy in other ways (charging I indie deva 30% and big publishers less) but if you’re going to criticize them, then at least criticize them for something real.
Huh, I didn’t realize the DRM was optional, that’s good at least. Thanks for the update.
Not every game on steam uses its DRM, I have steam games that are outright DRM free
Reject consumerism, embrace FOSS.
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What’s the blue middle one? Don’t recognize the icon.
battle net, it’s blizzard’s launcher
I feel like GOG would be more popular if their client were better. Maybe more usable with a controller too?
And something that would help competition in the game launcher space in particular would be if OSes had great built-in controller support (and controller OS navigation) so we wouldn’t have to rely on Steam for it.
Or piracy>:)
My own negative experiences with Steam vs GOG were:
- Moving homes and having no landline Internet for a while and not being able to most install most of my Steam games on my desktop gaming PC because mobile Internet is slow and expensive so installing a big game literally costs money. With GOG I just downloaded the offline installer at work into a USB Flash Disk and then installed it on my desktop at home.
- Not being able to install perfectly functional games from Steam into a machine with an old Windows version because the Steam client didn’t support it anymore (even though the games were compatible with that version). Mind you, you that machine shouldn’t even be connected to the Internet for safety reasons, which again would stop me from installing games from Steam even if the client worked.
Beyond that with Steam you have the risk that Steam takes away one or more of your game for some reason (say, licensing problems or just Payment Processors pressuring them to do it), you lose access to your account and can’t recover it (unusual, but possible), your account is forcibly closed for an arbitrary reason with no appeal (not happened yet with Steam but did happen with others such as Google), the store goes bankrupt and closes (not happened yet with steam but has happened with sellers of music with DRM if I remember it correctly), games without DRM or with Steam’s light DRM (the one simply using steam_api.dll, for which there are implementations which just emulate the API without phoning home) get forcibly updated to hard DRM so whilst before you could run it offline, now you can’t.
(Mind you, you get some of these problems - such as risking the loss of your entire game collection if the store goes belly up - with GOG if you just use GOG Galaxy and don’t download the offline installers for all your games, but at least there it’s entirely down to you as the store does nothing to make it harder for you to eliminate those risks)
Steam makes a lot of effort to keep itself inside the loop of gamers playing the games, not forcibly so (as somebody pointed out, they don’t force developers to use DRM) but more with a soft sales push (they offer it for free to developers and publishers and purposefully a bunch of “easy to implement” online features such as Achievements to using the “phone home” Steam DRM to induce developers to use it). They also do not at all indicate before a purchase on the Steam store if a game has Steam DRM or not, so that consumers have to go out of their way to make an informed buying decision, if at all possible. Even for the games on Steam without any DRM one has to actually use an unsupported process to keep a copy of that game after installed from Steam (a simple copy & paste which those who know what a filesystem is can do, though maybe not the less tech literate, though gamers tend to be more tech literate), so people tend not to do it. The result is that most Steam games have DRM and most game playing done on games from Steam involves the phone-home check of the Steam DRM.
Meanwhile in GOG it’s the exact opposite - people have to really go crazily out of their way to run a game from GOG with DRM (apparently there are one or two which slipped the net, and for others I guess you could implement your own DRM around it by encrypting the binary or something 😜)
Ultimately it boils down to weather one is comfortable or not with having for their games collection the risks I listed above.
Personally, with my almost 4 decades experience as a gamer (and almost that much as a Techie), I’m not at all comfortable with that since over the years I’ve seen multiple instances of people getting fucked by their software or even hardware being unnecessarily tied to a vendor for their normal usage loop.
That said, people going into this aware of the risks and still cool with them, then, hey, 👍, you’re an adult, making a well informed decision and will only affect yourself it the risks do materialized into a problem, so you’ll get no criticism from me.
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I’m confused as to how people with English as a second language even learn the word “costumer”. It’s reasonably obscure!
Who made that spelling and the pronunciation though? Seems like two separate people. Gets me every time.
Old? I got Silksong from them on release day.
Their acronym is “Good Old Games”, so I suspect it’s a play on that.
They were Good Old Games for about 4 years until 2012, when they started selling modern games and rebranded to just GOG, dropping the whole “old games” moniker.
(Yeah, I’m also old. I was there when they rebranded, but I thought it was recently, around 2020!)
They also work to preserve old games, instead of just serving remasters.
So, where can I purchase Nine Sols on GOG?
It’s ridiculous that Nine Sols will get a Nintendo Switch release before going on GOG. I guess “many gamers” aren’t asking for it - oh wait: https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/nine_sols https://www.gog.com/dreamlist/game/nine-sols-2024
A marketplace that is all DRM-free is good, but when they begin to concede on censorship for the political agendas of certain countries because it might affect their Chinese releases because they have far more of a horse in the race than Valve as a developer does in the Chinese market, you have to balance what you consider a bigger issue: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1809540/Nine_Sols/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/555220/Detention/
It only affects a very small minority of games, so it’s up to you whether you consider the censorship a deal breaker. Would a game with an Easter egg criticizing any other country’s politics caused the uproar Devotion did? There’s no shortage of games that do, and as a central plot element as opposed to a simple Easter egg. Then there’s also the fact that GOG insulted people’s intelligence with the excuse of “many gamers”, specially given their continued silence on other Red Candle Game releases that have no similar issues.
If an art form cannot be used as a means of criticism, then it is not one that is free.
https://artandmedialaw.com/artistic-expression-and-free-speech/
When fundamentals like this are so easily violated under ridiculous premises, further capitulation isn’t far behind.
