Today, GOG officially announced Galaxy 2.0 and their aim seems to be to pull everyone together under one roof.
There are two things that matter to all of us gamers: the games we play and the friends we play them with. But as more titles come with dedicated launchers and clients, our games and gaming buddies become scattered in between them. With GOG GALAXY 2.0, you’ll be able to combine multiple libraries into one and connect with your friends across all gaming platforms!
It's like a much fancier version of Steam's own ability to add games installed from other sources, as Galaxy 2.0 will also support cross-launcher friends lists and chat making it sound pretty darn handy. They do also state you can "Connect more platforms and add new features with open-source integrations.". Those hoping that is some kind of olive branch being extended for Linux will likely be disappointed though, going by their FAQ on the newer dedicated Galaxy site it sounds more like it's simply for adding other services into the client itself for those GOG haven't yet done.
This would have been the perfect time to finally announce the ridiculously long-overdue Linux support for GOG Galaxy (especially with the Epic Store also not supporting Linux), sadly GOG are continuing to leave Linux out. In response to a user question on Twitter about Linux, the GOG team simply said "GOG GALAXY 2.0 will be available for Windows and Mac.". While an honest answer, it's also pretty blunt. No mention of it coming, just a whole lot of nothing.
It's worth noting the wishlist entry "Release the GOG Galaxy client for linux" on GOG's own website with over 21K votes, has been listed as "in progress" for a long time now (at least as far back as 2015 going by the Wayback Machine). You would think by now we would have had some sort of sign.
Considering even itch.io, a tiny little outfit has managed to support Linux really well with their open source client you would think after multiple years GOG would.
I've reached out to GOG, to see if they would like a chat about it. I will update if/when they reply.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Last edited by Appelsin on 23 May 2019 at 4:56 pm UTC
Our platform needs more games.If I can add to this, our platform also needs more gamers. :)
Mohandevir 23 May 2019
Our platform needs more games.If I can add to this, our platform also needs more gamers. :)
...And to achieve that, Wine is not the solution. Lutris, may become a part of the solution, if it ever becomes fully automated like in: "Click install and play". Anyway, as long as there is no mainstream pre-installed Linux hardware (excluding developper stuff) sold on Gamestop (EBgames), bestbuy, walmart, amazon, newegg, DELL and the likes, Linux will remain a niche product treated like a 2nd grade citizen.
That's my only complaint about Valve; they didn't pushed as hard as they could have to make the Steam Machines a big deal. It served as a proof of concept. And, like it or not, it led us to Stadia.
Last edited by Mohandevir on 23 May 2019 at 5:31 pm UTC
There are also a few occasions where I'd be glad about incremental updates. I don't mind re-downloading a GB or two, but when games measure 40GB or more it gets tedious fast. For those I'd consider using Galaxy. But generally, I like the Linux offline installers better, and once a game has matured I like to keep the final version around on a local drive, just in case.
So all in all, no big surprise, and not a really big disappointment either.
If they don't listen on twitter or forums, maybe we can get them numbers if we come together and sign up.
Then when the BETA is ready and if they still don't support Linux, they will get a lot of numbers from all of us who can't participate.
https://www.gogalaxy.com/
slaapliedje 23 May 2019
GOG installers are ridiculously slow, though, always have been. I do not know what they do with these files other than unpacking them, but every GOG installation just takes ages
For Linux installers, they are using Mojosetup, and it's using simple zip as far as I know for compression. Decompression should be possible to do in parallel using all cores, but no idea why they aren't doing that. For Windows installers they are using innosetup. Not sure if it supports parallelization. Nothing stops them from leveraging high LZMA grade compression with chunking and indexing, like pixz is doing.
Last edited by Shmerl on 26 May 2019 at 3:31 am UTC
Today, GOG officially announced Galaxy 2.0 and their aim seems to be to pull everyone together under one roof."Everyone" :D
Wake me up when Galaxy for Linux is a thing. I stopped buying games from GOG a while ago. At least they're not as hostile as Epic, that's why I'm not going to boycott them completely. But I'm slightly pissed by their moves, though.
michaldybczak 1 Jun 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvnOXIiJrMw
Last edited by michaldybczak on 1 Jun 2019 at 2:40 pm UTC
Did you guys see this interview? GOG Galaxy 2 will be open source and they are expecting the community to improve it, so it's not that impossible to see Linux version in the near feature, maybe not the official one but it will be done knowing the Linux community ;) :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvnOXIiJrMw
They are only talking about the integrations with other platforms. It was a part of the original announcement: "Community platform integrations
Connect more platforms and add new features with open-source integrations." Source: https://www.gogalaxy.com/en/
It just means that if there is no official support for cross platform chat etc with for example itch.io(do they have have things like chat?) then the community can make such an integration layer. There has been no statement regarding open sourcing the rest of Galaxy 2.0.
Apparently I'm a dying breed, but I miss the old gog. Don't like that they are chasing after and replicating Steam in everything they do. Wouldn't be surprised if they dropped the DRM Free "principle" (LOL) at some point too. They've dropped everything else they once stood for and (claimed they) believed in.
In a sense Humble Bundle is even more sad. At least I still check out GOG and still buy games there from time to time. Definitely a case of "least bad". WTF happened to the gaming industry? :'(
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