Supraland is leaving GOG after less than a year, dev says sales were low

What do you mean by that? It doesn't update installed games, does it?

It updates installed games, when you run it with proper parameters. It's not automatic (i.e. something that runs without your intervention).


Last edited by Shmerl on 9 June 2020 at 8:55 pm UTC

Game is good buy overhped.

This dev aside, I tend to shy away from GOG even though I am highly sympathetic do DRM-free gaming. The reasons are that, as a Linux gamer, GOG is simply a bigger hassle than Steam. I have to sort out libfoo problems with 70% of the games in my library that have native support (frankly, I have less problems running ancient Win32 games in Wine often enough). GOG should also be looking to, at the very least, piggy back off of Valve and Codeweaver's work with Proton. But nothing has even been mentioned there.

And all of GOG's recent moves point to a deemphasizing of the DRM-free stance of the platform. We already have games like Granda 2 phoning home, for example.

This isn't about Linux though. He's removing the game from GOG. Completely.

But yeah, from a Linux perspective, GOG is just worse for everything. Worse support (do they refund?), no client, no Linux target for Devs, no multiplayer framework, no chat, no achievements, no trading platform...

It's just, worse. But hey kids, it's DRM free!

As minority (Linux gamers) of a minority (anti-DRM gamers) we'll be waiting a looooooooooong ass time for 'Good Old Games' to give a shit about us, let alone some lone developer who didn't do his research for his niche, if pretty, first person puzzler.

GOG provided refunds long before Steam started doing the same, so yeah, they refund. I used it only once personally, and they didn't cause any troubles with it.


Last edited by Shmerl on 9 June 2020 at 10:05 pm UTC

I was thinking of buying it, it was on my wishlist since the GOG release, and then I thought the game would be on sale on the GOG Summer sale, but no....

If you've got Humble Monthly... you get it for $1.

The Humble Bundle version is not DRM-Free. And I don't get any Humble Monthly anyway.

I also get annoyed at the many games on GOG that elsewhere have Linux versions, but they don't provide one themselves.

Yeah, that's a mess. The worst cases are major games which are missing ports from Feral for instance.

Does GOG have the infrastructure to split sales between multiple publishers, depending on the platform a game is downloaded to? If not, that could explain why.

Does GOG have the infrastructure to split sales between multiple publishers, depending on the platform a game is downloaded to? If not, that could explain why.

They have the infrastructure (such as they gather download statistics), but I'm not sure how exactly they are handling it in regards to payments to developers. There is some problem in that whole process, but what it is exactly no one explained.

Feral aren't the only porting company though, so it's them in particular who somehow are affected by this issue, no one else seems to have it.


Last edited by Shmerl on 9 June 2020 at 10:44 pm UTC

That is too bad. Supraland was a surprise hit for me and one of my favourite games of the last year.

I care about DRM-free but agree with the comments about GOG being a pain. Linux has always been an afterthought for them. The dev dropping linux is a bigger deal for me. I found out that he did the end credit music with his crazy band:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlLbcViQ-sU&feature=emb_title

(The dev plays the instruments in the video). Talented guy - unfortunate that he has some distorted views regarding linux.

But yeah, from a Linux perspective, GOG is just worse for everything. Worse support (do they refund?), no client, no Linux target for Devs, no multiplayer framework, no chat, no achievements, no trading platform...

Then again, it's nice not having achievements and game time tracking forced upon me. I wish Steam would make those optional...

But yeah, from a Linux perspective, GOG is just worse for everything. Worse support (do they refund?), no client, no Linux target for Devs, no multiplayer framework, no chat, no achievements, no trading platform...

Then again, it's nice not having achievements and game time tracking forced upon me. I wish Steam would make those optional...

To be fair, Steam doesn't force that on you, the developer does. There are plenty of games on Steam, including many of Valve's games, that will run without the Steam client running. Supraland is one of these, when it runs. Currently, I get a segmentation fault on Supraland, but it used to run well, even without the Steam client running.

To be fair, Steam doesn't force that on you, the developer does. There are plenty of games on Steam, including many of Valve's games, that will run without the Steam client running. Supraland is one of these, when it runs. Currently, I get a segmentation fault on Supraland, but it used to run well, even without the Steam client running.

Check Steam forum thread. Removing/renaming "$GAME_INSTALL_DIR/Supraland/Content/Paks/Supraland-WindowsNoEditor.pak" does the trick.

I'm not sure why so much people advocates for the removal of the native build when you are free to opt-in to the other one if you feel that windows version works better (in fact, native install has all Windows version files...).

Regarding the "dev", it's quite weird that creating GOG installer for each release is an "extra work" when it should be a super scriptable task (maybe the hassle is the upload of the new installers?).

Yeah, I'm surprised some have a hard time with a workflow that creates some tarball or something that can be uploaded to GOG. GOG repackage things on their own anyway.


Last edited by Shmerl on 10 June 2020 at 1:12 am UTC

Butthurt & ragequit?

Going onto GOG I expected maybe something like 10% of Steam, but it's more like 1%. Same with releasing a Linux version. It's all worth so little for us that it's rather annoying to have to do the extra work all the time and carry that weight around. I wouldn't do it again.

-1% here and -1% there, it's -2% already. Later the developer could find that every localization brings only +1% of sales and drop it too. I think shrinking their audience is the most stupid thing a manufacturer can do. Gaben does everything to expand Steam, and that's why he is a billionaire. The Supraland dev is just yet another Phil Fish (does anyone remember him?)

The game is good though, despite runs with poor performance and crashes too often. I should propably try Proton for it.

..how in relation to DRM-free gaming that "98-99% of players don't care"

But it's true. Does anyone disagree?

depends on the DRM.
DRMs that make it impossible to play RDR2, or anno1800 on linux suck
i dont mind steams DRM

linux support or not. drm or not. supraland seems like a nice game. i put it on my wishlist

The game is good though, despite runs with poor performance and crashes too often. I should propably try Proton for it.

Funny enough, this is one of those games that runs flawlessly and with better perf in Mesa than with Nvidia blob. I played from start to end the game and I probably got one or two crashes in 30hs.

I only get annoyed when DRM stops games from working under Linux (EAC AND BE for example), or when the DRM kills performance (denuvo). Generally I prefer my games DRM free, but some have multiplayer components which get gated depending on the store you use so it can be difficult.

As for steam, I can disable DRM from any game if I so wish, or run in offline mode (you can force games to do this with steamapi dll wrappers which is legal here).

Also is it really hard work to keep a game on GOG? really? I mean common you basically just upload the drm-free version whereas steam needs you to integrate their API stuff.... Just doesn't seem plausible, is GOG loosing them money? did they GATE the multiplayer community on GOG? thats a good way to kill sales!


Last edited by TheRiddick on 10 June 2020 at 2:37 am UTC

I tried the demo and enjoyed the gameplay but like many others I found the the performance was too bad to be worthy of my money. It is no secret that Linux and GOG are both a much lower marketshare than Steam and Windows so I'm not sure why it came as a shock that either would have low sales. Had they worked towards improving the Linux version they may have gotten more sales. I looked at all the patches that have come out for Supraland and found only one performance fix and it was before the Linux version was released. They fixed lots of bugs which is good but they didn't address a known issue with Linux.

1-2% of a lot of money is still a lot of money. If that math doesn't work out for you, sure, go ahead and drop GOG and/or Linux. But if these 1-2% didn't cover at least the cost of keeping multi-platform deployment in mind (I am avoiding the word "porting", because in 2020, if you have to "port" your game to other platforms, you did it wrong in the first place), your game wasn't worth publishing in the first place.

Yes, harsh. The truth sometimes hurts.

Same with releasing a Linux version. It's all worth so little for us that it's rather annoying to have to do the extra work all the time and carry that weight around.

Translation;

"We did all development and testing on one platfrom only and then to our surprise the 'release for other platforms' button resulted in buggy untested builds! those platforms must be horrible!"

By now the biggest warning flag a developer can give is "we will focus on windows for the initial release"

It's no coincidence that pro-drm devs also dislike supporting Linux.


Last edited by devland on 10 June 2020 at 6:49 am UTC