Supraland, the colourful and inviting first-person puzzle game from Supra Games is now going to be removed from game store GOG after less than a year being there.
Looking at the dates: it released on Steam in April 2019, then came to Linux in July that same year and then onto GOG in that same month. Today, June 9 in 2020 the GOG team posted on their forum that Supraland will be delisted from their store at the developer's request but it will stay in your GOG library. That's not long to be on a store to then ask for it to be removed, so why?
The developer has been quite vocal about it all, as it turns out. Back in July 2019, we posted an article about the developer saying some strange stuff about both GOG and Linux and it seems their opinion didn't change after being live on GOG for some time, as they said on Steam in May this year:
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.
Sounds like a case of heavily inflated expectations, mixed with some naivety. Still, it's better to request removal than to leave it up and not support it at all, so it sounds like they're doing the right thing overall.
In other posts they also mentioned how in relation to DRM-free gaming that "98-99% of players don't care" and that if there's any "crying about DRM stuff in the gamer scene, it must come from a really vocal but tiny minority. 1-2% tiny". That's some pretty tough words for the DRM-free crowd.
As for the Linux build of Supraland, it appears to have been suffering a few issues lately as posts on Steam will show and the developer isn't sure what they will do so the Linux build may be pulled too see: #1 and #2. They've never been particularly confident about it either as they said before a few times, and it appears they don't know how to support the Linux version. If they do announce a decision on that bit, we will let you know.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: hummer010To 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?).
Last edited by Shmerl on 10 June 2020 at 1:12 am UTC
QuoteGoing 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.
Quoting: mphuZQuote..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
Quoting: ageresThe 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.
TheRiddick Jun 10, 2020
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
PublicNuisance Jun 10, 2020
Kimyrielle Jun 10, 2020
Yes, harsh. The truth sometimes hurts.
QuoteSame 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"
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