GOG aren't having the best of times recently, with details about their financial troubles painting a bleak picture, although it seems they have something of a plan. Later they announced some changes, including a tweak to what they mean by DRM free.
Now? They're attempting to go back to their roots, at least little, to woo customers back to their store with a small revival of "Good Old Games", what they were originally known as. The start of this is the addition of a Good Old Games tag, which GOG say will "showcase over 500 games that our Team has deemed iconic classics".
This is one reason I liked GOG originally, their commitment to bringing back and supporting old games, but they lost their way somewhat when trying to become just another store. Hopefully they will be doing more as time goes on to revive old games. Plenty of older games nowadays can run on Linux just fine through all sorts of open source game engines, and having an easy and legal place to get them for the data files is great.
To go along with this announcement, today they released the classic FPS, The Wheel of Time. GOG say this was done in cooperation with Nightdive Studios and that the "efforts and in-house expertise of GOG’s Tech Team the game received modern OS compatibility and hi-resolution support". Although, by modern OS, they only mean Windows specifically.
Proper link: https://www.gog.com/en/games?tags=good-old-game
BTW limiting the search to Linux games brings their number from 452 to 64.
Last edited by pb on 6 April 2022 at 1:43 pm UTC
Quoting: pbThe link from the article doesn't work, redirects to https://www.gog.com/en/gamesIt's a bug on their end, nothing I can do about it right now as our links auto change.
Proper link: https://www.gog.com/en/games?tags=good-old-game
Edit: fixed for now using a different link, have let GOG know.
Last edited by Liam Dawe on 6 April 2022 at 1:47 pm UTC
But I noticed that they simply don't care about Linux. A lot of DOSBox games with support only to Windows, Linux ports needing the installation of libraries even on supported distro (bad UX), ports that don't even work anymore on any distro, GoG galaxy exclusive to Windows (they even detects the OS and disallow the download on Linux).
While Steam do a huge investment on Linux, with improvements on Kernel and Drivers.
I sincerely don't care about them.
Quoting: fagnerln(they even detects the OS and disallow the download on Linux).
This is what killed my interest in them largely, along with their really crappy onboarding for affiliates.
It wasn't just lack of Linux support, I had Windows games that wouldn't keep working -- I was willing to keep a Windows VM around for that. But lack of DRM when you can't get the game to run makes no difference.
I just recently found out about Lutris from this site, and that seems to make GOG stuff easier to run just in general -- even compared to directly on Windows.
I'm a software developer and my goal when playing games isn't to spend time figuring our how to get the game to work. I get paid at work for that sort of stuff. I just want to play my game and relax.
Quoting: GuestQuoting: fagnerlnBut I noticed that they simply don't care about Linux. A lot of DOSBox games with support only to Windows,
What's the problem with dosbox?
I think the second half of the phrase is the important one here. DOSBox isn't the issue. Based on playing with Lutris, getting DOSBox to run on Linux is doable, but the perception is that GOG can't be bothered to add Linux support to DOSBox games.
If GOG wanted to stay relevant, they needed to be supporting something like Lutris years ago.
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