GOG finally remove the false "in progress" note about GOG Galaxy for Linux

Quoting: RaabenI keep trying to support GoG, but they keep giving me less and less reason to.

I kept wanting to support GoG, but they kept piling up reason after reason for me to just stick with Steam and Humble Store. This admission of their ongoing lie is just the "final nail in the coffin" for me, virtually guaranteeing they'll never see a single dime of my money.

Quoting: ShmerlAbout Steam Deck, I'm still not clear if input support and all the controller related stuff is tied to Steam or not. Let's say you get a GOG game (whether native or Wine use case). How are you going to integrate it with controllers without Steam? Is it possible? Are there open source libraries for Steam Deck controllers support that can be exposed to games and Wine?

Maybe https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2020/12/standalone-steam-controller-driver-and-ui-sc-controller-gets-a-sweet-small-upgrade/ still works?

Quoting: BlooAlienMaybe https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2020/12/standalone-steam-controller-driver-and-ui-sc-controller-gets-a-sweet-small-upgrade/ still works?

I'd expect something like that is needed, yes. But I haven't seen anything addressing Steam Deck specifically.

Hm. Looks like they are working on it. That's promising:

https://github.com/kozec/sc-controller/commit/4d0e6c7d469bc14119adfbf90ea2bcc45e331b95

I hope they'll publish some instructions how to use this on the Deck to enable controllers for non Steam games.

Python though isn't a good idea for APU use case. I wish they'd used some compiled language for better performance.


Last edited by Shmerl on 1 July 2022 at 11:52 pm UTC

They should have replaced the notice with the image of a middle finger and the caption "To our Linux customers". Because that's how it comes across.

I used to like GOG. But Valve bends over backwards to cater to a Linux user like me, so I'm sticking with Valve for the foreseeable future. Plus, I've been a Valve fan since I played Half-Life back in the day, but that's neither here nor there.

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: denyasisI'm a little sad GOG is struggling, but their business model failed and they seem to be struggling with what to do next.

Which is a problem when your business model is to be the anti-Steam and in the process, Steam becomes a near Monopoly.

I'm the end, turns out people are really more ok with DRM and a nice, albeit mandatory, client than they bet on.

How do you retake market space without alienating uses that bought in on those founding principles?

Perhaps the bigger problem is that they had principles in the first place.

I think you're making an unwarranted assumption. I don't think the principles involved hurt them. Certainly not around here, where everyone basically says "I like their principles, if only they didn't suck in other ways". The Linux crowd is perhaps unusual there, but I think GoG's problem is that while their no-DRM idea was good and by and large helped them, it wasn't enough to beat a competitor which was superior in some other ways and had big network effects.

It may be that GoG tried to grow too big. Sometimes you have a small but profitable business, you decide to expand, you spend a bunch of money to expand, and it turns out the additional revenue isn't enough to make up for all the new expenses.

Actually their principles and possibly falsely reading the market might have caused this situation.

Attracting users with Good Old Games repacked in a form that works on modern systems is a niche market.

What glorifies a store is mostly AAA's because mainstream user base wants to play them. DRM is a norm in AAA market so GOG's Drm Free policy is not in their favor here due to it essentially blocking them from that store.


So in a way GOG is in a weird spot where it is niche due to reasons above but likely has more expenses/operation costs compared to other niche stores such as itch. So self sustaining is probably hard.

...god fucking dammit, I was actually one of the people who had their hopes up. You know what? Fine, if they don't want to support Linux, then open up the Cloud Save API so that Heroic, Lutris, and Mini Galaxy can easily access them. THAT is literally the one reason withholding me from buying games on GOG. I'm even willing to pay more (since they don't have regional pricing for my region) if it meant I could get the VNs I want and I could have Cloud Save to go with them!

Fuck GOG man. Until they open up Cloud Save, they're a no go for me, no matter how much I want to just buy Muramasa and Evenicle 2 (because, yes, they have that) from them.

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: jens(they could have made Proton completely closed, but decided to go 100% Open Source!).

It's based on wine. So no, they could not have kept it closed. So please don't make an essential requirement look like they did a great thing.

It needs Wine to work, but Proton itself is a separate thing, and Wine is LGPL not GPL, so there's nothing to stop someone from attaching Wine to a closed module. Sooo, yes, they could have kept Proton closed.

I have a GOG account, I have even bought a handful of games from them in the past, so I am definitely open to the idea of buying games from GOG. But I have no interest in doing so right now. The gap between Steam and GOG in terms of quality of service on Linux, is simply too vast. GOG needs to up it's game.

At the minimum, before I'd even consider buying future games from GOG, I'd need to see a native GOG client, with automatic game updates, cloud sync for game saves, a game overlay for features such as screenshots in game, displaying game performance info (like FPS), and Wine integration for Windows-only games.

Yea I know, realistically, that simply isn't going to happen, no need to tell me, that is too much ground for GOG to makeup and they clearly aren't interested enough to even try. At the same time though, I don't think in 2022 that's an unreasonable feature set to demand for gaming on any platform, and a feature set Steam is very comfortably delivering right now, plus a whole lot more (Remote Play, Shader Pre-Caching, Steam Workshop, etc..).

So why would I even consider buying a game from GOG, when they don't even have a native desktop client?

GOG, do better.