Urgh, when they start having to decide what technically counts as DRM-free to justify themselves things are pretty fucked.

To be fair, it is a non-trivial matter. Not all restrictions are created equal; while some are explicitly labeled as DRM, and fit a strict definition, some are more subtle about their control but accomplish similar goals. Hitman was one such case - "it is totally not always-online DRM, it is just a system to offer additional features!" and clearly lots of people saw it as equivalent to DRM. Or Steam's "you need the client to get the first copy of the DRM-free game" and "you need the Steam API and workshop for some features" - it is clearly not DRM from any rigorous definition, but for some people it hardly matters. Multiplayer is another big one, as the statements make clear, because usually publishers have so much control over multiplayer that it doesn't make much sense to talk about DRM.

But GOG advertised themselves as a DRM-free store. They don't get to wriggle out and exploit technicalities, not without severely undermining their claims. "We stand against DRM because we need to, but keep trying to find loopholes to allow it" is not a good selling point. Yeah, this means refusing precisely the super popular AAA games, that is the trade-off they were making since the beginning.

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Quoting: EikeI wonder what I would want to play with 15 fps though.
Not even a point and click, right?

Turn-based 4X games, where you don't really care about what little animation there is... but other aspects of performance are super important, like the time between turns or how big you can make the map.

Visual novels, abstract games like chess or sudoku or solitaire, and other games where there just isn't that much happening in the screen, especially not super fast. Maybe there is some eyecandy effects, but it has little impact in the "gameplay".

And, of course, there is the use case of "I know this sucks but I just don't care". Some people (like me :P) are perfectly willing to put up with big annoyances and low-quality experiences.

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Cool article, I really appreciate the in-depth discussion. Like you pointed, it is good for the players to be informed.

(Though I'll say even for the same depth of analysis, being more succinct could probably make the main points clearer - especially for people that haven't been following everything closely)

I also assume all of this is particularly concerning (in addition to, obviously, for porting studios/devs) for indies. For games that don't have a massive marketing budget, however Steam chooses to showcase their game is a huge deal, and adding an endorsement or disavowing the game for the deck can mean a lot. The opaqueness in the process is concerned, because it both erodes trust in the "fairness" of the platform and stops devs from taking direct meaningful action, putting them at the mercy of the "algorithm gods.

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Quoting: Pengling

Quoting: eldakingBut the Nintendo policy of "no, this game does not exist anymore, forget it and buy the new game" is silly, there should be no reason for this, especially for things like the GBA where emulating the hardware is trivial.

I'm not a fan of that approach, either, but avoiding competing with their own pasts at the cost of not keeping older works in circulation is probably more of a loss to us as consumers than to the businesses that do so, unfortunately.

Absolutely, it is stupid because they should not get away with it, but they do and it is probably profitable. They are not being stupid in a "they are losing so much money" way, just in a "they are making money by pulling an obvious scam and it is not even a cool creative scam".

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I recently played Aria of Sorrow (one of the games included) and it is absolutely a blast, probably the best Castlevania game (not that I have played most of them, of course). It was not as part of this collection, though, I had to hunt down the original game.

I think it is super cool when ROMs are sold like this. They could even be extracted/uncompressed and played on other emulators, though of course the convenience of just using the default it comes with is usually preferable - but I saw a tutorial on how to mod the ROMs (applying patches and re-compressing them), for example. But the Nintendo policy of "no, this game does not exist anymore, forget it and buy the new game" is silly, there should be no reason for this, especially for things like the GBA where emulating the hardware is trivial.

The scary notices that "this is not supported!" are very weird for us Linux users, used to hack everything and run it regardless of whether the devs worked on it or planned it. But for the console environment, where the norm is "no of course you can't run software I didn't sell you, and even that only at my convenience", this might look normal? Maybe they are being overcautious about support tickets, maybe they are half-testy about their games working on a handheld that they didn't specifically release them for (they could be selling a PC version and a Deck version, if it wasn't for Valve meddling too much!), maybe they didn't research and/or test it properly, or something else.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualTechnically, GOG is completely correct. Their native Linux builds don't officially support Arch Linux or the new SteamOS, which is a derivative of that distribution. They support Ubuntu. They can't guarantee support for an OS they've never tested their games for.

Whether this PR spokesperson understands this or not, I couldn't say. Clearly the diplomatic response would have been, "these games have been tested for Ubuntu officially, but they may work on the Steam Deck. We don't know; we haven't tried it."

I would agree with you, but I think they are making assumption here too, I bet they didn't test any GOG game on the Steam Deck. So they cannot guarantee something which they have not tested imho.

At the bare minimum the proper response here would be, "we tested this X numbers of GOG games and they work". "On this other ones the joystick is not detected or has X trouble".

I mean there's a couple of Linux games builds flagged as unsupported on the Steam deck too. They really expect that all of their windows GOG games to work on Steam Deck?

In that case, if in the future they get lots of refunds from Steam Deck users, it will be well deserved.

But anyway, I think that this was not a "techinical" response and they are not "guaranteeing" anything here this is just a PR bot response.

Their games don't support the Steam Deck's distro, but installing Ubuntu on the deck should still be easier than installing Windows.

They went straight for the nuclear option, that they can't even guarantee will work either.

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Dang it, that is a new low. When they prefer to tell people to install Windows than talk about the games they already have for Linux, you know things are bad.

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I am actually interested on this, as HoI4 is the Paradox game where I don't own any DLC and play only sporadically in bursts. Could make a lot more sense on the short term. But I found the subscription a tad too expensive for what it is - not out of the question, but I'm not happy about it.

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I don't much like additional platforms as stretch goals because if you use (only) that platform, backing before the goal is hit is a big risk and for most people already backing they don't particularly care. I mean, I'm happy when a platform I like is funded and included, but doesn't seem like the most effective stretch goal for crowdfunding.

On another note, the game looks pretty good. Not sure if it is a kind of gameplay that I'd enjoy but looks interesting at least.

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VERIFIED: 9 games (3.81%)
PLAYABLE: 13 games (5.51%)
UNSUPPORTED: 0 games (0.0%)
UNKNOWN: 214 games (90.68%)

Not much to be said for my library so far. The verified titles aren't bad, but the playable ones is an all-star list with many of my all time favorites. Which is... not that great, but not unexpected. I expect those to be at least playable because yeah, I play them on linux already, on much weaker hardware. But the most likely problem is controller support, as strategy games aren't usually well suited for a controller without much adaptation. Perhaps seeing text and information on the small screen is an issue for some.

I half hope that this is sorted out for at least some of those games, or that at least they work with teaks. But I don't expect my library will have a huge percentage of "verified" titles when it's all done.

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