10 years of gog.com | Hacker News Reader

10 years of gog.com

gog.com

119 pointsdsego27 comments

Wow, GoG is a decade old - it's hard to believe. GoG has always had the image in my mind of a scrappy new startup competing against the big likes of Steam, Microsoft Store, Origin, etc. I was probably a bit too young for the crowd that it's games were initially aimed at. My earliest gaming memories stretch back to the N64 era, but really only start in earnest with the Xbox and I only really got into PC gaming in the mid-2000s. A of classics like the old Infinity Engine games (Baldur's gate, Planescape Torment), Stronghold Crusaders, Heroes of Might and Magic, and others were largely unknown to me until I bought them through GoG. Despite their age I thoroughly enjoyed many of these games, and experiencing playing these games gave me a better appreciation and enjoyment of more modern games that draw on these older titles.

I think the tendency for the availability of games to quickly decay is one barrier that prevents video games from having the same prestige as a lot of other works of art, like film, books, or visual art. In movies or books it's not uncommon for works to become recognized for excellence and remain widely explored decades after their release. With video games, it's often becomes increasingly difficult to legally acquire old games and as time goes on eventually getting them to run in a modern machine becomes a challenge. It's great to see that GoG has created a market for old games and created an incentive to maintain the ability to easily play them on modern machines - CD Projekt's efforts go a long way of reducing the "media decay" of video games.

Congratulations for ten great years!

If you've never used it, Gog is a really nicely thought out experience from an ecom perspective. I'm not wild about the app store they've built, but it's worth creating an account and tooling around a little on the website. It's terrific.

Tonnes of the games from my childhood are on their platform. The only annoyance is having to boot into Windows for many of them. I know it's easier said than done, but it'd be great if they could crack a way of wrapping a WINE-like emulator around each game so I can play on macOS.

That would be great; in the meantime PortingKit [1] has a decent hit rate on select titles, and the GOG installables are always recommended over the Steam alternatives for obvious (DRM) reasons.

1: http://portingkit.com/en/

Yippee thanks! Comparing the Steam Store experience on Mac to the GOG experience is an exercise in itself :-)

They do wrap some games in Wine, other in Dosbox and the adventures ship with ScummVM.

Play on Linux has a list of games that can be downloaded and wrapped directly from GOG.com from inside the app.

Love these guys. Gaming like it was when I was a kid in 1998. No community, no achievements, no always online license account DRM crap, no overlay.

My Adventurer Mart is the finest shopping in all Faerûn: widest selection, lowest prices, and nary a fancy illustration. Just the goods, bare and plain.

Noclip did an interesting documentary about GOG. "GOG: Preserving Gaming's Past & Future" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffngZOB1U2A

Please don't shut down, please don't stop providing the DOS compatible original game files, ever.

You might like Archive.org's collection of DOS games if you haven't seen it: https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games

I hate steam, and love gog. But there is one issue that makes me buy certain games on steam.

Games that get released full of bugs and that then get fixed with frequent updates.. This tends to happen with ambitious indie games from small teams (the best games!).. I fully trust the team to fix the game, but when it releases usually there are a lot of bugs they didnt find as they have no QA. Eg. I just bought ' Frozen Synapse 2'

Steam seems to get updates earlier and more frequently. Why is that? Is it cus the devs dont bother updating gog? That doesnt seem likely from these teams. GOG should definitely do everything they can to have update/patch parity with steam, if that means making it part of the contract when u release a game there, so be it. Then I would never buy anything on steam.

ps. Why do I hate steam? 1. Its an unnecessary program on ure system, that wants to always be on, always be updating, have all kinds of access it doesnt need jusr for u to play games. 2. It has a lot of social features and whatnot (that I dont care about cus I only play single player games) but at its core it is simply a DRM system and DRM is terrible. 3. It obfuscates the game files, putting them all in a 'steam' folder. So you cant easily manage / back them up. 4. Double click game icon .. loading steam.. updating steam..

Other Steam downside,

-the kid is playing a game on his laptop so Steam will not work on the PC, I try to keep Steam in Offline mode as much as possible. -playing in Wine and keeping each game in its own prefix, you have to install Steam in each prefix, unlock it with the security code each time and I think there were some Steam updates that broke in Wine, so for Wine having a standalone game is always the better solution.

Do you use GoG Galaxy? It's GoG's desktop client that automatically updates games. I usually find that games are updated more or less simultaneously between Steam and GoG. After all, it's the developers or studio that dedicates resources towards producing bug-fixes, the same version is usually uploaded to all the online distributors so there's no real reason not to push updates to all the distribution services. Maybe GoG gets different builds because it's DRM-free, and that adds time to release updates?

No, gog galaxy is too much like steam. I dont need automatic updates.. I'd just like to be able to get latest update patches, or latest version from gog.

There's no Linux version of GoG galaxy.

I think this has prevented some games from being released on Linux at all on GoG. Tooth and Tail has a Linux/Mac/Windows release on Steam, but is missing the Linux release on GoG. It uses Galaxy or Steam for multiplayer.

There was a post on gog forums about this from developers of one of the games, i cant find it right now.

But form what i remember, developer can push updates to stem on his own. For gog, they need action from gog. (and i think gog also reviews new patches.)

I've heard that, for GOG, the pipeline to validate/publish patch is not as reactive as the one for Steam. And the big différence in market share might make the developpers prioritize Steam over GOG

GoG and HumbleBundle are the only ways I buy games ever. I don't want to pay for DRM-ed stuff I can't just download and use at any computer I want.

Humble bundle is the reason I have 250 steam games that I’ll never play. Honestly I wish I could delete most of them, to easy my ocd.

GoG in the other hand is pure magic. I really love that store.

You can tag them in a special category and IIRC also hide that category.

You can. "Delete from library"

HumbleBundle stuff is probably DRM-ed through Steam, right?

Some games are (maybe all the games nowadays, some years have passed since the last time I did) but I just buy the whole bundle (for a price slightly bigger than required to get the maximum version) and don't play the steamed games. Once there was a steamed game I have really wanted to play I have bought it this way legitimately, then downloaded a pirated version and played it instead.

Since the good years they've stepped off significantly from their original premise (which was charity and set your own price, with no DRM as a prevailing thought). These days they are mostly a platform that sells games that exist on steam for prices that are occasionally lower than steam.

Congrats! It would be cool to read about the technical challenges that go with making good old games work on new operating systems.

Still waiting for a linux client.

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