Yeah, this is an awesome change of pace for an industry that notoriously locks down its hardware.
The Steam Machines were also equally open, and the (otherwise streaming-focused) Steam Link supported sideloading.
btw to this day it still receives updates!
But, what were people sideloading on it? any alternative usage that might be interesting to explore?
The internet is filled with stories about locked accounts, lost libraries, games being pulled out of the library due to 'low quality of gameplay' while people are actively playing them on Steam, DLC and in-game currency sold that can never be redeemed or used in the game it's bought for (see: 'Wizardry Online' debacle, Steam/Valve continued selling in-game currency far beyond the point that it was being discussed to remove the game from the library all together.. then removed access from the game for Steam users after making a tidy profit. This was a current/active/new game with a bad launch, not an old title.)
So just to re-state: Valve never won my trust with their behavior with Steam and associated acts. There is just no one else; let's call this phenomenon 'Walmart Syndrome', perhaps?
Bypassing Steamworks basic DRM is easy. Other DRMs obviously require special workarounds.
GOG (and CDPR) on the other hand can't even be bothered to port their own client and games.
Also, GOG is not 100% DRM-free anymore, even if they want to advertise themselves that way. [0]
[0] https://www.gog.com/forum/general/drm_on_gog_list_of_singlep...
I'm not happy about these features requiring an internet connection, but they seem pretty minor. The alternative would probably have been that those features were left out of the GOG versions completely.
> GOG (and CDPR) on the other hand can't even be bothered to port their own client and games.
To be fair, I'm pretty sure GOG has a hell of a lot less money than Valve. They don't benefit from any of the gambling-mechanics or multiplayer game "bling" sales that bring in so much of Valve's money, aside from having a much smaller share of PC game sales than Valve does. Valve's got to be way more profitable plus have much higher income, so have the margin to play with stuff like this—which is in their interest, because the weaker alternative operating systems are, the more Valve operates only at the pleasure of Microsoft.
Luckily Lutris allows me to somehow compensate for GOG's lack of interest in Linux, but still, I feel they really do not care about the DRM thing.
https://github.com/Sude-/lgogdownloader
I only have 12Mbps DSL and an offline game system that I use a FAT formatted microSD card to transfer to so I appreciate the split files, even though it does get annoying with the huge games.
I agree that GOG's Linux support is minimal; often they don't even provide Linux versions that are available on other stores :(.
Two of the isses on the list account42 links to are more serious, although most are fairly minor (there are also a few issues not on the list). Not to excuse those exceptions, however I don't know of any other store that is anywhere close. I have no inside info but my my suspicion is that many CD Projekt investors resent the DRM-free aspect of GOG and would like it to change, while the people running GOG realize it is the major unique aspect of GOG and trying to change it could sink the business. OTOH, I suspect the CD Projekt investors mostly see GOG as a way to get a better deal from Steam for CDPR games. Hard to say what will happen in the future.
https://sharkwouter.github.io/minigalaxy/
It deals with both downloading and installing as well as integrating Wine.
This is also how we used to install and play games on Windows, before the Steam era.
Why do I need Galaxy?
Itch.io has a Linux client, by the way.
I disagree that they "should" have a Linux client, for the reasons I explained. I don't have a use for such a client, and as such, I'm happy to ignore it (and love that it isn't mandatory, unlike Steam).
I've never received support from Steam for any technical issue. I'm resourceful and if there's a way, I'll make it work; but almost every help I needed with Steam games was taken from user's forums, within and outside Steam.
Case in point: I learned browsing Steam's forums that the Linux version of The Eternal Castle is glitchy and in many cases the keyboard input doesn't work at all; one user helpfully suggested just using the Windows version using Wine or Proton; this suggestion worked.
> Itch.io has a Linux client, by the way
Good for them! I hope it's optional, since I've no use for it.
What I love about Humble Bundle and GOG is that their games (mostly) don't try to take over your games collection, unlike Steam. I do use Steam and support Valve, but I'd prefer Steam was optional.
I mean, all they had to do is let users disable automatic updates and keep running the old version of the client "without any guarantees" -- if the Steam APIs end up changing enough that I can't log in anymore, well, so be it. But to permanently lock users out simply because of a forced update… seriously uncool.
Now that the store had that facelift the only issue I am aware of is the honestly pretty lacklustre curation... Which is an extremely hard issue so pretty forgiveable
But hey, you can instead distribute with Epic, a storefront so advanced it doesn't even have a shopping cart.
[0] not to mention community forum, reviews, and art gallery.
I understand the sentiment though.
Which is kind of odd, since the Unreal Marketplace in the same launcher does have a shopping cart.
There is no good justification for this restriction and it makes that whole feature sound more like a PR move than something that was really released to help the consumer.
Good to know, then devs can sell their games somewhere else? Oh, I guess they don't. Nevermind.
Rather the opposite. I think it ended up as part of several compute clusters because the console was sold for less than it cost to produce, something normally offset by game sales. So suddenly Sony had a large market that only cost it money.
I'm sure internally it was pitched as a neat idea why don't we see what happens (god can you imagine the corporate politics in a decision like that?), but practically it allowed Sony get get special import status.
I'm sure eventually they realized they didn't care about that enough it outweigh allowing those filthy users to possibly do something interesting.
Sony throws a lot of stuff at the wall. There was a good chunk of hardware cut out of later PS3s, not to mention continued attempts and silent canceling of things like those move lightguns, etc.
[0]: https://www.wpafb.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/399987...
Wasn't more an issue that games didn't specifically optimize for cell processors? They had to run on dozens of platforms and the Cell processor was the odd one out.
> to get useful compute out of it during the length of time that option was arounnd.
There were at least three largish cluster setups, the biggest being a super computer with almost 2000 PS3s. Of course you are right, that is barely a blip on their sales.
That’s what being exotic hardware means.
The major use case for these was for number crunching (training neural nets, running physics simulations, etc). And these things were something crazy, like 100x faster than a similarly priced PC server. There were plenty of libraries out there for doing linear algebra.
A quick google search suggests that this was extraordinarily common in academia. I found materials from lots of different universities that were close to what I remember my peers talking about.
This was also a little bit before CUDA hit. So there really wasn't a mainstream offering for doing massively parallel, SIMD calculations.
Edit: I went to Wright State Uni and most of my CS professors did research associated with the Air Force, which as forgotpwd16 notes, had at the time a super computer made from PS3s. This might explain why the PS3 was so popular among our department.
I think it's an urban legend fueled by marketing, I've never seen any hard proof of that, except some BOM calculations from independant analyse, but I don't think mass production work that way.
You can’t run physics simulations on single precision. So the people who would have bought and tinkered and pushed it forwards were all turned off by it.
The military was allowed double precision; but there was no point making it a compute cluster otherwise.
I don’t know if it was a marketing or budget decision but basically all the early adopters who would have championed doing impressive things on there (I was so hyped at the time for the cell architecture) couldn’t do anything useful with it.
I recall I was very excited at the prospect of getting my hands on a ps3 for modelling, but all my work (1) at least required double precision and it left a long bad taste in my mouth when it wasn’t to be.
(1)chaotic plasmas
https://www.theregister.com/2010/01/25/playstation_cracked_w...
https://tedium.co/2020/11/27/sony-linux-otheros-geohot-histo...
It's arguable giving hackers a platform to explore the innards of the PS3 was the biggest contribution Other OS made to the PS3, and I'm not surprised it scared Sony management. In the release notes for the PS3 firmware update that removes "Other OS", Sony also state it was for "security concerns":
https://blog.playstation.com/2010/03/28/ps3-firmware-v3-21-u...
"...will disable the “Install Other OS” feature that was available on the PS3 systems prior to the current slimmer models, launched in September 2009. This feature enabled users to install an operating system, but due to security concerns, Sony Computer Entertainment will remove the functionality through the 3.21 system software update."
The "security concerns" were of course geohot/others using it to crack the PS3 DRM.