GOG has had to hire private investigators to track down IP rights holders
thegamer.com
thegamer.com
The addressable market segment of people who play PC games and also care about DRM-free accessibility would be larger if GOG's launcher ran on Linux and targeted Linux users. It seems like a logical overlap to me.
Valve is eating GOG's lunch in this segment but it could easily change. Sure it might be small but it's bigger than ever, still growing, and seems to fit GOG's mission.
I would definitely start repurchasing my Steam games DRM-free on GOG if only they provided a launcher with the tooling necessary to download & run them on my system.
As things stand now, and for all the good GOG does... it's not enough to be DRM-free but only distribute Windows installers. You've just outsourced the DRM scheme to Microsoft. If the software doesn't run on a DRM-free OS, the job is only halfway done.
And in the meantime, GOG's product is tragically subject to piracy, (I believe) partially enabled by their decision to _only_ package games for the OS upon which most piracy traditionally takes place! :( I hope this could be offset by packaging for a crowd with more ideological overlap.
Majority of the games there don't even come in a native Linux form, and those that do can be a hit or miss when it comes to compatibility - at least one game I tried needed a dependency from a no longer available package. Alternatively a few titles come shipped with some kind of wrapper that's really just an outdated version of Wine surrounding a win32 EXE.
Also, isn't the point of buying something DRM free that you don't have to use a client or any other online feature? The offline installer has always been GOG's killer feature in my book, that's how you make sure the game gets truly preserved.
Agreed. I thought this was the whole point of GOG.
The problem with buying movies from streaming providers, games from Epic and Steam, etc. is that you don’t own them. They say you do, but even something like Movies Anywhere isn’t guaranteed for life. Downloading digital content is the surest way to ensure that in-theory you could against use it someday. Anything else is a false promise of forever.
AFAIK download all is not available, you will have to get them one by one. But after that they’re yours to keep forever.
I think you are comparing apples and organges
valve will give you a game license, gog will sell you a game.
you can download, install and play all gog games forever with no drm.
(I use lgogdownloader and download all games to linux)
I believe choice of storefront is more a service and support problem, and less about the product itself.
Game licensure and game ownership are equivalent products at the end of the day in most instances. Rugs could be pulled, yes, but thus far haven't been very often or to any significant extent (that I know of).
Most paying customers are fine to run proprietary code, accept DRM, or buy a license instead of owning a game. Even Linux users will do this if the company (Valve) has a decent track record at practicing "don't be evil" (they do).
As a Linux user, when you purchase a game from GOG (and I concede that this is ideologically superior to a license from Valve) you are on your own afterwards. Windows users can get a bit of help from Galaxy and I think GOG even does tech support now but this doesn't apply to our segment.
You must now divine a scheme whereby your game is made runnable. Cue fighting with distro repositories and Wine versions/prefixes/winetricks, or depending on a third party launcher (Bottles/Lutris/Heroic/pick one), or adding the game to the Steam client (that you probably have installed already anyway) because Steam knows how to run things with Proton... and then you must maintain this going forward.
This might not bother you or you may even find it therapeutic (and I do, for certain games). But the majority of the segment doesn't like it, and it won't scale as well as a first-party solution, not even for an individual user.
My assertion is that exchanging game ownership for game licensure currently looks like a pretty fair deal if I receive first-party support for running the game on my OS. But GOG could change that!
Many games that GOG sells and a very large share of the new releases are DRMed. The Galaxy client is often how the DRM gets applied.
Want to play HoMM3 with your friends? You can still do that.
Try doing the same thing with a more recent "DRM-free" game.
I haven't ever encountered this, nor have I ever encountered a GOG game that requires the use of the Galaxy client.
Can you explain that assertion?
That's not in any way what gog says. Even california law says gog sells you games (while steam only licenses them)
I have a disconnected windows 11 vm, and install and play gog games in it all the time. Never an issue.
Jesus Christ. It's exactly what GOG says. Compare https://www.gog.com/en/news/bgog_2022_update_2b_our_commitme...
> 1. The single-player mode has to be accessible offline.
> 2. Games you bought and downloaded can never be taken from you or altered against your will.
> 3. The GOG GALAXY client is and will remain optional for accessing single-player offline mode.
> Having said that, we believe that you have the right to make an informed choice about the content that you choose to enjoy and we won’t tell you how and where you can access or store your games. To make it easier to discover titles that include features like multiplayer, unlockable cosmetics, timed events, or user-generated content, we’re adding information about such functionalities on product pages. In short, you’ll always know.
If you want to play multiplayer HoMM3, you can. That's how the game was commercially released and it hasn't been updated to add DRM.
Modern releases DRM the game as a matter of course, and GOG defied their user base to say that that's fine with them. Do you want to play with your friend? You need an internet connection and multiple accounts registered with the vendor.
For a concrete example of Galaxy being the DRM implementation, the Gloomhaven executable you can download from GOG has the button to play multiplayer disabled. It will still work if you get around that - the functionality itself doesn't check anything. But the executable will only enable the button if you start it with Galaxy running and logged in to an account that, according to GOG, has purchased the game.
That doesn't sound like "digital rights management" to you?
I don’t expect whatever windows may or may not be available in 2060 to be able to support such a download from 2025 in a playable fashion.
And I also fully expect wine on linux to support them all. I like a lot of old games, and they run much better under wine than in windows these days.
For me, GOG is as close to perfect as I've found.
But I agree in general. The issue is probably that GOG is a smaller store than Steam and Linux segment for them in result is also way smaller than for Steam, so they don't see it as a priority.
Meanwhile you can use lgogdownloader.
It's sort of interesting that they support Linux as platform for games sales to begin with. Besides them, Steam and itch.io who even does?
Not just on Steam but only for Steam Deck
But I think that's an understandable position. One single distro with one single hardware (okay two because the LCD and OLED versions has some differences).
Once you go down the "full Linux support" way it's a hellhole of different distros, compositors, proprietary and open source hardware drivers etc. This is where Flatpak, AppImage, snap etc. could actually play a good part imo if done well but I'm not sure I've seen any games released on Steam for Linux in those formats (maybe Steam not even allow it)
Edit: you can download BG3 for any Linux distro not just the Steam Deck
> proprietary and open source hardware drivers etc
Somewhat of a problem, but not so much anymore, most Linux gamers know to use AMD and Mesa. So I'd say their focus on SteamOS is a good base of support.
It's because building for Linux expects specific versions of system libraries like glibc, if you compile your game on newer glibc, it may not run on older version of glibc at all. Steam solves it with Steam Linux Runtime compatibility layer which forces the game to run with specific glibc (and others) shipped with Steam on Linux, other video game stores have no equivalent solutions.
Anyway, Steam runtime is a massive overkill especially when its libraries get outdated.
Using heroic and wine is so seamless that I don't even remember if I have been running a game natively or not. It just works.
If you're using Heroic on Linux, then there's no question whether you're running games natively or not. You are running a Windows game in WINE (or Proton, a WINE fork). Epic Store doesn't carry any Linux native games (even when a native Linux version exists).
[0] apparently using this https://icculus.org/mojosetup/
If you want a stable userland, you can try using flatpaks. When I tried it, it downloaded entire root filesystems for Fedora and Ubuntu just so the applications would run.
It does work. The application appears to be unaware of the outer, incompatible distro.
I don't quite see how this approach wouldn't work for games.
Even if Windows ever did disappear as an OS, it would remain as a backwards compatibility layer apparently...
This is why everyone is dropping Linux support and targeting Proton instead.
Other than that Android backwards compatibility has been quite good, much better than Desktop Linux anyway!
It's not as pain free as Steam, because you sometimes still have to apply wine fixes, but it works well with the most popular games.
1. it doesn't (at least recently?) always do a great job of handling multiple displays, either launching games on my second monitor, which I orient vertically or getting confused about which monitor to use and switching back and forth until eventually the instance (but not the Lutris client) crashes
2. I find myself getting into launcher hell where I'll use a different wine version for one game and when I switch to a different game, it's using this new wine version and stops working
Not sure if Heroic solves these issues but I would try it again (didn't have any luck setting it up initially) if it does
If you are using KDE then there is a global Window rules setting and Heroic actually obey those rules, so you can force to launch a game always on X display, always minimized etc.
https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/kwin/kcontrol/windowspecific... (not sure that's the most up to date manual)
It looks like gamescope has it's own fullscreen shortcut (super + f), but people complain about it about it going to the wrong display. Maybe your window manager offers a more consistent full screen option like i3 does.
Having a nice way to view and manage a game library is essential at this point. I don't want to do it manually.
And maintaining something like Proton is pretty complex, there's so many different distros. Actually ensuring the game works probably was too big of a task for them.
You can always add your gog games to Lutris though.
The vast majority of games on Steam are Windows games, yet the Linux Steam client runs them fine via Proton.
I don't think people are asking for GOG to make Linux-native games. People are asking for an official GOG client that can handle installing games via Proton/Wine, handles cloud saves, account management, etc.
If a bunch of open source hobbyists can create a viable multi-platform client (see Heroic Games Launcher), then so can GOG.
I'm in the same boat here. I would be more than willing to rebuy some games on GOG if they supported Linux.
If you want easiest future proofing, you have to use the windows release.
Still, you do have a point, by comparison Steam is a lot more polished on that front. I would complain more, but my personal hangup is very niche to begin with so it does not seem fair ( remote view in vm ). It is small things, but small things add up.
You can just download them from GOG and play, so no Linux launcher is not a big deal, just a convenience (some would argue launchers are an inconvenience)
My experience is that it's never been the "smaller studios" that give Linux the middle-finger the way the so-called "AAA" publishers do. I see a shocking number of small studios and indie developers consistently releasing for Linux, Mac, and Windows and managing to do a surprisingly reliable job of it, where "AAA" companies sometimes can't seem to manage to keep a game running reliably even on the one platform they support.
The client is a bad thing. What you want is for it to stop working on Windows.
Why would you want it to work on Linux?
I don't think a niche store like GoG has to put a massive investment into marginal platform like Linux when Proton makes it work very well by itself.
My grandfather was a "landman" for oil companies tracking down mineral rights and has all sorts of stories like this. It can all get messy and weird fast.
Stuff like tracking down people you'd assume would be dead but are in fact ancient and alive at 103 in a nursing home. Convincing a bank that through a series of mergers and acquisitions that they are the rightful owners of the mineral rights to a piece of land foreclosed on in the great depression by a bank that itself failed. Generations of poor people dying without wills or settling probate. Inheritance battles spanning generations until no one alive was around for the start. Step mother that swooped in and married a man at the end of his life, inherited everything, remarried, had kids and left everything to them instead of the step kids.
What's the goal of convincing the bank that they own some land? Is this a case where the original bank foreclosed on the property, resold the surface while carefully keeping the mineral rights, and then failed? And the current owner of everything-but-the-mineral-rights is fully aware of not possessing them?
If you determine that someone else is the owner of some land, and they deny it, you can just start doing whatever it is that you want to do on the land, and you'll become the owner.
Pretty much exactly. It's pretty common if not the norm. Splitting the rights is normal when say a large ranch is broken up into plots. It would be very rare for say the deed to a suburban home to include the mineral rights.
Fix those and we’d be muuuuch better off.
It would be a large improvement over the status quo of having a term of 70 years after the death of the author.
There's a similar problem with mineral rights. US states register land ownership, but not mineral right ownership is not as well tracked. Litigation over abandoned mineral rights is not rare.
https://www.thegamer.com/no-one-lives-forever-the-operative-...
That being said, I am not sure why an interested party could not make their own knock-off version of the game. The game is a parody 60s James Bond with a female lead. Would anyone care if it was functionally the exact same game, but everyone was wearing a funny hat?
You can look Freedom approach to that idea. I tried it a couple of times and as someone who had it in original way, in DOS 6.22 and wtih ESS Blaster - it doesn't click for me.
It was said then that half of the battle was tracking down rights holders as IP had sometimes been absorbed through multiple acquisitions by the time they came to restore some games.
If there is no clear owner, and no one claiming right anymore, then it is abandonware that we can all profit of.
But now Gog will actually spend lot of effort to make the intellectual property alive and so killing abandonware that is their competition in the end. When a game is still sold through their platform, it can't claimed to be abandoned as it is still in the market generating revenues.
And in the example they give with the PI it is even worse. You don't do this in the interest of the creator that needs to be rewarded for its game but some distant relative that had nothing to do with it...
I support gog, I've been buying games from them for a long time. By yeah, where's the Linux support?
https://www.gog.com/wishlist/galaxy/release_the_gog_galaxy_c...
It happens with Denuvo because executives recognize licensing DRM software costs more than the revenue the game brings in.
They don't actually package the earlier .exes. You get one choice.
Sysinternals Process Monitor ("procmon") is your friend.
Also, shot in the dark, but maybe try the solution from this old thread: https://www.gog.com/forum/dark_reign_series/dark_reign_2_not...