Overview page: https://www.gog.com/en/anniversary
Direct sign up for Galaxy Linux beta: https://www.smartsurvey.co.uk/t/YEF5EV/
This is awesome. It’s about time GOG
i want to play this map in worms
Would be fun island vs island map
That being said, I think Armageddon and WMD support PNG images?
Might not be a huge deal for current Linux users, because of Heroic and Lutris are well known and widely used, but for gamers who are about to switch from Windows this could be another reason to do so.
I saw many “how to switch to Linux” guides where they had to stop at the gaming section and explain Proton/Wine/Heroic/etc
It sounds much easier: If you want to game on Linux there is a native Steam and GoG clients.
Lots of people loves achievments and cloud saves.
For those of you who were able to switch to Steam, I understand why this isn’t very interesting for you, but GOG has a huge library of very old games that Steam does not have, so this is still a pretty big deal, even if it took a really long time.
GOG also adds community patches to old games very often, so their releases work better than their Steam equivalent.
To add, they originally repack(so it run on modern computer) and sell old game, which is why they named it Good Old Game.
I’m just happy that i can play Witcher 1 and 2 i bought on GOG last time.
I also bought those games when they were on sale!
Personally, I like the Ultima series of games
Not to mention DRM free!
When I buy a game I check if it’s on GOG first.
I have a HUUUGE steam library… Thanks to a few years of Humble Monthly. But really I prefer GOG.
Yeah I usually do the same. Offline installers are a pretty big benefit. I like to know a lot of games are available offline.
For me if the GOG client can’t offer better support than Lutris I don’t see a reason to use it over Lutris. Not going to lie, the bar is kinda low as I don’t particularly love Lutris but the bar is there for the GOG launcher.
If they manage to implement a working pause an resume function for downloads, I am in.
Spent the day trying to download Indiana Jones’ 120 GB of madness. Lutris crashed after 5 Gb, because I dared to move a window. Heroic showed me a pause button, but after I pressed resume it forgot about the 8 GB already downloaded and started at 0% again. I ended up using aria to fetch the offline install files directly, sitting at 110 GB at the moment. Hope the install goes smoother.
You’re assuming those will work on GoG, that might not be the case unless they do something like Proton, otherwise those old games are Windows/DOS only and so you would have to manually download the binaries and run then through wine or something, so Galaxy coming to Linux wouldn’t affect this.
Lutris & Heroic already install all windows GOG games into Wine +/- Proton prefixes using some simple automation. The bar for an official GOG launcher to achieve the same isn’t that high if they want to go down that route. Proton is freely available and open source, so GOG can use it too if they want (and would be sensible to do so).
All of those old games just run through wine or dosbox. They install just fine through GoG Galaxy. GoG Galaxy has been on macOS for years.
This is huge.
Will probably still use Heroic, but I’m happy to see more choices
good, but maybe it’s too little too late ? but still, competition is always a good thing to have
Better late than never. Heroic does a very good job for me, but we will see what the new GOG era can deliver.
Not ever too late. They offer a lot of good products for dirt cheap. Don’t give up on Gog just because everyone is on the steam dick (myself included). The best part is you own your game from GOG. They give you full offline never online installers for all the games on here.
No such thing. Every time in my life I didn’t do something because I thought it was too late I was wrong. Time marches on and on and on and on and new people become sentient every day. Linux’s user base may be the largest it’s ever been but its growth potential is substantially larger, and a native client lowers the barrier to entry.
No such thing
waiting till the next morning to give someone their epipen seems like a too late situation.
Some situations work themselves out if you wait long enough.
Good to know, and hopefully I step in the right direction, but for me it’s too little too late, since I first requested GoG to port their stuff to Linux, Valve has:
- Released a client for Linux
- Ported their games to Linux
- Created a standardized target for Linux
- Financed Wine and dxvk development
- Released and maintained Proton
- Released Linux based platforms multiple times
And in short has spent lots to increase Linux adoption. I might install it and check out some old games that might not be available on Steam if they have an easy way to run them like Proton. But I have since spent thousands on Steam, not to mention I mostly use Steam as my main UI on most of my gaming systems.
Difference is, Gog has the moral high ground so to speak. In Steam you don’t own shit - sure, there are convoluted ways to download the installer archives, but it’s a joke compared to GOG.
Other than that, I agree with everything you said.
I feel like this and DRM are the two things people point out as GoG’s benefits, but first of all GoG also sells you a license, so it’s EXACTLY the same as Steam. The “difference” is in the other point, because without DRM games bought on GoG can be backed up and installed again without needing GoGs approval, but this ignores two HUGE caveats:
- GoG also allows DRM on their store, with some games having DRM for DLCs or extra content.
- Steam doesn’t require DRM, so all games that are DRM free on GoG are most likely also DRM free on Steam.
All in all this means that in regards to ownership morally GoG is essentially the same as Valve, they just have better PR about it.
PS: To give credit where it’s due, GoG is a lot more restrictive with what DRM it allows, and you can expect most of the game you bought to be playable without DRM there. However I feel that allowing me to play on my libre OS is a lot more morally significant than the difference between those two DRM stances.
Genuine question, can you start these DRM free games that you own via steam without the steam launcher?
I’m not sure how it is now (I haven’t needed to do this in awhile) but I would remove the steam_api.DLL or whatever it’s called and launch Indies and it’d work just fine for a surprising amount of games.
Absolutely, otherwise the game wouldn’t truly be DRM free. There are some games that have a different version on Steam that on GoG where the game crashes if it can’t find steam running, IMO those are badly programmed games and while it is technically DRM I would put those into a category of unintentional DRM, and there is an easy crack which is to replace the steam library they ship with with a fake one that replies as if it were steam. And while easy to do I would not call those DRM free.
TIL, I thought all steam games had to be run via the steam launcher.
Yes. Needing the Steam client to run would be considered DRM.
There are actually many DRM free games on Steam [link], most notably Cyberpunk 2077.
Cyberpunk 2077 is DRM free because it’s made by CD Projekt Red, the same company that runs GOG…
True, they owned it when CP2077 was released.
That doesn’t explain the thousands of other DRM-free games on Steam though.
If by many you mean 5%, sure.
Not really. GOG has the moral highground on game ownership but Steam has it on hardware ownership, which I would argue is more valuable. I do wish Valve would do more against all of the terrible trends in the gaming industry but I’ll accept everything they’re doing to push forward an open ecosystem as a whole instead.
GoG doesn’t produce hardware, so that’s a moot point.
Owning your hardware means being able to use free software on it.
I’m excited for this. I’ve been hoping this would happen for some time. Hopefully GoG will provide a friendly counterpart to steam to keep each other honest. Never consolidate!
I wonder how they’re gonna handle windows games. Whether they’ll use system’s version of wine or ship something of their own like Proton on Steam. Very curious.
Why wouldn’t they just use Proton.
That’s what I’m interested in. Whether they intend to just use whatever is available (which is absolutely ok) or they’re going to ship their own solution fine tuned however they want and need it (which would be obviously fork of wine/proton).
I’d expect them to handle it same way as lutris. Default version + bunch of other options
I imagine they’ll use UMU.
Isn’t proton just wine with a few other things like DXVK? And all open source, so they could just fork or even copy it directly. Proton is based on a fork of wine too.
So far I use Lutris for GOG games. Does galaxy still work offline and not act as DRM in any way? So anything already installed could be launched with it?
Galaxy is just for automating installation and updates and implementing cloud saves and achievements. The installation is identical to one made with standalone installer and can be launched from the executable without running Galaxy client. Already installed games can be imported to Galaxy library.
Proton is kinda tied to Steam, but UMU already replicates those dependencies so you can run it outside Steam client, so GOG could do something similar and I doubt Valve would object cooperation if GOG wants to participate developing Proton.
Any changes GOG make to wine/proton would have to be open source anyway
Of course, but I meant Valve could be willing to help GOG to integrate Proton into Galaxy if they start contributing to development.
Yes, proton is basically “wine deluxe” as I understand it, so they might use it just as it. I just wondered whether they’ll use available solution or plan to use some modification of their own.
I guess we’ll see, hopefully, soon.
They’ll like use the ULWGL–Unified Linux Wine Game Launcher for that. It’s basically all the tech Bottles, Steam, Lutris, etc worked on thrown into one project to prevent duplication and share prefix stuff between launchers.
Edit: Whoops, I guess the project was renamed to UMU.
At first, probably not at all?
Get the basic system and cloud saves working first.
I would say so. But I wonder what’s their overall endgame vision.
Fine i guess. Just a bit worried about all that vibe code. I hope it will not turn out to be hyper-hackerable.
Better late than never I guess.No one cares anymore with Lutris and Heroic providing open source implementations.
i don’t understand how a linux user can have the mindset of “well there is already X, why new alternative”. having alternatives is like, our whole thing
Reason is simple. They could have done that years ago, instead they pushed against it and now Steam has the best and tried Linux support.
Yes, alternatives are good,but be better as a company.
Yes, alternatives are good,but be better as a company.
Gog became independent of CD Project only fairly recently.
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gog just became independent again
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on gog, you actually own your game.
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gog does tremendous work making oldrr games work on new hardware.
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I don’t fully understand the why. No GOG sells games without DRM, that’s it’s whole selling point. Why have a launcher (other than maybe for installing)?
Anyway. Speaking of GOG I’m more excited for Physical games
Although I don’t think I would actually utilize it.
It can be a pain in the ass keeping something updated with the manual installers, especially if you don’t install them in your home directory (the default).
It’s the reason why Linux is the way it is. If we just succumbed to whatever Linus Torvalds wanted to do, Linux as we know it would fall completely to AI. But, that isn’t the reality we have to face, we have plenty of Linux variations out there so that we do not have to just deal with one sole Linux distro.
When the Ubuntu developers disappointed the fanbase, we had options. Lately when Linus Torvalds announced AI, we have options.
That’s the beauty of it all.
Not true. All Linux distros use the Linux kernel, which is maintained primarily by Linus.
But distros do customize them, they don’t have to always follow what Linus puts out.
No one cares anymore with Lutris and Heroic providing open source implementations.
Lutris follows the horrible Gnome design HIG and Heroic is an Electron web app that always selects weird UI elements by default when using it with a game pad (it’s clearly an afterthought).
If GOG Galaxy happens to just work under SteamOS Game Mode, it’s a massive improvement in my book.
Heroic is an Electron web app that always selects weird UI elements
And like all Electron apps, it’s a resource hog.
Man, I actually like the way Gnome apps look and feel.
I hate Gnome login manager, writing gnome apps, the empty gnome menu bar, app switcher, the way the dock is implemented, the screen switcher, and a few other things.
But the apps plus icons actually using screen real estate correctly is so much better than KDE’s interface implementations.
I kind of agree, except for one big difference: cloud save sync. Currently, Heroic et al can sync game saves for Windows GOG games, but for Linux-native games (or Linux builds of multiplatform games), that’s not possible. GOG would have to support Linux cloud saves on the server side.
(For me this is Silksong.)
When they officially have Galaxy for Linux, they will finally have a reason to implement it. And at that point, presumably, the FOSS launchers will be able to utilize it too.
Other than that, having the option of an official GOG Galaxy launcher, with smoother GOG integration and active work both on the client and the server to make everything work better, is a good thing no matter how you look at it. Yes it’s late, but it’s definitely not too late.
I might keep using Heroic. I might switch to this. Time will tell.
I have yet to be able to get my steam controller to work within heroic. Hopefully it works with gog.
Really happy to see this. Hopefully others follow.
I am not really interested in it, because I like that I have most of my digital games in Heroic and I am really annoyed that I have to use Steam in it’s own interface. Using a dedicated programming for GOG is the last I want.
But great for everyone who wants or needs a dedicated Gog client.
I have had problems running games in Heroic. Hopefully GOG Galaxy works better.
Guess i can start buying on gog more now, i started buying more just before i left windows, but then started buying on steam more again because steam just made it a lil easier on Linux, especially for HTPCs with the likes of bazzite.
I’ll probably just keep using Heroic because it unifies libraries. If it ever becomes possible to bring in the steam library as well, it’d be great.
My experience with Heroic has been extremely unreliable as compared to Steam. I don’t know why but hopefully the folks at GOG can iron out those kinks.
It’s mostly worked well for me, but unfortunately it has to sync my GOG library every time I open it before I can see any games at all. Epic just loads fine, but I only get those free games because I can. 😅
I’d like to see itch.io support as well.
Ooh, yes. Actually, I’d put that over Steam in priorities. Steam is serviceable as is. Itch needs more love.
