Let’s be honest, this was apparent for a long time. Steam, a centralised platform, has been making strides in Linux gaming and has been making innovation after innovation together with its steam deck. Gog, a forefront to freedom in gaming, barely did anything for the Linux gaming scene. No innovation either. Its just the simple (and well needed) premise of no DRM. It’s necessary, but not enough. It didn’t cater to its niche, it just committing to creating one under a premise. That’s not how you go forward. How does this connect to bad management? Well, I think that with good management gog would make different moves. And wouldn’t rest on its laurels so much.
The launcher that they have is pretty rough. I downloaded it for Mac OS and it just wouldn’t run right. Kept closing down. If I could just download right from the website they’d have some money.
If they draw is drm free games why only allow purchase through a custom launcher like everything else?
I don’t use their launcher at all.
It’s kind of a convoluted process but you can definitely download every game you own through gog without it.
Yeah galaxy is sadly a bit of a mess. Back when i was still running windows it broke its own update capabilities once or twice.
Can you not download from the site on mac?
People talking about money kinda missing the point this is a culture issue. They need to sort themselves out clean house if people can’t be reasonable for their staff.
There’s nothing wrong with the business model of selling older games at affordable prices. This is about poor management. (Or deliberately bad management by a “CEO” who was hired to destroy GOG to remove a popular choice from us).
Thankfully if GOG goes down I don’t lose anything.
Now if Steam goes down, I lose my entire library
Gabe Newell has promised that if Steam goes down you won’t lose your library, but we only have his word as assurance.
Do you have a source for this? People like to repeat this rumour but I’ve never found out where he promises anything like that.
No doubt the corporate drones that take over after his death will shit all over his legacy.
It’s one of my biggest fears, but I guess there’s always piracy especially for old games.
As great as Gaben and Valve are his word doesn’t mean anything (it’s not a personal attack either, it’s just that it isn’t anything binding). Luckily if they fail to keep their promises (or legally cannot) then the crack community will step in. I’m pretty sure they cracked Steam DRM ages ago. I remember a friend using it for Left 4 Dead back in the day.
Anything that uses steam apis and services won’t work without steam and steam offers a lot of that to game devs
A lot of steam games dont have drm
You would lose only most of your library, not all of it
If you can’t play the game without the steam client then it still has drm. The main selling point of gog to me is the offline installers that don’t require any client
But he’s not talking about those ones.
If you can’t play the game without the steam client then it still has drm.
Plenty of games don’t rely on any Steamworks API at all. For the remaining goldberg_emulator exits.
You can play the game without the steam client
If steam goes down I’m sailing the high seas from then on.
As a result, no one on the team has the courage to express their opinion. Under Gołębiewski, GOG typically makes business decisions that may be profitable in the short term, but may not contribute to the platform’s long-term growth.
Why half ass things when your the good guy?
I hope they stick around they are great for gaming. I need to buy off there more often.
The publication added that CD Projekt cuts jobs at its subsidiary every two to three years, with annual staff turnover reaching around 30%.
As summed up by another former employee, “GOG has been acting well tactically from a financial perspective, but poorly strategically, and the current business model is likely running out of steam.”
So nothing burger? Other than a corpo being anti-worker which is not news…
“no pun intended”
I really like GOG so it would be highly unfortunate to see them go under. I guess we really can’t have nice things in this day and age.
GOG is a side project of CD Project, the makers of The Witcher and Cyberpunk. They are massively wealthy. If GOG goes down, it’s because CD Project lets it happen, not because there is no other way.
Are they publicly traded?
Too bad, I use Steam and it works wonderfully on Linux, but i don’t want it to be the only option.
i don’t want it to be the only option.
Neither do I but it is. GOG doesn’t support Linux. Heroic is a 3rd party community effort. Valve is currently the only company making financial investments into Linux gaming.
Many more companies than Valve are making financial investments into Linux gaming, including companies that own various Linux distributions (Red Hat, Canonical, etc.), CodeWeavers (who amongst other things have been contracted by Valve on a lot of Proton work) and to a lesser extent Humble Bundle.
It does support Linux: it lets you download Linux installer for games that have a Linux port.
The lack of GOG Galaxy on Linux just means you have to manually manage your games.
It does support Linux: it lets you download Linux installer for games that have a Linux port.
GOG lets publishers upload various installers but GOG does nothing to support them, let alone offer something like Proton (which is open source, so they could take and integrate it for free).
No one needs to “offer” Proton. It’s available freely for anyone. I think some people think Proton is a Steam thing. It isn’t. Yeah, Valve did a lot of work on it, which is great, but it isn’t limited to them. Vlave has essentially unlimited resources, and I’m happy they spent some making improvements for WINE, but GOG does not have nearly the same resources. I wouldn’t expect them to put their effort into that. Valve only did because they were building hardware that they wanted to run Linux.
Valve only did because they were building hardware that they wanted to run Linux.
That was part of it clearly but I think more so they wanted an escape route as Microsoft enshittifies (further)
On steam I can click install and run and most games windows and Linux just work without further effort. This makes gog worthless to me. I could just use wine I don’t know why I’d bother.
No one needs to “offer” Proton. It’s available freely for anyone.
And that’s how GOG does not support Linux: Paying customers need to figure it out on their own. They don’t even value their customers to a degree to take and integrate existing open source solutions.
Is proton entirely FOSS? I do know that they are built on wine, but now that I think about it, I am not sure.
GOG is the only big option if you want to own the games you purchase.
That’s not how copyright laws work anywhere. You don’t own anything, it’s just a license.
In case of Steam.
With GOG I get an actual license key & terms that state my ownership.
With GOG I get an actual license key & terms that state my ownership.
No, the intellectual property is not transferred to you. You have no clue how copyright works.
I totally understand your point, but when people talk about “you own nothing” they don’t really mean you “own” the content on physical media, they mean it doesn’t have DRM. You’re technically correct, but your pedantry is making you miss the forest for the trees, basically.
For most people that is a distinction without a difference.
GoG Vault would disagree with you on that.
You can download the full installers and keep them, nobody can take them away or disable it remotely
What they mean is that technically you still are being granted a license to use it. The same was true for things like DVD movies. They’re technically correct, but missing the point.
GoG Vault would disagree with you on that.
They are free to disagree on laws but they are still bound by them.
You can download the full installers and keep them, nobody can take them away or disable it remotely
That’s true but if your license is revoked, you’re illegally in possession of the game assets.
It’s less clear than you say.
In principle the First-sale doctrine should apply but it has not caught up with reality yet.
That’s not how it works but hey, you do you
It 100% is how it works. Read that EULA next time you install one of those games via the installer you downloaded from gog.
Yeah & we still get to keep the installers, but hey I seriously do get your point
and?
Who says you have to respect the laws? Just pirate if publishers mess with players
Just pirate
What’s the point of GOG then?
Morals
Morals
Nothing moral about a store that affirms Microsoft’s Windows monopoly.
Same reason we have Barnes and Nobles in the states. I like to browse before I hit zlibrary.
We have itch.io
Not everything is on GoG
I see what they did there. groan.
NOOOOOOO I LOVE GOG
The word choice is certainly not accidental.
GameWorldObserver.
Can they be trusted?
