None of them are even remotely close to the sort of games I enjoy, the porn part isn’t the issue I just don’t care for “dating” sims or puzzle games.

if you try and run the games directly with Wine yourself you get none of the modern conveniences in things like Steam, Lutris or the Heroic Launcher and have to actually learn the “old ways” of going through the log when game fails to launch

They do not work in Lutris or Heroic either, as I said previously.

the tradeoff is that you’re tied to their ecosystem and don’t tend to learn how to do things yourself

All of Steam’s Proton stuff is open-source and GOG could easily implement them, but they make the decision not to every day.

I get it, Linux makes up like 3% of the gaming market, but its paramount to me personally, and while I appreciate GOG’s game preservation and other ethics, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. The fact that I have to “learn the old ways” is why I won’t buy from them. I do not want to “learn how to do things myself”, I just want to play the games I paid for and not be spied on and have ads relentlessly crammed down my throat. Sorry, not sorry. I have a job already.

This seems like a developer/publisher issue. GoG can’t update with files it hasn’t been given.

Would’ve been Pay2Fap, but it’s free! (ง ื▿ ื)ว

They do not work in Lutris or Heroic either, as I said previously.

That was unclear from “Probably half the games I buy on GOG don’t even launch, even after adding them to Steam”. Frankly I thought you were trying to run GOG games the old fashioned way directly in Wine from the command line, since I haven’t really had your experience of half my games in GOG not running in Linux (of the ones I tried in my 200+ games library in GOG only a few did not just run fine directly when installed and launched via Lutris, and of those I still managed get maybe half to run, which is similar to my success rate with Steam games).

Frankly it’s very weird that you’ve tried them with Lutris and Heroic and have such a horrible success rate on GOG games specifically, since for me even pirated games yield a better “hands off” success rate than “half don’t even launch”.

You must be incredibly unlucky or the Steam Deck (assuming that’s what you use) is seriously fucked up in terms of general Wine compatibility.

All of Steam’s Proton stuff is open-source and GOG could easily implement them, but they make the decision not to every day.

Steam games come with phone-home DRM and are often heavily integrated with Steam’s server API for things like cloud saves, which ties them down even further to Steam’s infrastructure.

GOG going with the Steam APIs and Steam’s very own fork of Wine (which is what Proton is), the former designed to tie games down to Steam’s server infrastructure and the other to integrate best with Steam’s store app, makes no sense both from a business perspective and from a freedom in gaming perspective and “freedom in gaming” is GOG’s main schtik as a games store.

Steam’s contributions to Linux are to help Steam, not to help Linux, which is probably why they forked Wine into Proton rather than contributing into Wine: they have to keep it open source since Proton is based on the original LGPL code from Wine (they would need to rewrite it from scratch to close source it), but by controlling that fork they can make sure it will always work best inside the Steam app, in the Steam Deck and with Steam Games.

Steam’s Linux contributions are optimized to work best with Steam (and specific things like the Steam API only work with Steam infrastructure), which is what I meant when I said that they want to tie gamers to their infrastructure.

Let’s not be naive: Steam does what’s good for Steam and whilst as a side-effect they do contribute to Linux, it’s always in ways that are optimized to work best from the Steam app and with Steam games, whilst GOG does not contribute to Linux at all, just kinda supporting it with minimum effort, but since their “unique selling proposition” is freedom in gaming, de facto in Linux they get out of the way of open source gaming support tools and of gamers who want to more tightly control their gaming experience.

Both Steam and GOG are doing what’s best for them and both bring as a side effect different benefits for gaming in Linux.

Frankly it’s very weird that you’ve tried them with Lutris and Heroic and have such a horrible success rate on GOG games specifically

Oh it’s not just GOG, it’s Epic as well. And frankly, I don’t believe you. Based on what you said above about “don’t tend to learn how to do things yourself” I’m gonna guess you’re using all sort of tricks to get shit to work. The only thing I do is hit download and then open. If they don’t work, I don’t bother with anything more than that (or try opening them in Steam, sometimes that works).

You must be incredibly unlucky or the Steam Deck (assuming that’s what you use)

I have 3 different devices, including a Steam Deck, that I have had the same experience on.

Steam games come with phone-home DRM

Which is completely irrelevant if you’re not buying/redeeming them on Steam.

GOG going with the Steam APIs and Steam’s very own fork of Wine (which is what Proton is), the former designed to tie games down to Steam’s server infrastructure

LOL what? I’m very interested to hear more about what you think Steam’s “server infrastructure” or the store app has to do with this. And how that relates to myself and GOG having problems but you not having them? How can it work “just fine” for you in Heroic/Lutris but simultaneously GOG is incapable of the same?

I didn’t even realize you could download them directly from their website. There’s no indication of this when visiting the website on Linux. I thought you had to use the client.

What you mean is that they haven’t created their own Linux distro and Wine fork like Steam.

So yeah, I guess this

The Linux version of X4 took over a week longer to update on GoG than Steam for the 7.00 update.

If it updates from local files, I usually use an open-source program, lgogdownloader, to download installers for GoG.

If it doesn’t…yeah, not much that can be done about that, if Egosoft uses their own updater on one platform and Steam on another.

I will say that actually, one of my single largest irritations about Steam is that it uses multiple TCP connections to download, and one cannot limit the number of TCP connections it uses when downloading. The result is that when it saturates your local connection, it tends to squeeze out other programs using the connection, since available bandwidth tends to wind up roughly allocated relative to the number of connections being used under congestion. I really wish that it wouldn’t do that.

I wouldn’t care if I could just say “use no more than 2 connections”, but…

i.e you are all a bunch of wankers

I literally cannot find a page with actual links to the games? Im not cross-referencing a damn porn bundle.

I believe the giveaway was only for 48 hours so it might be over

Hey, it included Postal 2 as well! (But also guilty, and not ashamed to admit it.)

I wouldn’t want to meet a person who wanks to Postal 2, though playing is fine.

Sure mate, whatever, I’m lying, your way out there misinterpretations of the points I’m making and misreading of what I wrote are actually genial argumentative “gotchas” and the product of a superior mind and your relentless batting for Steam and against all other games stores isn’t at all mindless fanboyism.

Keep up the good work, maybe they’ll give you a discount!

Curiously I actually have an example of a GOG game - Project Zomboid - where the Linux version won’t work on my distro (latest Pop!OS) because of missing libraries whilst the Windows version works perfectly under Wine straight out of the box when installed via Lutris, which is pretty silly.

As others pointed out, many times the Linux installers are also several versions behind the Windows ones.

When it comes to Linux, the one and only benefit of GOG is that due to their no-DRM policy and downloadable installers you have maximum freedom to do things like sandbox games to your heart’s content and do thinks like run them with networking disabled - which you can’t do from Steam - and older AAA games from around the 90s and 00s which often had nasty DRM, when they are available in GOG come stripped from the DRM and are thus more likely to actually work under Wine, whilst that’s not reliably the case in Steam (I have an older game from EA in Steam which won’t at all run under Linux from Steam no matter what you do, but a pirate version runs just fine - so I suspect it’s the DRM, which was pretty nasty already in the 00s when the game came out - though since there aren’t installer scripts for pirated games in Lutris, I had to learn the whole process of detecting missing DLLs and configuring them in Wine myself to get it running).

Mind you, it was a massive surprise when I moved my gaming rig to Linux about a year ago, that nowadays most games just work out of the box, both Steam games from the Steam app on Proton and GOG games using Lutris with Wine, given that my previous try at gaming in Linux about 5 years ago was a massive exercise in frustration which I quickly gave up on and that Linux instance just sat there for years in dual boot configuration but never actually used.

So you’re one of the 10

If I’m misinterpreting something, feel free to clarify. Your relentless batting for GOG and against all other games stores isn’t at all mindless fanboyism.

I want to buy more but I can’t seem to find any games I actually wanna play or don’t already own on Steam. This campaign did remind me that they exist and that I should try to support them more, so I think it was a net positive for me!

In the sense that reading Mein Kampf is fine sure

It’s when you start agreeing with it that the problem starts

I guess masturbating to it would be a sign of enthusiastic agreement, yes.