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.

They’ve always distributed Linux versions for games that have them an those are the ones which pop-up by default on the game’s downloads pages if you’re browsing their site from Linux, so it’s not as if they don’t support Linux.

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

Meanwhile because they ship DRM-free games with offline installers they’re actually closer to the spirit of Linux than Steam: you have full control over how you run a game you got for them (for example, I try to run all games sandboxed with networking restricted to localhost only plus a number of other safety limitations, which I can do with GOG games launched from Lutris but not with Steam games).

As I see it Steam does a lot of handholding (both in Windows and Linux) in exchange for them retaining a ton of control over your gaming, whilst GOG just gives you maximum freedom but with zero handholding.

Maybe because I’ve been a Techie and Gamer since the 90s, personally I vastly prefer the later approach but I can see how people who grew up in the hand-holding era of computing would value convenience over control.

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

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

i.e you are all a bunch of wankers

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

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?

Only their Galaxy client, because any games with native linux support has the proper installer files. They don’t go out of their way to ensure windows only games also work on linux

Y-yea… For solidarity

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!

I want to buy more from GOG but my only gaming system I have is a Steam Deck. I know the native Linux stuff should work ok but u always have problems getting windows stuff to work. Either through Heroic Launcher or Proton. I must be doing something wrong. All the guides I find are just wrong or out of date.

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

In the sense that reading Mein Kampf is fine sure

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

i.e you are all a bunch of wankers

You being able to play it on linux is not the same thing as having Linux support. They don’t even have a first-party launcher. Probably half the games I buy on GOG don’t even launch, even after adding them to Steam. Meanwhile Steam works literally 100% of the time, in my experience.

They support free games. If only they supported free platforms to play them on…

GOG is a distributor and storefront. They aren’t a developer, so it’s not up to them to develop Linux versions of the games they sell.

I think they’re saying GOG doesn’t support Linux?