[HN Gopher] GOG Joins European Federation of Game Archives, Muse...
___________________________________________________________________
GOG Joins European Federation of Game Archives, Museums &
Preservation Projects
Author : LorenDB
Score : 205 points
Date : 2025-01-15 17:35 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.gamingonlinux.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.gamingonlinux.com)
| freedomben wrote:
| Just a high level comment on GOG, I am immensely grateful to them
| for existing and for sticking so strong to their principles
| against DRM, and for maintaining great customer service. I have
| bought a lot of games from GOG and have been very happy. As an
| exclusively Linux user, I also appreciate how well GOG works with
| Lutris et al and that they aren't making life harder for those
| devs. I _love_ the offline installers and I deeply appreciate
| their availability.
|
| I'm not a big gamer but after watching the industry and
| Linux/open source in general for many, many years, I'm more
| convinced than ever that it's the gaming community who will save
| general purpose computing (that's also a nod to Valve for
| everything they've done for Linux as well, which has been major).
| surgical_fire wrote:
| I second that. I normally buy games on Gog when I have the
| option.
| ykonstant wrote:
| Unfortunately, it is (very) hard to make non-native games from
| GOG work on Linux, as someone who just doesn't "grok" Wine.
| This is especially painful for me, because I have supported and
| want to support GOG, but my obscure point and click adventure
| games work out of the box with Proton on Steam, which is more
| than I can say about GOG games.
|
| To this day, I have exactly one game that I have not managed to
| get working on my linux system: GRIS, bought from GOG. I tried
| everything suggested online, nothing worked. Since then (I
| still have not played GRIS), I tend to get stuff from Steam.
| izacus wrote:
| GoG games work just fine when installed with Heroic in Linux.
|
| Demanding that a small shop fighting DRM now also funds
| support for your rare operating system is some massive
| entitlement, especially since there's plenty of ways to make
| them work now.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| Nobody is demanding anything. They simply stated what they
| value as a consumer, and if GOG wants more of their
| business, what they need to do to earn it. This is valuable
| feedback to any company.
| postepowanieadm wrote:
| I wish I liked GOG, but they ignore Linux users, while Steam's
| Linux support is the best thing that's happened to Linux gaming.
| aeurielesn wrote:
| As a SteamDeack owner, I'm really looking forward to see AAA
| games be Linux-first.
|
| Windows gaming really needs to stop.
| tombert wrote:
| Proton has gotten so good now that this is less of an issue
| to me. I buy games on GOG and just load them into Steam with
| Heroic.
|
| I actually will often get better performance doing it this
| way; Jupiter Hell, for example, has a native Linux port, but
| I almost exclusively play the Windows version on Linux. I'm
| not entirely sure why this is, maybe performance issues with
| OpenGL compared to the D3D->Vulkan pipeline.
|
| Linux has so much fragmentation between distros and the like,
| the Windows API is ironically one of the easiest ways to get
| stuff working consistently on Linux. If you're playing games
| on NixOS, for example, you have to do extra work to get Linux
| versions working a lot of the time because NixOS kind of
| breaks dynamic-linking by default. If you play the windows
| versions on NixOS, it's often as easy as `wine myGame.exe`.
| thesnide wrote:
| I was thinking that way in the past. But then, the only
| stable ABI is the win32 one.
|
| The linux kernel one is very stable, but the libs ones isn't.
|
| As soon as the dev ensure and cooperates with wine/proton to
| make it work nicely, i'm game.
|
| Needing those old libs in linux is rather cumbersome, if at
| all possible. So having wine doing the translation layer is a
| really good thing. As it frees the devs to be able to focus
| on 1 plateform.
|
| I also noted that the switch enabled a lot of linux native
| ports. That's also a nice side effect.
| braiamp wrote:
| > the only stable ABI is the win32 one
|
| TBF, that's also true when compared to Windows. The only
| actually stable ABI in all major OS's are Linux Win32 via
| Wine.
| yupyupyups wrote:
| You can create portable apps on Linux that will work for
| years to come. Bundle everything except for very core
| libraries, even libstd++. Things to NOT bundle would be
| glibc and any opengl implementation. To make apps backwards
| compatible with older versions of Linux, compile the app on
| a system with the oldest glibc you wish to support (because
| glibc is forwards compatible, but not backwards
| compatible).
| ChocolateGod wrote:
| This never really works in practice, far too many
| variations and compilation differences between distros.
| The Linux Standard Base was an attempt to do this and it
| went.... no where.
|
| > (because glibc is forwards compatible, but not
| backwards compatible).
|
| I've lost count of times I've had "portable" binaries not
| work because I'm using a newer version of glibc and the
| binary was compiled for Ubuntu/Debian.
|
| The only "standardised" way of making native Linux apps
| portable and "work for life" is to use the thing that
| worked in the server space, containers, Flatpak being the
| vendor-neutral and more widely supported for desktop
| apps.
| segasaturn wrote:
| Is this something that Flatpak could fix?
| ChocolateGod wrote:
| Steam can already use bwrap (Flatpaks sandbox system)
| with its own runtime to accomplish this, but why bother
| when you can just target Win32 and have it work out the
| box.
|
| Outside of graphic and input, game engines make use of
| very few native APIs compared to applications as they're
| made to be portable with consoles.
| ThrowawayB7 wrote:
| Your Steam Deck provides Windows API emulation so games coded
| to target Windows will run on it. As a Steam Deck owner, you
| are perpetuating Windows gaming.
| this_user wrote:
| It's probably outside their scope, and they are not as large
| and wealthy as Valve that they can afford to invest the
| necessary resources. But you can use 3rd party launchers like
| "Heroic" that support GOG and basically give you the same
| experience as Steam does.
| tombert wrote:
| I find that this is also the easiest way to get your games
| loaded into the SteamOS interface.
|
| On my homemade NixOS SteamOS-like gaming box, I have it boot
| into the SteamOS interface, and it's pretty and console-like,
| and it's nice to be able to quickly install my GOG and Epic
| games and automatically add it to Steam so it can be easily
| played with that interface.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| FWIW they _could_ piggyback on Valve 's open source work and
| help there like Zoom Platform (DRM-free shop like GOG,
| unrelated to Zoom) did[0]. ZP is a _much_ smaller company
| than GOG (pretty much everyone in it, including the CEO,
| hangs out on their official Discord) and they still got
| someone to handle that part. I don 't use the utility myself
| but i've seen on Discord that they -try to- provide support
| for people using it.
|
| [0] https://zoom-platform.sh/
| NegatioN wrote:
| Not a perfect solution, but you could just use Steam to load
| games from GOG on Linux though. Thereby getting "the best of
| both worlds". I have yet to stumble upon any major issue doing
| this.
| the_snooze wrote:
| Also, running other store launchers under Steam Proton works
| surprisingly well. I've been able to install Battle.net as a
| custom entry in Steam and run StarCraft II flawlessly in
| Linux.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| What does Steam bring to the table here?
| NegatioN wrote:
| You get to launch Windows games through Steam Proton. It's
| a no-hassle way to get up and running with gaming on Linux,
| although many are probably using Wine or Lutrix.
| freedomben wrote:
| What do you mean by they ignore Linux users?
|
| Every game clearly indicates whether it provides a Linux
| installer so there aren't any surprises there, and even in the
| cart you'll get a banner message saying something like, "Some
| of these games don't work on your operating system (Linux)" to
| avoid surprises.
|
| You can even search the store filtering only for games that
| provide a Linux installer, which is a control I use regularly.
| It's disappointing how few games do offer that, but it's
| getting better everyday (for which I largely credit and thank
| Valve).
|
| They don't support Linux with GOG Galaxy, but given they
| maintain compatibility with Lutris and Heroic and others I
| think I actually _prefer_ that to official GOG Galaxy Support.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| >They don't support Linux with GOG Galaxy
|
| This is a bit of an issue.
|
| For example, Dead Cells offers daily challenges and has a few
| items locked behind completing them. They facilitate these by
| using the platform's tooling, which means the GOG version
| uses Galaxy and Linux users can't access it. And as far as I
| can tell, there's nothing on the site telling you this,
| troubleshooting the problem took a fair amount of digging.
|
| A small thing, and I still opt for GOG over anything else,
| but it can be annoying.
| braiamp wrote:
| Two things, Heroic implements a GOG Galaxy api [1], and
| second, the challenges work on Windows without Galaxy, the
| problem is that their build of SDL is not up to date [2]
|
| 1: https://github.com/imLinguin/comet 2: https://www.gog.co
| m/forum/dead_cells/daily_challenges_on_lin...
| keyringlight wrote:
| Another aspect to this, for recent games I imagine on a
| certain level it's on the original developer to implement
| things for their games sold through the GOG channel. There
| is a spreadsheet [1] of games where the GOG version has
| lesser functionality or has been left behind compared to
| others, usually steam.
|
| This is one of my problems with the "PC gaming = steam"
| attitude that has become prevalent, PC as a platform is
| broad and varied, and if you're going to sell your product
| on multiple stores without making clear that they're
| different then you really should support them, otherwise be
| honest enough to only sell where you are prepared to. I'd
| say managing expectations and who's responsible only gets
| muddier when you're involving compatibility across
| different windows versions, hardware generations, or
| different OSes entirely.
|
| [1] - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zjwUN1mtJdCkg
| tTDRB2I...
| beretguy wrote:
| One would think GOG would participate in helping to spread the
| word about this game preservation petition in EU:
|
| https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home
|
| They could put a permanent banner on their website, I'm sure that
| would bring in some signatures.
| Pooge wrote:
| I never heard about this petition... Signed and shared to
| European friends!
| mig39 wrote:
| Now if only GOG could fix their Mac client so that you can
| actually quit it.
|
| Maybe someone at GOG will actually read this and let a project
| manager to let a programmer know to fix this. Because they keep
| doing everything else other than fixing a really really annoying
| bug. We shouldn't have to force-quit apps!
|
| https://www.gog.com/forum/general_beta_gog_galaxy_2.0/macos_...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-01-15 23:01 UTC)