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.
this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2024
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It's pretty hard for GOG. Many of the things people don't like about GOG are not really GOG's fault, they are just a result of small market share. Steam is the bigger platform, and so naturally it gets priority for basically everything.
You game doesn't work on Steam? Then you'd better fix it immediately, because that's where the bulk of players are. But if your game doesn't work on GOG... well.. maybe fix it when you get some spare time. (Or maybe don't have a GOG version, because you don't want to have to keep multiple platforms up-to-date.)
So publishers and developers are generally less cooperative with GOG. And GOG themselves obviously have much more limited resources to do stuff themselves.
Steam's recent work with Linux has been great. And I do wish GOG would have something like that. But again, Valve has vast resources for that kind of thing - and they've been working on it ever since the Windows 8 appstore threatened to wipe them out. (That threat fizzled out; but nevertheless, that was what got the Linux ball rolling for Valve.) I'm in two minds about whether GOG should try to boost their Linux support. On the one hand, GOG is all about preservation and compatibility... and so it makes sense to have better Linux compatibility. On the other hand, it would be leaning further into a niche; and working on a problem that is kind of solved already. i.e. We can already run GOG games on Linux with or without a native linux version... it just could be nicer... Maybe it's not a good use of GOG's resources to go for that.
(That said, when I look at their linux start.sh scripts and see
cd "${CURRENT_DIR}/game" chmod +x *
it makes me think they could probably put at least a bit more effort into their linux support.)
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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.
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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.
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