GOG Joins European Federation of Game Archives, Museums & Preservation Projects
14 comments
·January 15, 2025freedomben
surgical_fire
I second that. I normally buy games on Gog when I have the option.
postepowanieadm
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.
freedomben
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
>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.
this_user
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
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.
NegatioN
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
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.
aeurielesn
As a SteamDeack owner, I'm really looking forward to see AAA games be Linux-first.
Windows gaming really needs to stop.
thesnide
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.
tombert
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`.
beretguy
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
I never heard about this petition... Signed and shared to European friends!
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).