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GOG officially announces GOG Galaxy for Linux (lemmy.ml)
submitted 2 days ago by to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.world
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Overview page: https://www.gog.com/en/anniversary

Direct sign up for Galaxy Linux beta: https://www.smartsurvey.co.uk/t/YEF5EV/

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[–] 7 points 2 days ago (18 children)

I feel like this and DRM are the two things people point out as GoG's benefits, but first of all GoG also sells you a license, so it's EXACTLY the same as Steam. The "difference" is in the other point, because without DRM games bought on GoG can be backed up and installed again without needing GoGs approval, but this ignores two HUGE caveats:

  • GoG also allows DRM on their store, with some games having DRM for DLCs or extra content.
  • Steam doesn't require DRM, so all games that are DRM free on GoG are most likely also DRM free on Steam.

All in all this means that in regards to ownership morally GoG is essentially the same as Valve, they just have better PR about it.

PS: To give credit where it's due, GoG is a lot more restrictive with what DRM it allows, and you can expect most of the game you bought to be playable without DRM there. However I feel that allowing me to play on my libre OS is a lot more morally significant than the difference between those two DRM stances.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago (17 children)

    Genuine question, can you start these DRM free games that you own via steam without the steam launcher?

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago (14 children)

    Absolutely, otherwise the game wouldn't truly be DRM free. There are some games that have a different version on Steam that on GoG where the game crashes if it can't find steam running, IMO those are badly programmed games and while it is technically DRM I would put those into a category of unintentional DRM, and there is an easy crack which is to replace the steam library they ship with with a fake one that replies as if it were steam. And while easy to do I would not call those DRM free.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    TIL, I thought all steam games had to be run via the steam launcher.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago*

    Further, even if they are integrated with Steam via the Steam API (they literally are shipped with a steamapi.dll), you can usually get around the soft DRM of it using something like the Goldberg Emulators (basically a version of that DLL that doesn't connect to Steam's systems).

    The problem is that if you care about games having or not DRM, you can't make an informed purchase decision in Steam because they don't give you information about that when you're considering buying a game, so you only find that out after you bought it.

    This is even more of a problem that merelly single player games that won't run offline because some forms of DRM which aren't phone-home DRM can still make it impossible to run that game with Wine or Proton - I have a game from Steam which won't at all run in Linux no matter what I do, yet a pirated version of it runs just fine with Wine.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago (10 children)

    Does Steam tell you upfront before you buy the game if it's DRM free, or is it always a happy surprise when you brand new single player game doesn't fail to startup because it phoned-home and your Internet connection was down?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago (9 children)

    It does, kinda, there are warnings for games that require certain things like kernel level anti-cheat or 3d party accounts, although I think they should have an extra one for always on DRM which is particularly nasty and troublesome for people on a steam deck so there's reason for them to warn on that.

    But also, you have 14 days to return a game as long as you have less than 2h of play, if this is a major concern for you you can run the game offline and ensure it works otherwise refund it. There are also unofficial curators run by community that allow you to quickly see if a game is in those lists which is a nice community way to ensure weird cases are captured. Still would be nice to have more official stance from Valve on hard DRMs, hopefully with GoG coming to Linux they might have to care more about it, but we'll see.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (8 children)

    Often you don't know or care your game won't run offline until your Internet is down and you just want to play a game and it won't run. Also some kinds of DRM are totally invisible until certain conditions happen (say, you upgrade components in your PC and now the DRM thinks it's a different machine).

    Even if without fail you install and test every single game you buy from Steam games for DRM before you actually play them (so as not to exceed the 2h), making sure you do so within 14 days of purchasing, and refund them if they do have such DRM, or for every single game you're considering buying, spend time trawling through support communities upfront to see if they have such DRM, you still won't know for sure if that game has some DRM that will stop you from playing it a later date - maybe the offline stuff only triggers after X days offline, maybe the DRM is doing the whole machine ID stuff and breaks only if you change enough or specific components in your PC, maybe it's just something that cause needless problems running it under Wine, and for all those things maybe nobody that had problems with it wrote about them in whatever support forum forum you checked.

    Unreliable workarounds aren't actual solutions.

    Meanwhile you can buy from GOG without such hassles or risks that you have when buying games from Steam to make sure they're free of nasty DRM, a totally unecessary massive hassle as Steam could easily list for each game if they gave DRM or not and which kind of DRM they have if they do, but they choose not to.

    My point is that with its current stance Valve is at best purposefully supporting anti-consumer stances from some game publishers which would suffer in terms of sales if their bullshit DRM was prominently signalled in the store listing for their games.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago (7 children)

    I don't disagree with most what you said about Steam, I really wish they were more strict about DRM and disclosure of it, I think they have a lot to improve in that area, and you are absolutely right that just because there's a workaround doesn't mean it's not a problem.

    In fact the only thing I disagree with is this:

    Meanwhile you can buy from GOG without such hassles or risks that you have when buying games from Steam to make sure they're free of nasty DRM

    You do know GoG allows DRM on their store, right? And that you don't have curators or similar to have a workaround, your only hope is to go through this thread https://www.gog.com/forum/general/drm_on_gog_list_of_singleplayer_games_with_drm/page1 to find if it's listed there.

    I'm not anti-GoG or pro-steam, I wish both of them to succeed because I want to play DRM free games on my Linux machine, but I feel that GoG gets a lot of good propaganda for things they're only doing marginally better than steam.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (6 children)

    Yeah, they sometimes fail in enforcing their own stated policy.

    While quite a number those things are so so, many are clear breaches of that policy (for example the Absolver one at the very start and the Cyberpunk 2077 one).

    Personally in my 200+ collection of games from GOG I never had such problems, whilst my Steam collection of around 20 games has several titles with DRM to the point that one of them won't even run from Steam in Linux but the pirate version (which is cracked) runs just fine.

    None the less, you make a fair point.

    Personally I currently favor GOG because with their "No DRM" (except when they fail at it, as you pointed out) and downloadable offline installers, I de facto have the same ownership rights of the games I purchase as I used to have in the pre-Internet days when I bought a game CD (later, with the Internet, even physical games started having online validation), and if a different store was giving me that I would support them equally for that.

    It's really about how far in practice do my ownership rights of a game go rather than store X or store Y, so stuff like blocking from playing a single player game in a machine which is offline or at any point the "game license" being revoked, the game removed from my collection and now I can't ever play it anymore (which, by the way, is also a risk in GOG if you don't download the offline installer) are big problems to me.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago (5 children)

    Yup, I can totally see that logic, but as someone who's using Linux as their main OS for a long while being able to easily play the game on my system is more important than most instances of DRM (although always on DRM is not acceptable to me). My reasoning is that if I have to jump through hoops to get the game to run on my machine by for example having to setup a wine prefix and figure out things for it I'm not paying for that game, if they don't care for me as a customer, then why should I pay them?.

    For a long time that meant only native games got my money, and back then I used to buy stuff from GoG as all being the same their no DRM policy is better than Valve's. But Valve invested heavily on Wine and Proton, which not only improved my experience inside their store but also outside of it, so I see a lot of return in giving them money, whereas GoG I'm getting the same experience from them than from the pirate bay or whatever kids are using nowadays, so I don't see a reason to give them money.

    All of that being said, when GoG Galaxy comes to Linux, and if they integrate wine with it in a useful way, I plan on having a look at the old games catalog and possibly throw some money their way to encourage both Linux and DRM free support, but nowadays rebuilding my game library elsewhere would be prohibitly expensive, not to mention the pains of having to deal with multiple launchers, systems, etc.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (4 children)

    I use Lutris as my launcher in Linux and the level of convenience to run Windows games in Linux with it is slightly superior to Steam (superior mainly because I like to run my games inside a sandbox with networking disabled, which I can easily do in Lutris but not Steam, plus I don't have the launchers always running in the background and it's very rare that I have to wait for Lutris to update when I want to run a game and start it, whilst with Steam it's pretty common that I try to start a game and then spend a few minutes waiting for Steam to update itself and/or the game, when all I want is to run the bloody game and don't care about it being the latest version), though for most people it should be around the same or maybe even a bit more for Steam if you care about automatic updating of the games before they're run (which Lutris won't do for GOG games - it will fetch and install game updates but you have to tell it to do it) and certain Steam API facilities such as cloud-saves and showing achievements to your friends.

    My total failure rate of running Windows games from GOG using Lutris as the launcher is about the same as that of running Windows games from Steam because Lutris too does the whole Wine + DXVK thing and has launch scripts for most games, though Steam does seem to have problems with AAA games from a certain generation (around the 00s) that won't run in Linux whilst the pirate version of the same game runs just fine from Lutris, which is probably due to the DRM for those games back then which I remember was a real pain in the arse and which is still present in the Steam version.

    So my no-DRM thing is also a bit about running my games in Linux - because sometimes DRM gets in the way of that - though it is mainly about ownership and controlling myself when and how I run the games I bought and not actually losing access to a game because it was taken down from the store.

    In fact I have no intention of using a Linux GOG Galaxy as my launcher in Linux, same as back when my gaming PC was Windows I didn't use the Windows one, I just hope GOG finally making one for Linux signals that they're taking Linux gamers more seriously and maybe they'll do like Steam and contribute some open source code to the gaming ecosystem in Linux, as that will benefit us all.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago (3 children)

    Yeah, I understand all that, but first of all I have 4 gaming systems, 3 of them boot straight to Steam big picture (Desktop plugged to my living room TV, Steam Deck and Steam Frame), while I could have my gaming laptop for something different it just makes it easier to use the same on all systems, plus I would miss on cloud saves which make it seamless to switch from one system to another.

    But here's the thing, to run things in Lutris I have to set it up myself, and setting it up with GoG downloaded installers or pirated versions is essentially the same, so what exactly is GoG providing me that I can't get by pirating? Am I only paying them for the legality of it?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

    You don't have to set up anything yourself in Lutris for games from GOG - you just go to the GOG view in Lutris where it lists all your games in GOG and click "Install" on the game you want to install and play: Lutris has scripts for the vast majority of GOG games that will automatically do whatever tweaks are needed to be done to Wine to run it so you don't have to do anything beyond that.

    It's about as likely that you have to do anything further than clicking "Install" to get a GOG Windows game to run from Lutris as it is likely that you have to do anything beyond clicking "Install" to get a Steam Windows game to run from Steam, and even if you do get an issue, like with Steam in Lutris most of the problems are solved by just switching in a pull-down box in the config for that game to get it to use the latest Wine or Proton version.

    As I said, I get no more hassle with running GOG Windows games in Linux with Lutris than I have running Steam Windows games in Linux with Steam.

    If you run pirate games from Lutris, THEN you do often have to set it up yourself since Lutris doesn't have install scripts for such versions of the game at which point one does indeed need to dive into logs and poke around Winetricks to get the game to run (though you might get lucky, especially with DODI repacks).

    Even if installing and launching GOG games from Lutris wasn't that convenient, you would be paying GOG rather pirating the game to pay the makers of the game for having made something you enjoy, and in fact I would recommend you to buy the game directly from the makers if you can bypassing the games stores (ANY games stores, GOG included) so that they get the maximum amount possible as they're the ones doing most of the work and the games stores are just middlemen taking advantage of market inefficiencies and networking effects in games distribution to get a disproportionate cut of the money for doing a tiny fraction of the work.

    As a question of principle I actually chose to pay for games in GOG when I could just download pirated copies of the GOG offline installers for those games and install them just as easily - the Lutris scripts for the GOG versions of the game work for both direct download from GOG and for local offline installer files, and those local offline installer files can just as easily be pirated copies as they can be something you downloaded from GOG.

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  • [–] 1 point 19 hours ago (1 child)

    Yeah, but the fact that Lutris allows to do that painlessly is neither GoG nor the game dev doing. The game dev made a game for a different OS than mine, old enough games I can excuse, but all major engines have supported Linux for a while now, so I don't feel particularly morally obligated to give money to someone who made a statement that they don't care about me playing their game. On the other hand GoG also did nothing other than provide a store, and game devs could just sell their DRM free copies on their own websites and bypass GoG entirely, the convenience GoG sells goes out of the window if I can't access it and I have to rely on a third party app to make it convenient.

    That being said, there are amazing games that have native versions and sell DRM free copies on their website and I strongly encourage anyone to buy directly from them, for example Factorio, RimWorld or Project Zomboid. Other games don't sell on their own websites but do provide Linux versions on GoG, like Dead Cells or SOMA, I definitely see the point of buying there to give money to the devs. But for devs that don't care about me, and a store that treat me as a second class citizen.

    Valve invests the fee onto improvements to wine, dxvk, FEX, as well as the features they offer like Steam client, cloud saves, etc. They invested money that allows me to play non native games easily, so to play those games I'm okay to pay Valve for it, they're the ones that allow me to play them. But neither GoG nor game devs that don't care about Linux want my money so I don't care about them either.

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  • [–] 0 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

    Right, you're trying to make a "who are the good guys" judgement using money as the metric ...

    Then let's do some cold hard business analysis on all this shit:

    For starters, Valve does very little of the work in projects like Wine compared to the work done by voluntaries working on those Open Source projects. I vaguely remember that they had one person full time on it.

    Further, judging by their yearly profits (more than $1 billion as leaked in 2021) they clearly "invest" very very little of the fee "onto improvements to wine, dxvk, FEX, as well as the features they offer like Steam client, cloud saves, etc." otherwise the profits would be much less.

    Imagine how far something like Wine would go with just half a year of Valve's profits, enough to pay for a year of work of around 5,000 devs here in Europe (depends on the country - I'm using $100,000 per year per worker which is actually well above average dev pay in all of EE)

    More Maths: say you would have to PAY directly for the software that lets you run games in Linux. Let's put a fair value per copy for that at €200 - well above a consumer price and actually a business price for software, though not a corporate price. Let's further say that the average price you pay per game is €40. Last but not least, lets simplify our math by saying that Valve paid for the entire development of all that open source software, which is nowhere near the case, and lets ignore taxes as they vary a lot from country to country.

    Valve takes 30% commission per game sold, so even in this wildly pro-Valve imaginary scenario were Valve does all the work in those open source projects, if your game collection in Valve is more than 17 games, then you're already losing. Any further game you buy is just you delivering value to Valve for no extra value in return as you've already paid for the value you get from those open source projects.

    The reality is that Valve aren't the good guys - if they were their profits would be way less because they would be truly "investing the fee onto improvements to wine, dxvk, FEX, as well as the features they offer like Steam client, cloud saves, etc." as you imagine they are. In fact the most reasonable explanation for them putting a small bit of their billionaire revenues into those projects is that it's a small strategical investment to reduce their dependency on Microsoft and the risks associated with Microsoft doing like Apple does with iOS and Google is on its way to do with Android - forcing all sales of software that runs in Windows to go through a Microsoft store. Valve is not a charity: they send a little bit of money that way that just keeps the projects rolling with volunteer work without actually putting so much money into it that they basically take over because it's the optimal business strategy that minimizes the cost for them whilst helping secure their market share against such a move by Microsoft.

    Valve are there to make money for their owner and all they do is to make money for their owner, not help out the likes of you and me.

    Mind you, neither are GOG or any of the other for-profit game stores the "good guys": they're all in it for themselves, not for us and anything they do which is good for us they do it because it's good for them and would otherwise not do it.

    Ultimately if you really want to make this about "value", then you have to figure out how much "value" you derive from each feature that each store offers you - so how much are cloud saves worth it to you, how much is having a game store launcher in Linux and its features worth it for you, how much are offline game installers and no-DRM worth it for you and so on.

    Personally I see little value in store launchers and cloud saves and more value in offline game installers and no-DRM, so my value consideration makes me lean towards buying more from GOG than from Steam. Yet I will still buy from Steam if a game is in Steam but not GOG and the value of the game for me is enough to exceed this imbalance, which is why I have a small collection of games in Steam - I actually tend make purchasing decisions based on value considerations since I have a background in Finance and as a business owner so naturally look at products and services as something that delivers value to the user.

    However, it's perfectly valid that other people see different value for themselves in these things and that adds up to a preference for Steam over GOG - the value an individual derives from features of products and services is a personal thing.

    Let's however not deceive ourselves by looking at small strategic investments of massive for-profit companies and think they're doing it for us.

    PS: By the way, curiously of the 3 games you listed 2 of them I bought directly from the game makers.

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