919
GOG officially announces GOG Galaxy for Linux (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 day ago by to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.world
175 comments fedilink hide all child comments
❤️ 2 🙏 2
 

Overview page: https://www.gog.com/en/anniversary

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

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 1 point 12 hours ago (2 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?

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 child)

    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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 1 point 48 minutes ago

    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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent