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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[–] 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 1 day 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 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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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