this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2024
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[–] aggelalex@lemmy.world 52 points 6 months ago (16 children)

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.

[–] blind3rdeye@lemm.ee 30 points 6 months ago (11 children)

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.)

[–] emeralddawn45@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 6 months ago (5 children)

How would a game "not work" on GOG? isnt their whole thing that they give you just the game files with no DRM or whatever?

[–] blind3rdeye@lemm.ee 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Are you seriously asking how a piece of computer software might fail to operate correctly? As much as DRM sucks, it isn't the only thing that can cause something to not work.

[–] emeralddawn45@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

No im saying theres no such thing as a "GOG" version afaik. Its just the game files. What features differentiate a 'GOG' version from the same game acquired anywhere else? Their whole business model is offering games without any DRM or storefront added features, you dont even need to use their launcher, you can just download the game files directly. Whereas 'Steam' versions have all sorts of code added to be compatible with Steam.

[–] blind3rdeye@lemm.ee 4 points 6 months ago

You pretty much said it. The Steam version often has all sorts of stuff for Steam integration... and the Steam version is the default version. So various hooks for achievements and networking and mod installation may be different. Messing with any of that could easily break something. Furthermore, GOG does have its own API that some games use (again, for achievements and cloud saves); so if a game has chosen to use those features they may accidentally break something.

But even aside from possible difference between versions; bugs in the game itself still have to be addressed on every platform. Even if they don't bother testing the new version, they still have to at least push the update - which is still more work than zero work. This is why it is fairly common to see games that are under active development only have their beta version on Steam (or in some cases only Epic), even when they intend to launch on a bunch of platforms.

So for some games (certainly not all, but definitely some), patches come on Steam first and GOG at some point later. Maybe a day later, or a week later, or in some rare cases not at all. Similarly for DLC. And that definitely isn't GOG's fault. There isn't really anything GOG can do about it. It's just a side-effect of Steam being the far bigger platform.

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