aggelalex@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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.
That’s… Largely a financials problem.
Steam: $8-10 billion/y
GOG: $80-120 million/y
Steam can throw 10 GOGs worth of resources at a problem and barely break a sweat. Yeah, of course they are making huge strides, that’s how consolidation of wealth works when that wealth is actually reinvested.
An official Steam Deck mod would probably be nice. Heroic Launcher kind of works.
blind3rdeye@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
It’s pretty hard for GOG. Many of the things people don’t like about GOG are not really GOG’s fault, they are just a result of small market share. Steam is the bigger platform, and so naturally it gets priority for basically everything.
You game doesn’t work on Steam? Then you’d better fix it immediately, because that’s where the bulk of players are. But if your game doesn’t work on GOG… well… maybe fix it when you get some spare time. (Or maybe don’t have a GOG version, because you don’t want to have to keep multiple platforms up-to-date.)
So publishers and developers are generally less cooperative with GOG. And GOG themselves obviously have much more limited resources to do stuff themselves.
Steam’s recent work with Linux has been great. And I do wish GOG would have something like that. But again, Valve has vast resources for that kind of thing - and they’ve been working on it ever since the Windows 8 appstore threatened to wipe them out. (That threat fizzled out; but nevertheless, that was what got the Linux ball rolling for Valve.) I’m in two minds about whether GOG should try to boost their Linux support. On the one hand, GOG is all about preservation and compatibility… and so it makes sense to have better Linux compatibility. On the other hand, it would be leaning further into a niche; and working on a problem that is kind of solved already. i.e. We can already run GOG games on Linux with or without a native linux version… it just could be nicer… Maybe it’s not a good use of GOG’s resources to go for that.
(That said, when I look at their linux
start.shscripts and seecd “${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 weeks ago
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?
SoulKaribou@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
experienced this with BG3 on gog while my friends had the steam version, when it launched. Patches on gog were delayed by sometime a week, preventing us to play together.
emeralddawn45@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
The conspiracist in me wonders if this is intentional as the result of a deal with other publishers. Maybe its just that ‘the devs didnt get around to it’ but honestly with how simple it should be to release things on GOG i more wonder if it isnt suppression.
blind3rdeye@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
Are you seriously asking how a piece of computer software might fail to operate correctly?
emeralddawn45@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
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.
GaMEChld@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
As someone with no Linux experience, what’s wrong with that code?
AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It adds the executable permission (without which, things can’t be executed) to all the files in the game’s directory. You only need to be able to execute a few of those files, and there’s a dedicated permission to control what can and can’t be executed for a reason. Windows doesn’t have a direct equivalent, so setting it for everything gives the impression that they’re trying to make it behave like Windows rather than working with the OS.
emeralddawn45@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
I mean i assume thats just easier to deal with updates where a game has multiple exe files that may or may not change names. Assuming everything in the directory is assumed to be safe, is there any downside to applying it to everything, aside from opening up the possibility of a user accidentally trying to execute like a texture file or something which I assume just wouldnt work? I actually don’t know and im curious.