Because GOG doesn’t want to support it. They’d rather the community do it.
I’ve been with linux for 20 years now and at one point GOG was the place to go, because DRM was one of the biggest problems with wine.
I downloaded all my games stopped using it after they came up with their own electronic store, which I thought was a horrible shit and very clunky on wine.
Steam and proton were rising at the same time and more and more games were working without the usual fuss of installing .dll files, obscure media codecs, .net and etc, so it was bye bye GOG.
Because it doesn’t make business sense to them. The author of the article makes just two arguments and assumes those are the only relevant arguments. There’s a lot more involved in the decision to port GOG Galaxy to Linux. Like support, for example.
Personally, since proton got so good and heroic can just use any version of proton installed, I’ve began to buy GOG games again and run them through heroic. 99% of the time they just run OK. But of course I do my due diligence and check protondb before making a purchase.
Use Heroic Games Launcher. It works very well.
Look at what happened when Epic brought a store to Windows
Those barriers still exist on Linux
GoG makes even less sense to have a launcher because you can just download off their website
IIRC GOG is actually partnered with HeroicLauncher… so… it’s semi official to use that… and better UX.
That’s neat to learn
I wouldn’t call HGL a better UX. It straight up doesn’t work for me. When it did, I couldn’t get games to install or update and had to DL manually in browser, install into some other Wine prefix, and then manually move the files to an HGL-generated prefix. The UI looks nicer but it’s not nearly as straightforward as Galaxy’s. It’s more like Lutris in its complexity, though I imagine there’s no easy way around that.
Better UX is a big word, as any unofficial launcher it kinda sucks because it doesn’t have a specific feature set. Besides, first party support is always better
heroic has no download throttling, very annoying for shared/shitty networks and large games
I’d put that as a feature request honestly, they’ll probably add that in at some point
If you’re on Linux, you have a lot more options to affect the system. You could try running Heroic Launcher through
trickle: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/34116/how-can-i-limit-the-bandwidth-used-by-a-processIdeally this would be implemented on the client side, i.e. Heroic Launcher, but there seems to some challenges in making that happen: https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher/issues/597
bit late to this, but trickle doesn’t work because heroic spawns new downloader processes unaffected by trickle’s limits
Hm, if it spawns some external process, would it be possible to wrap that in a shell script of the same name (and have its dir earlier in PATH), which in turn calls the other one, but through trickle?
Better UX until you have to download or update a game… there is an open bug report where it just doesn’t progress but keeps starting new processes until you‘re OOM. Still no fix in months, I’ve had to boot into Windows for every single update. Really not that good of an UX.
Bad engineering
Are you updating Linux games from Windows??
How does your Windows install open the ext4/btrfs file system your Linux games are stored on?
Affiliate links are not business partnerships. Does Heroic have anything more than that with GOG?
EDIT: The answer is no, GOG is not partnered with Heroic Games Launcher.
Gog funds Heroic.I actually think it’s a fairly decent compromise (although I prefer Lutris), since Gog is clearly not interested in paying to maintain a Linux port.
EDIT: Wrong(ish)! See below.
Gog funds Heroic.
By some other means than affiliate link payouts? I’m not aware of any such arrangement, but if one exists, can you link some details about it?
I read it somewhere awhile ago. You’re killing me asking for a source, goddamn.
EDIT: somewhat ironically, here’s a Reddit thread where a developer says they are a part of the affiliate program, so, I don’t know much funding that brings in. It sounds like a less formal arrangement than I was imagining:
Yes, that’s what I thought: It’s just affiliate linking (aka marketing) that any app can use, not a partnership between Heroic and GOG. Thanks for following up and confirming it.
Quoting /u/imLinguin in the post you linked:
Heroic dev here. We are just part of the affiliate program since we help people access GOG on Linux easier. There is nothing more, so there is no need for official announcements from the GOG side.
I’m glad you called me out on that. It’s easy to misremember when we are just constantly bombarded w information.
Anyways, it would be a good compromise, imo.
Curious what Gog’s actual hang up is, since the Steamdeck’s picking up so much momentum.
tbf with heroic launcher starting to implement comet (galaxy api), it might not be needed anymore
It would certainly make me more likely to support GOG financially. At least fund its development.
I understand the devs profit from purchases made through Heroic to GOG, but I’d like to see something a little more explicit than what seems like an affiliate link.
It is UI for GOG? We have a Heroic Game Launcher. It can work with GOG.
I get into this on the post, but AFAIK community-built solutions such as Heroic and Lutris aren’t exactly the same, with a lot of Galaxy’s selling points being the cloud features such as save data sync and a friends list system for online play.
Different people may or may not find uses for these features, but it’s still worth discussing IMO.
Imho, if they decide to put effort into Linux, I’d rather see them put dev resources into heroic to add these features than to make just another client. They are late to the market, that would make the most of it.
Removed by mod
Because cdpr is a joke. Like did you see cyberpunks release? All they care is about money they showed that with their rushed job. I haven’t claimed any free games on GOG because you have to sign up for their newsletter in order to claim the game. I still get spammed with emails from GOG even after unsubscribing after I receive every single email. At this point of just marked em’ as spam.
“rushed job”
8 years of development
I don’t know how CP77 turned out how it did, but it certainly wasn’t due to being rushed. Either way, they managed to fix it although it took like 2 years or something.
As for you still getting GOG emails… Git gud?? Unsubscribing from a service’s emails is the easiest thing in the world if you take roughly 2 seconds to make sure it’s done properly.
Yeah and I fucking unsubscribed and they keep sending me emails and then I unsubscribe again and then they keep sending me emails and then I unsubscribe again and then they keep sending me emails…
You picking up on it yet?
And it was in development longer than 8 years it got rumored I can 2011 or something and then the teaser was 2013 I think I forget hold up I’m fuzzy rn. But you can tell it’s a rushed product by the end result. if it needed more time it needed more time end of fucking story
Then you’re doing something wrong, simple as. I’ve completely unsubscribed from GOG emails and it was ez. Literally just in account settings.
As for Cyberpunk, it entered pre-pro in 2016 and released in 2020. https://www.destructoid.com/how-long-was-cyberpunk-2077-in-development/ So really 4 years, so maybe rushed given the scale tbh. If they had released in 2022 it might have been in a better state, so I’ll concede there.
You can use heroic I guess…
I used to purchase everything I could from GOG until I switched to Linux full time. I still like the company and buy some from them, but until they become more Linux friendly or Steam gets worse I’ll still prioritize Steam now. And it’s not only the (very odd) resistance to making a Linux version of Galaxy, I’ve also seen them not offer Linux versions of games even when the developers have released it on other platforms.
I tried to push for GOG purchases too and then I just ended up with games that would receive updates late. I’d miss out on discounts and bundles that make future purchases cheaper, at some point it was cheaper to just rebuy stuff with DLCs on Steam than continue building up the library on GOG.
I also gave their galaxy client a try since it promised a united library for all platforms and then they did a horrible job managing the plugins for other stores - they constantly kept breaking or logging me out while even Playnite worked perfectly out of the box.
In the end I just stopped wasting energy on GOG, life is too short and complicated enough. If they have a good deal on old games I might grab it, otherwise I prefer anything else.
Same here. I had nearly all the XCOM2 DLC purchased from GOG, and then Steam ran a sale on the bundle that was cheaper than buying the last piece to complete the collection! Since then I think GOG have run similarly cheap sales, but it wasn’t the last time I saw that happen.
I know launchers like Heroic are available, and I use it for some of my games from them, but I actually liked the Galaxy launcher on Windows. I wasn’t linking it to anything else though, so I didn’t run into the issues you mention.
It’s sad, because I think they could do well in the Linux community. Hopefully they eventually start supporting it, but until then I’ll be buying most of my games from the company that’s actively contributing and improving things for the community.
I’ve noticed that GOG usually runs their sales after Steam’s sales (or maybe before? Either way, they’re not in sync) and that it’s usually all the same stuff on sale. I don’t buy GOG anymore because Linux but back when I was still on Windows I would wait a week and buy from GOG where applicable.
And Linux versions taking over a week longer to update than the steam ones. I refunded a game over that before and got it on steam instead.
Marginal support happens a lot on Linux. See AMD drivers without Adrenaline. “You may use Linux if you must… at your own risk… we do the bare minimum to keep you runnig… our past stuff is in the open but we can pull the rug on future releases any time.” You can install gog games and maybe some dude made galaxy work in wine, corporate has decided that is good enough.
Maybe the author of the article/blog doesn’t know about Heroic?
They mention lutris, but note that it isn’t a functional equivalent to Galaxy. But as far as I’m aware, Heroic is (correct me if I’m wrong, I haven’t seen Galaxy in action).
I found Heroic today. Same games that won’t run on Lutris won’t run on Heroic either. The biggest disappointment was that it crashed a few times and I gave up entirely when it froze up. I’m not saying Lutris is flawless, it certainly isn’t, but my experience overall has at least been acceptable.
That’s my experience too. Heroic looks nicer, but functionalitywise Lutris is far ahead, having support for EA’s and Ubisofts launcher as well. It’s also a lot more stable than Heroic.
I agree, it was something I would have thought would happened a long, long time ago. Then a few years ago I thought for sure when steam and linux were really picking up.
It is one of the reasons I dont use gog that much.
CDPR suck.
