GOG has not been in a good place in the past year. There was the Devotion debacle, Cyberpunk 2077, what a disappointment that was. Then there was the attempted HITMAN release, the fact that the DRM-free game store still sells games with DRM, the fact that Linux users still don’t have an official client, this entire spreadsheet, etc… GOG has been stumbling a lot.
DRM-free stores do have a place and a purpose, but the way GOG has been going about doing things… it’s not great. I do wish they did better. I LIKE the idea of a store that only sells DRM-free games, but the way GOG operates is just half-assed. Here’s hoping 2022 is the year GOG turns things around.
The problem really is the growth mind-set. They could have kept with the “good old games” idea (DRM free ofc), but that is a limited niche market. Sooner or later these kind of negative outcomes are inevitable if you prioritize growth.
I think Cyberpunk is probably the biggest factor to blame here. Let’s be real: most of the popularity the platform gained in recent years was because PC gamers started praising CDPR as this perfect game developer for some reason. CP2077 completely shattered that perception, it inverted it even. CDPR as a whole has a negative image now, and I can’t believe for a second that the store reporting loses out of nowhere, when it was doing better than ever right before the game’s release, is a coincidence.
TLDR; GOG’s popularity came with CDPR’s very positive image, it’s going away with CDPR’s very negative image.
Well yeah. That’s what happens when you screw up the launch of the second most expensive game ever produced. It even got pulled from the PlayStation store due to customer complaints. You know, the same store that still sells gems like this. Let that sink in.
I use GOG for years. I believe that when they began to implement their own launcher it was a misstep. I know someone else on their forums pointed it out better than I could but had they stayed DRM FREE without launchers they could have avoided a lot of cost with having to 1) Keep up with the launcher battle 2) Deal with DRM creep coming into their releases 3) Have a unique identity in the game digital distribution world.
The amount of research I have to do before I pull the trigger to buy one of their games made me back up my titles and close my account.
The amount of research I have to do before I pull the trigger to buy one of their games made me back up my titles and close my account.
Well put. And I hate it how much I empathize with this sentiment. Every time I want to buy something on GOG I have to make sure it’s not a lesser version of a game available elsewhere. It’s annoying to say the least.
I really like GOG, they make older games easy to play on Linux. They even have extras in some games I’ve bought, like that Fallout 1/2 app for fixing bugs and upgrading graphics etc. It’s super fucking annoying they don’t have a native Linux client, the main reason I don’t use them much, I also want to play old games on my shitty Windows work computer too, but it doesn’t sync saves with my awesome but not powerful ThinkPad at home
But https://github.com/sharkwouter/minigalaxy works reasonably well.
does it sync saves? i don’t see it mentioned
I assume not. I started using minigalaxy recently since I heard about its latest release, and it does almost nothing and some of what it is supposed to do is bugged. (On my system it doesn’t create desktop menu items properly when asked to, so the faulty .desktop files it creates do nothing. I edit them manually to fix the wrong paths.)
Pros: It does download and install the games for you, and it does download and install DLC for you, making it easier to use than just the website. It lets you know what DLC you have and also if there are updates it figures it out and can install the updates.
Cons: Doesn’t seem to download incremental updates for games, but instead downloads the entire installer for every update. Not sure what the official client does, but this is possibly countless gigabytes of wasted bandwidth. As mentioned above it hardly does anything else, or does it wrong.
You might as well just use the website, since it does notify you when things get updated, and you’re going to download the installer anyway. Official GOG installer creates the right .desktop files as well.
I would love to use gog more but the fact that they don’t even have an official client pushes me away specially as valve/steam are pushing forward and investing even more into linux. I agree with gog’s philosophy more but steam’s service in undeniably better for linux-based end users.
I’m still supporting both GOG and Steam, which are competitors to the absolute abysmal Epic Games Store and Uplay (or Ubisoft Connect, as they now call it). Sure, GOG is also guilty of crunch, but the worst allegations of their competitors haven’t repeated themselves there.
That said, there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism. That, of course, includes games.
