I'm a Linux user who buys a lot of games on GOG and I've never had a problem running them using Wine stable, with the only exception being games that supposedly don't even work on Proton yet.

Majority of the games there don't even come in a native Linux form, and those that do can be a hit or miss when it comes to compatibility - at least one game I tried needed a dependency from a no longer available package. Alternatively a few titles come shipped with some kind of wrapper that's really just an outdated version of Wine surrounding a win32 EXE.

Also, isn't the point of buying something DRM free that you don't have to use a client or any other online feature? The offline installer has always been GOG's killer feature in my book, that's how you make sure the game gets truly preserved.

> Valve is eating GOG's lunch in this segment

I think you are comparing apples and organges

valve will give you a game license, gog will sell you a game.

you can download, install and play all gog games forever with no drm.

(I use lgogdownloader and download all games to linux)

I don't know about the overall market analysis so I'm not commenting on that. But I do know that personally, GOG meets my needs in spades and Valve doesn't, so I've spent a lot of money at GOG and will for the foreseeable future. I am a Linux guy and don't own any Windows machines. I couldn't care less about the Galaxy client. To be honest, I'm not even sure what it does -- I just know that I get along just fine without it.

For me, GOG is as close to perfect as I've found.

I agree that GOG needs to port their client to Linux for all the reasons you stated, but as a workaround you can use Lutris which lets you log into your GOG account and download+install games (Windows games too).

It's not as pain free as Steam, because you sometimes still have to apply wine fixes, but it works well with the most popular games.

Bad QA for actual Linux games was the main reason I stopped buying on gog. Even when a game had a (gog exclusive) Linux port using their weird "game inside a shell script" approach[0], often times I would run into more problems than just using wine/proton on the Windows build.

[0] apparently using this https://icculus.org/mojosetup/

I recommend downloading Heroic Launcher.

https://heroicgameslauncher.com/

But IIRC you don’t even need to use the launcher, that’s the whole point of DRM free games

You can just download them from GOG and play, so no Linux launcher is not a big deal, just a convenience (some would argue launchers are an inconvenience)

How long has it been? Like a decade? That's when I bought my last GOG game and decided to wait for a proper Linux client.

Having a nice way to view and manage a game library is essential at this point. I don't want to do it manually.

It really does seem like the idea of DRM free games and Linux goes hand in hand. I would be really interested to hear about why they don't currently offer Linux support for their launcher.

I'm in the same boat here. I would be more than willing to rebuy some games on GOG if they supported Linux.

It would be great if everyone could release Linux binaries, but smaller studios are extremely stretched and with no shortage of work as it is. Considering the quality of Windows emulation today, it's quite possible that the windows API simply becomes the new "Java for games", where studios test their games on Linux and never release a native binary.

Heroic launcher works great and also doubles up as an Epic client and you can just run your own installers with it too (this is how I install Battle Net and Diablo 4).

I give GOG a lot of leeway, because in my heart of hearts, I know I will eventually curse steam lockin ( that day may be far away, but it is in our collective future ) so I throw them some money every now and then.

Still, you do have a point, by comparison Steam is a lot more polished on that front. I would complain more, but my personal hangup is very niche to begin with so it does not seem fair ( remote view in vm ). It is small things, but small things add up.

Heroic Games Launcher and Lutris both authenticate with GOG and allow you to install their games.

The client works very well on Linux via Proton.

I don't think a niche store like GoG has to put a massive investment into marginal platform like Linux when Proton makes it work very well by itself.

A bigger problem for me is not lack of Linux Galaxy client, but that a bunch of developers only release Linux versions on Steam (Larian with BG3 is a recent example).

But I agree in general. The issue is probably that GOG is a smaller store than Steam and Linux segment for them in result is also way smaller than for Steam, so they don't see it as a priority.

Meanwhile you can use lgogdownloader.

It's sort of interesting that they support Linux as platform for games sales to begin with. Besides them, Steam and itch.io who even does?

For now I rely on Heroic Launcher and it does a decent job for my GOG games on Bazzite.

Honestly thanks to Lutris, I have no want of a native linux GOG client and would rather GOG and others contributed to an already excellent solution and for there to be less distributor owned clients.

Honestly Heroic Launcher is way better than Galaxy, integrates with Proton, and includes other shitty launchers like Epic

> I like GOG a lot but it's wild to me that their GOG Galaxy client doesn't work on Linux!

The client is a bad thing. What you want is for it to stop working on Windows.

Why would you want it to work on Linux?

I work for an oil and gas brokerage company. What you say is absolutely true (Especially your last sentence!). Some wild stories. We've certainly dug up some family drama throughout the whole process.

Tracing ownership of land back 400 years to some Spanish land grant…

> Convincing a bank that through a series of mergers and acquisitions that they are the rightful owners of the mineral rights to a piece of land foreclosed on in the great depression by a bank that itself failed.

What's the goal of convincing the bank that they own some land? Is this a case where the original bank foreclosed on the property, resold the surface while carefully keeping the mineral rights, and then failed? And the current owner of everything-but-the-mineral-rights is fully aware of not possessing them?

If you determine that someone else is the owner of some land, and they deny it, you can just start doing whatever it is that you want to do on the land, and you'll become the owner.

Copyright was 20+20. MOST problems with it come from endless extensions and no format shifting exemption.

Fix those and we’d be muuuuch better off.

Why would you need permission to make a game work on a newer platform? Were the changes made to the code of the game, or of the console?

Which inspired someone to straight up offer it for free[0]. Essentially saying, "If you own the rights and have a problem with it, here is your chance to do something about it"

That being said, I am not sure why an interested party could not make their own knock-off version of the game. The game is a parody 60s James Bond with a female lead. Would anyone care if it was functionally the exact same game, but everyone was wearing a funny hat?

[0] http://nolfrevival.tk/

That's a weird comment. I'm on GNU/Linux, I can just go to the website, log in, go to my library, and download any game I want. What part of it isn't working for you?

/s?

lookup heroic launcher. all gog games run just fine signed into that.

Can you get more info by launching the game from a terminal?

Also, shot in the dark, but maybe try the solution from this old thread: https://www.gog.com/forum/dark_reign_series/dark_reign_2_not...

Monitoring system calls (on Windows, that's a type of DLL call) is a good way to debug confusing processes that only last for a few seconds. I expect the launcher is launching some program, which is saying "I started successfully!" and then hitting an error state before it draws a window, so the launcher concludes you must've finished playing.

Sysinternals Process Monitor ("procmon") is your friend.

Agreed. Playing VGA games in a DOSBox is nice, but I recovered my 386sx clone from my parents' garage that still boots DOS 6.22 on 5-1/4 floppy and I very much wish I hadn't given away all my disks (diskettes :) before I moved.

I was annoyed that I purchased Civilization III, and it came with a readme saying that by default it would launch the game with all expansions, but if I wanted to play an earlier, unexpanded version (which I did), I could just go to the install directory and start the earlier .exe.

They don't actually package the earlier .exes. You get one choice.