I use GOG to get away from downloading things in the context of a store and have a nice little archive of installers to use whenever I want it. I am trying to get as many Steam games to just be that way so when I run the binary it just works without Steam being involved at all. Laughably few will do it on their own but there are some ways around others…
Yeah, quite happy without some bloated launcher, thanks.
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.
Because Linux still makes up a small % of PC Gamers, so CDPR hasn’t prioritized it. Plus they’d need to have some kind of proton-like middleware (or just proton) for the majority of their games (which are mostly 15-20+ years old) to be playable. It seems like a large engineering challenge for a company which isn’t nearly as wealthy as valve
“This river doesn’t need a bridge because almost nobody ever crosses it.”
Also is there a reason they can’t just distribute proton? It’s open under BSD, so they’d be free to do it.
Gog is not in the bridge building business though
Then maybe they shouldn’t have publicly said they were planning to build this bridge ten years ago.
Heroic did it. Why couldn’t GOG?
CD Projekt is a public company, which would likely be cautious in relying on complex third-party tools like Wine.
Most businesses rely on third party tools and software libraries. Particularly open source ones.
Valve isn’t public, but they seem to be making plenty off of WINE. In fact, companies of all types love building on other projects, because it reduces how much work they need to do.
They just don’t seem to care. They could literally hire someone who works on Heroic to make an official Galaxy port reusing most of Heroic’s functionality. Yet they don’t.
Because of the power of friendship… And open-source.
And caring about Linux…
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.
I think the bigger complaint is that, when Galaxy was released, GOG said (back in 2015)
A Linux version of our client is planned eventually … Stay tuned for future announcements
Ten years is plenty of time to implement a launcher, or at least give a planned timeline
Sure, third parties have done it with Heroic, etc. but promising support and not delivering leaves a really bad taste to me
CDProjekt/GOG said the same thing about Cyberpunk 2077, their biggest product ever, and in the year 2025 I’m still running the Windows version of that through Proton because they give no fucks.
Ten years is plenty of time to implement a launcher, or at least give a planned timeline
Or to give literally any kind of update, like admitting it was never seriously planned.
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.
CDPR suck.
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.
This is what keeps me on Steam, along with Steam Input and Big Picture
Heroic Games Launcher, supports gog cloud saves, full wine/proton integration and even store front.
Also, it has controller support (slightly dodgy though)
It’s also a nice way to use a single launcher to replace 2 / 3 (Epic Games, GOG Galaxy and Amazon gaming).
On Linux I only use Steam and Heroic.
And that’s amazing work they’ve done, but really it’s surprising that it’s not already supported natively.
I think there is some … cooperation? Or at least acknowledgement towards heroic from GOGs side.
What do you mean by natively?
Supported by GOG
Yeah, they promised Linux support years ago with Galaxy 2.0.
It’s basically the reason why I always prefer Steam for my games.We don’t need third party launchers to buy or play their games. Why do you want this?
Besides what the other person said, there’s also the whole treating Linux users as second class citizens. If they didn’t had a launcher for Windows, then it wouldn’t be that big of a problem, but the fact that they did created a launcher for Windows years ago and porting it to Linux has been the most upvoted feature request since then and they haven’t done it is a slap in the face of a community that shares a lot of their beliefs. Valve is investing money on making Linux gaming a reality, GoG won’t even port their launcher to Linux, despite not caring for a launcher I know who I’m giving my money.
I like having all my games in one place, on a platform where Linux “just works” and I don’t have to fuck around with it.
Eliminating third-party launchers sounds great in theory until you have 20 different half-baked second party launchers that serve no purpose other than being a barrier between me and the games.
If third party launchers were as good as the first party ones, we wouldn’t.
You may not agree, but some people actually like the platform integration features that Galaxy and Steam and the like provide. Cloud sync and achievements and things that you may not care about are important to other people.
And then there’s just the whole “They said they would, and this is not very reassuring about their commitment to Linux users.”
Thanks for the reply. I appreciate you answering my question.
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.
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.
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.
We got Minigalaxy
