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.
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
Heroic did it. Why couldn’t GOG?
Because of the power of friendship… And open-source.
And caring about Linux…
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.
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
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.
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.
You can use heroic I guess…
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.
Heroic Games Launcher, supports gog cloud saves, full wine/proton integration and even store front.
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
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.
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.
Yeah, they promised Linux support years ago with Galaxy 2.0.
It’s basically the reason why I always prefer Steam for my games.This is what keeps me on Steam, along with Steam Input and Big Picture
IIRC GOG is actually partnered with HeroicLauncher… so… it’s semi official to use that… and better UX.
heroic has no download throttling, very annoying for shared/shitty networks and large games
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
I’d put that as a feature request honestly, they’ll probably add that in at some point
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.
Affiliate links are not business partnerships. Does Heroic have anything more than that with GOG?
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.
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.
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
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
That’s neat to learn
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.
Because GOG doesn’t want to support it. They’d rather the community do it.
There’s an open-source CLI client to download GOG games,
lgogdownloader. It’s packaged in Debian.There are also GUI launchers that can download from GOG:
