running out of steam
THESE PEOPLE HAVE TO GET DEGREES IN FUCKING ENGLISH TO DO THIS
this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2024
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they need to use super generic popular idioms in order to be search engine optimized. technology killed journalism
The other day I was thinking about the movie Scrooged with Bill Murray, and how during one of the Scenes of Christmas Passed he got his girlfriend a pack of Ginsu knives for Christmas and how that's on-theme for his character who is obsessed with TV because Ginsu knives were a big As Seen On TV product and how someone on the writing staff must have went to college to think of that.
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GOG was good for acquiring and re-releasing OLD GAMES. somewhere along the way they decided they wanted to compete with the big platforms and be "We're just like them but without DRM"
I haven't used GOG for years, they allowed me to relive a few of my old adolescence favorites, but stopped being useful to me a long time ago :/
Selling old games and new games isn't mutually exclusive, and more money tends to be spent on new games than old ones. It's not unreasonable to expect that selling new games too could subsidise the work to make old games run on modern platforms.
i mean I get that, but what I was saying was the original purpose of the store became an afterthought.
Let's be honest, this was apparent for a long time. Steam, a centralised platform, has been making strides in Linux gaming and has been making innovation after innovation together with its steam deck. Gog, a forefront to freedom in gaming, barely did anything for the Linux gaming scene. No innovation either. Its just the simple (and well needed) premise of no DRM. It's necessary, but not enough. It didn't cater to its niche, it just committing to creating one under a premise. That's not how you go forward. How does this connect to bad management? Well, I think that with good management gog would make different moves. And wouldn't rest on its laurels so much.
That's... Largely a financials problem.
Steam: $8-10 billion/y
GOG: $80-120 million/y
Steam can throw 10 GOGs worth of resources at a problem and barely break a sweat. Yeah, of course they are making huge strides, that's how consolidation of wealth works when that wealth is actually reinvested.
It's pretty hard for GOG. Many of the things people don't like about GOG are not really GOG's fault, they are just a result of small market share. Steam is the bigger platform, and so naturally it gets priority for basically everything.
You game doesn't work on Steam? Then you'd better fix it immediately, because that's where the bulk of players are. But if your game doesn't work on GOG... well.. maybe fix it when you get some spare time. (Or maybe don't have a GOG version, because you don't want to have to keep multiple platforms up-to-date.)
So publishers and developers are generally less cooperative with GOG. And GOG themselves obviously have much more limited resources to do stuff themselves.
Steam's recent work with Linux has been great. And I do wish GOG would have something like that. But again, Valve has vast resources for that kind of thing - and they've been working on it ever since the Windows 8 appstore threatened to wipe them out. (That threat fizzled out; but nevertheless, that was what got the Linux ball rolling for Valve.) I'm in two minds about whether GOG should try to boost their Linux support. On the one hand, GOG is all about preservation and compatibility... and so it makes sense to have better Linux compatibility. On the other hand, it would be leaning further into a niche; and working on a problem that is kind of solved already. i.e. We can already run GOG games on Linux with or without a native linux version... it just could be nicer... Maybe it's not a good use of GOG's resources to go for that.
(That said, when I look at their linux start.sh scripts and see
cd "${CURRENT_DIR}/game" chmod +x *
it makes me think they could probably put at least a bit more effort into their linux support.)
How would a game "not work" on GOG? isnt their whole thing that they give you just the game files with no DRM or whatever?
experienced this with BG3 on gog while my friends had the steam version, when it launched. Patches on gog were delayed by sometime a week, preventing us to play together.
The conspiracist in me wonders if this is intentional as the result of a deal with other publishers. Maybe its just that 'the devs didnt get around to it' but honestly with how simple it should be to release things on GOG i more wonder if it isnt suppression.
Are you seriously asking how a piece of computer software might fail to operate correctly? As much as DRM sucks, it isn't the only thing that can cause something to not work.
No im saying theres no such thing as a "GOG" version afaik. Its just the game files. What features differentiate a 'GOG' version from the same game acquired anywhere else? Their whole business model is offering games without any DRM or storefront added features, you dont even need to use their launcher, you can just download the game files directly. Whereas 'Steam' versions have all sorts of code added to be compatible with Steam.
You pretty much said it. The Steam version often has all sorts of stuff for Steam integration... and the Steam version is the default version. So various hooks for achievements and networking and mod installation may be different. Messing with any of that could easily break something. Furthermore, GOG does have its own API that some games use (again, for achievements and cloud saves); so if a game has chosen to use those features they may accidentally break something.
But even aside from possible difference between versions; bugs in the game itself still have to be addressed on every platform. Even if they don't bother testing the new version, they still have to at least push the update - which is still more work than zero work. This is why it is fairly common to see games that are under active development only have their beta version on Steam (or in some cases only Epic), even when they intend to launch on a bunch of platforms.
So for some games (certainly not all, but definitely some), patches come on Steam first and GOG at some point later. Maybe a day later, or a week later, or in some rare cases not at all. Similarly for DLC. And that definitely isn't GOG's fault. There isn't really anything GOG can do about it. It's just a side-effect of Steam being the far bigger platform.
As someone with no Linux experience, what's wrong with that code?
It adds the executable permission (without which, things can't be executed) to all the files in the game's directory. You only need to be able to execute a few of those files, and there's a dedicated permission to control what can and can't be executed for a reason. Windows doesn't have a direct equivalent, so setting it for everything gives the impression that they're trying to make it behave like Windows rather than working with the OS.
I mean i assume thats just easier to deal with updates where a game has multiple exe files that may or may not change names. Assuming everything in the directory is assumed to be safe, is there any downside to applying it to everything, aside from opening up the possibility of a user accidentally trying to execute like a texture file or something which I assume just wouldnt work? I actually don't know and im curious.
You've pretty much got it. It's bad, but it's not horrible. Trying to execute some random file such as a texture basically just doesn't work.. but only by luck. It's possible, but unlikely that the data might look enough like an actual program to run and do something unpredictable.
I'm not aware of any major reasons why its a problem to make everything as executable (and I know that when I open an NTFS drive from linux, all the files are executable by default - because NTFS doesn't have that flag). From my point of view I just think its sloppy. I figure it can't be hard for GOG to just correctly identify which files are meant to be executable. For most games its just a single executable file - the same one that GOG's script is launching. And presumably the files that developers provided GOG have the correct flags in the first place.
Anyway, not really a big deal. Like I said, I just think it's a bit low-effort.
Yeah that's fair, and im not defending the practice, it just made me think of some games that Ive seen that have multiple executables, usually with an inbuilt launcher that i have to bypass. Or when games used to come with a dx11 and dx12 executable. Personally i find that in itself super sloppy and annoying as well, but it makes a kind of lazy sense to just apply it to all the game files, in that its just one less thing to have to change if you make an alteration to the name of the executable file or add a new executable for whatever reason. Just one less possible failure point. But yeah I can see how its definitely not best practice.
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There's nothing wrong with the business model of selling older games at affordable prices. This is about poor management. (Or deliberately bad management by a "CEO" who was hired to destroy GOG to remove a popular choice from us).
Thankfully if GOG goes down I don't lose anything.
Now if Steam goes down, I lose my entire library
Gabe Newell has promised that if Steam goes down you won't lose your library, but we only have his word as assurance.
Gabe Newell is much more likely to go down before steam does. his words mean nothing for the future.
No doubt the corporate drones that take over after his death will shit all over his legacy.
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People talking about money kinda missing the point this is a culture issue. They need to sort themselves out clean house if people can't be reasonable for their staff.
The launcher that they have is pretty rough. I downloaded it for Mac OS and it just wouldn’t run right. Kept closing down. If I could just download right from the website they’d have some money.
If they draw is drm free games why only allow purchase through a custom launcher like everything else?
If I could just download right from the Website
You can.
They do not make that obvious. I downloaded the launcher and when it didn’t work I bailed. I’ll check closer
I don't use their launcher at all.
It's kind of a convoluted process but you can definitely download every game you own through gog without it.
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