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Just did a GOG survey that focused on the idea of a paid membership option on GOG. Seems they're determining what people would be willing to pay extra for. Some of the options were
- a tool for backing up offline installers
- ability to install previous versions of a game
- extra insight into the preservation work they're doing.
- voting rights on games to bring into the preservation program.
And others that I can't remember.
Anything but properly supporting the Linux community 🤡
How have they still not learned that the largest intersection of the people that care about their core value proposition (game preservation, DRM-free, etc.) are Linux users?? It's not like they have to create the compatibility layers from scratch; Valve did it for them.
If they provided a launcher for Linux users, I'd actually buy shit from them. Yes, Heroic Launcher exists, but I'm not paying GOG for the work that the Heroic dev did. I want first-party support.
At this point they should just hire the Heroic devs, I doubt anything they could build themselves would compare in terms of quality.
I'd be happy if they did and adopted Heroic as an official launcher. However, if that happens, I'd still want proper controller support to be added so that browsing the GOG store in Heroic doesn't require mouse and keyboard bindings on something like a Steam Deck.
Why do you want a launcher? I have a few GoG games and I don't really feel like a launcher is something I need.
What I do want is games to actually update on GoG at the same time as steam, not over a week later. X4 7.0 came out and it was over a week longer for the GoG version to update, in the end I refunded and bought it on steam instead.
Cloud saves, achievements, and tracking hours is something I do like. I have over a 100 GOG games, so individually managing exe files isn't something I really want to do.
You don't need to manage the exe files. Just install heroic launcher. You can access and install your whole GOG library from there, and you can configure each game with different versions of wine or proton, if you need to. It also integrates with Epic and you can easily add games to Steam as well if needed.
You can even sync the game saves with the GOG cloud, although last time I tried the save sync was a bit clunky.
Yeah I've used heroic launcher, but a native launcher is still preferred. I like the GOG launcher on windows.
I backup my own saves, don't really trust someone elses computer to do as good of a job as I can myself. Wrote a script to automate it.
Do you not have to update that script every time you play a new game? Cloud saves are pretty automatic, and regardless of platform, they've been pretty reliable too. It also fits that use case that you go to a friend's place and want to show them something in your save file on a whim.
Syncthing?
Yes, that's what I use when I need it for GOG saves. But typically, every game puts their save file in a different spot, so you do need to do a one-time setup for each individual game.
Typing
backup "Game" "/path/to/files"is pretty simple though. I wouldn't complain about cloud saves existing, but I won't rely on them and absolutely wouldn't pay for them.That's great, but maybe we should stop talking about you. People pay for Steam, Netflix and many other services because they don't want to write scripts. They want something convenient and easy to use. They also want additional functionality. You said how you back up save files, but nothing about achievements, time tracking, friends, screenshots sharing, guides, parties, etc.
I'm fairly sure the update cadence is set by the game dev/publisher, not GoG.
They might have to grease some wheels somehow then. Some kind of incentive structure to make sure they do it.
... and Steam is more important to them than GOG
Because I use a Steam Deck and having a launcher for third-party stores is the easiest way to install games.
Additionally, the reasons mentioned in the other comments.
I do just want to point out, Valve didn't do that - Proton is mostly just pre-existing software that they packaged together into an officially supported feature. I love that they did it, and having it in the biggest PC game platform presumably did wonders for Linux gaming, but it was most certainly not made from scratch.
I agree with you for the most part, but valve also is funding the developers behind the most important things out of proton. DXVK and vkd3d-proton were almost non-existent before Valve employed them.