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.
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I got the same survey. The ones that they definitely do not want to do, if they value their reputation, are things like “increased cloud save storage (that’s still probably less than what Steam offers)” and things that they took away, like 1.0 installers. But some of the other options look to be more squarely aimed at the enthusiasts of the preservation program that this subscription is designed to financially support, as well as one or two actually good features like legal account sharing. Hopefully they go down that route instead.
It’s on par with Steam, I think. You get like 200 megs per product. I know because my Witcher 3 install is above that and it’s annoying. That wouldn’t be a dealbreaker as a subscription benefit, I don’t think.
With the rest I do agree.
I can tell they’re struggling and have been for a while. It isn’t easy to compete with Steam, and the thing that would have done it (having DRM’d new games in the service) was voted down in a similar survey some time ago.
I would not be against some Patreon-like crowdsourced solution for behind the scenes stuff and prioritization rights. GOG, or something like it MUST exist. Steam is bad enough with their current dominant position, it can’t be the sole remaining option in this market.
I would much prefer to be able to give them more money in exchange for more games, though. I am constantly frustrated by how often some indie game is only available on Steam, and I’ve started buying things full price on GOG but waiting for sales on Steam as a matter of policy.
It’s on par with Steam, I think.
IIRC Steam lets developers code how much storage to use, with a 5GB cap per game
Is that where it is now? I haven’t looked at the documentation in an age. I think most stay lower because ultimately cloud storage is a cross-platform concern and different first parties have different requirements. Plus you want to keep it under control anyway. At any rate it’s not a huge concern and other services like PSN or Nintendo Online already charge for it, so… not a dealbreaker as long as the base implementation stays free.
I told them I’d like a GOG style humble choice. If they’re not willing to give actual games, I’d be interested in a subscription to help game preservation, but probably only $5 a month max.
A humble choice like subscription service would be pretty great honestly. $10ish a month for maybe 1 AA/AAA modern game and a handful of retro and indie games would have me on board immediately. Starting to charge for things they currently or have previously offered for free is not the way to win people over.
Just put out AVP2
The only one that sounds good to me, perhaps, are the voting rights. I’d pay for that. Patreon artists and creators do this sort of thing, and if this is something GOG needs to do to get by, then fine by me.
Downloading offline installers/backups, however… That would be locking away a feature that exists now to everyone that has bought a game. That means locking away a feature from customers who have spent money on a product already… Likely for the explicit point of being able to get installers that don’t need an online connection. If they choose to do this, they’d be desfeting their own purpose.
For context; I bought most of my games on GOG. I don’t really buy games anymore, and my Steam library is low absolutely massive, however. Both of those reasons are because I’ve been subbed to Humble Monthly for a few years. But ultimately when I go looking to buy a game, my preference is to buy from GOG specifically because it’s offline and DRM free.
GOG maybe give us an option to turn off cookies inside your app before asking us money!
Wait so currently you can’t install previous versions of games you only get the most up-to-date version. That’s daft to expect people to pay for, that’s a free feature on Steam.
That’s not an official/proper feature on steam, there’s nothing in the interface to select an older version, right? Just the beta system that lets developers have multiple branches available, which is often used to keep a limited number of previous versions available.
I thought it was a command that you could launch steam with that would give you access to older versions. I’m sure I have done that when trying to mod GTA and it needed a particular version.
Ah, seems you’re partially correct - steam has a command for downloading a specific depot version. You need to know the specific ID to download, and notably games can use multiple depots to form the game files, but I thought you needed to use something like SteamCMD or DepotDownloader for that.
I’m still upholding the fact that it’s not a “proper” feature, while I appreciate having those kind of utilities put in the user’s control, this isn’t something most people could figure out themselves.
That is absolutely not a free feature on Steam. Some publishers like Paradox leave old versions as ‘beta’ branches to allow us to reinstall them, but Steam as a whole is very against you playing anything but the latest version.
You cannot instruct Steam to not update a game. When you launch a game, Steam will update regardless, unless you have gone offline, or you launch it in a way that bypasses the Steam client. If you ever forget to go offline before launching a game, Steam will forcibly update it
I honestly thought this was an option, but I can’t see it in the client, and the offline installers only offer all patches and the latest version. Not the original version.
I agree that’s daft, and hope that feature doesn’t get paywalled. The more people who do the survey and stress these points, the better.
I’d pay for native linux support. They should provide direct support to Heroic if they don’t want to take on the cost themselves full bore. I remember some AMA they did where the cost of Linux wasn’t worth their already thin margins and they were happy with Heroic. If they were ever going to grow, I’d believe that they would need to address the handheld market and getting their storefront more visible
I like what GOG do, but gating features, even niche ones, behind a subscription sounds like the first step towards enshittification.
Also, I’m sure as hell not giving them extra money until they fix their platform on Linux/Steam Deck.
F
Voting rights and extra insight are fine, but I feel a “Humble Bundle”-esque membership would work well. For $x a month you get a few games to keep.
I wish they worked with opensource projects like Heroic to provide an easy and fast way to run their games on Linux like in Steam. And if they provided a donation option or something to fund that work.
They do that already. They’re partnered with Heroic. If you buy GOG games through Heroic, Heroic gets a cut of that sale using a referral code program like you’d see in other stores. It gives Heroic some cash, and it gives GOG a line of sight into exactly how much revenue they’re missing out on by not building the Linux launcher themselves. This is what got me to start buying from GOG again.
Oh shit, really? Do you have a source for that?
https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher/releases/tag/v2.13.0
We also started a partnership with GOG and now every game you buy from the GOG store inside Heroic will give us a commission, so it is another way of supporting the project. :)
The link is also available at https://heroicgameslauncher.com/donate if you prefer to purchase games in your web browser.
Awesome, thank you!
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.
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.
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.
And you just ignored the rest of the reasons, and to add to those: automatic updates.
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.
Because there is no linix client some games that use these features do not release their linux version on gog due to their company’s feature parity policies.
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.
What if I told you that the intersection between people who care and the 5% of their potential audience that are Linux users is very small either way?
I’m not saying Linux isn’t a chance for them, but it’s also an investment and very like not a profitable one for quite a while.
What if I told you that there are roughly 4 million steamdecks in existence. Ref
And that this is about 1\3 of the Steam Linux market. Ref and about half of the entire handheld PC market. Ref
Of course, we dont know how many MAU GOG has so maybe 4 million new customers is baby numbers, but Steam seems enamored enough of that market segment to commit huge new UI and store features (deck verification, “Runs on Deck” filters, other deck specific stuff) including the game controller mappings which do help with non-deck also but were clearly a necessary element for handhelds. Maybe deck users, it being a committed gaming platform, spend more on games?
Anyway, trying to get subscribers (always a teeny fraction of your free users) ahead of converting new non-customers into customers, seems like bad econ to me.
If GOG is so hot for game preservation why not see if they can score an emulation deal to bring lost handheld titles to PC\deck? Sega might be down, NeoGeo is owned by the Saudi’s, I’m sure they’d love some free money for their back catalog. That’s in line with Lutris’ mission of being the one game launcher for your entire library. A few strategic investments and partnerships could open up GOG as the gateway to classic gaming across devices, but that would require some vision to carry through.
Steam’s investment in UI and store features are part of the onus of hardware platform growth. Steam isn’t just a storefront anymore. GOG has no such interest.
I do think indicators are good for the future of Linux gaming, but it’s just not good business right now to go chasing it.
1/3 of the Steam + Linux market, that accounted for an incredible 1.45% of Steam installs in February. This means there were roughly 67 Windows gamers for every Linux gamer (using Steam) that month.
So even if Linux gamers are 10 times more likely to care (and pay for) for game preservation, you are not even approaching the number of Windows users that might. Suppose 90% of Linux gamers care, while only 9% on Windows do, you still have roughly 9 Windows users for every Linux one. And this is a very generous assumption to make.
Maybe, eventually, at some point, this makes sense financially. But if your goal is to be profitable, you grab the low hanging fruits first, not invest in maybe 10% more potential users.
I’d love a gog galaxy client for Linux with proton support. I also agree though, that it probably wouldn’t help them become more profitable.
You do know Heroic exists, right? It works perfectly fine.
And I prefer an open source solution integrating multiple platforms to a single closed solution per platform.
It’s not like they have to create the compatibility layers from scratch; Valve did it for them.
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.
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.
A subscription seems like the exact opposite of what GoG stands for. I buy a game, I own it forever. How does a subscription improve that?
I got the impression they’re aiming more for a “fan club” kind of thing where you get access to articles/videos/Q&A/voting rights, etc. So more a kind of Patreon like many creators have. I didn’t get the impression that this would in any way change the business model of the store.
If that’s the case, I may be interested. I’d still like Galaxy on Linux before I give them additional money.
I also got this survey and I had the same feeling. It felt more like a patron for their game preservation program with possible features like a members-only-community, interviews or documentation about the preserved games, their publishers/studios and the efforts to keep them running or some kind of loyalty rewards/discount coupons. Maybe even ‘special builds’ like ‘experience the OG version 1.0 of $game’.
There was one option, that I interpreted like ‘maybe we will put future compatibility updates after purchase (e.g. supporting Windows 12 or whatever) behind the membership’ - but that’s purely my interpretation of a single bullet point style line in that whole several page long survey
Select a game from a catered library to be granted lifetime ownership? Like rent to own perhaps?
But they specifically don’t appear to be talking about that
Yeah I’m not at all against the idea of throwing a few bucks at them per month for something, but I just don’t see anything that fits in the context of why I use GOG in the first place. Voting rights doesn’t seem like a bad idea. Ideas like earlier versions of games, tools that help with backup, etc should be offered for free or sold for a one-time cost IMO.
Source code access to your library?
Not sure what else they can offer
Making porting gog to linux a priority which has by far the smallest market share for computer gaming is the dumbest thing anyone in this thread is saying, where is that financially a viable option to cater to the tiniest percentage of gamers for gog? I know ill get downvoted but im tired of the fanatical linux posts on lemmy at this point. Get with reality they are going to work on the client where the money is most predominantly flowing from and its not linux or mac. Haters gonna hate the truth but its the truth from a business standpoint.
This is a future proofing measure. With the enshittification of Windows there is a reasonably sizable share that is looking to migrate. Making an API/front end functional on the platform is just good business. I for one will be switching 95% to Linux the instant Microsoft acts on their patant for putting a mandatory advertising ticket on the screen. Literally the only thing I will use it for is programming things for work.
Or, you know, they could make the client portable, like so many software…
A Linux or Mac client doesn’t need to be a different thing than a Windows client.
and its not linux or mac
Except there’s already a Mac version of GOG Galaxy.
While I agree, it’s also a chicken and egg problem. How can more money flow if they don’t make it easy? Even just endorsing Heroic and providing them some APIs would work
Making porting gog to linux a priority which has by far the smallest market share for computer gaming is the dumbest thing anyone in this thread is saying
Building a bridge across the river is totally stupid, because no one crosses that river to get to where they are going.
Building a house on that hill is dumb, because no one lives there.
Creating that new type of device is a waste of time, because no one has ever bought one like that.
…
You see the point, right? Not that I’m trying to give business advice. I’m just saying that these things aren’t necessarily as stupid as you seem to think.
Lmao you have people seizing it’s hilarious
What if most of the people that want to pay a GOG membership are Linux gamers that would be willing to pay for official Linux support?
With the Steam Deck getting more popular and more SteamOS handhelds on the way, it has never been a better time for game companies to support Linux. GOG does already sell some games that have Linux support, they just don’t have a convenient way to download and install them.
GOG galaxy appears to use CEF and Qt, as well as some parts (such as plugins) that use python. All of those are cross platform. So I doubt it would be incredibly difficult to port to Linux. The fact that there is already a macOS version indicates that it can be made cross platform and can run on Unix-based systems.
I have supported GoG for quite some years. I don’t understand why they keep pivoting different things to do.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but I would support paying for the initial game as well as every major patch when a new OS came out. Say, they do something to make a game work on Win 11. One year later we have Win 12 so I don’t mind paying a little for the patch. Then one year later we have Win 13 and I’m willing to pay again if I still play the game.
I would also support paying for online servers for games that have multiplayer components. That takes money to maintain.
As others mentioned, GoG should stop wasting time on a launcher. Hell, even the installer. Just ZIP the whole thing for me to download.
I would also support paying for online servers for games that have multiplayer components. That takes money to maintain.
If the developers were interested in allowing people to keep the servers running, they’d just give us the server code like they used to. If I was in charge of a GOG that was a little more flush with capital, I might fund an easy drop-in replacement library for Steam’s multiplayer APIs so that developers can easily port their games to GOG and be playable, in multiplayer, offline.
