Slashdot Mirror
GOG.com Announces Linux Support
For years, Good Old Games has made a business out of selling classic PC game titles completely free of DRM. Today they announced that their platform now supports Linux. They said,
We've put much time and effort into this project and now we've found ourselves with over 50 titles, classic and new, prepared for distribution, site infrastructure ready, support team trained and standing by ... We're still aiming to have at least 100 Linux games in the coming months, but we've decided not to delay the launch just for the sake of having a nice-looking number to show off to the press. ... Note that we've got many classic titles coming officially to Linux for the very first time, thanks to the custom builds prepared by our dedicated team of penguin tamers. ... For both native Linux versions, as well as special builds prepared by our team, GOG.com will provide distro-independent tar.gz archives and support convenient DEB installers for the two most popular Linux distributions: Ubuntu and Mint, in their current and future LTS editions.
They do use dosbox, and I've even taken their assets and loaded them on an Android tablet... so at least some of their games have worked on Linux for some time now.
That said, there is a big difference between "probably works on" and "is supported and tested on".
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
It's a little more complicated than that.
They have big all-in-one installer .exes that setup a full environment for the games.
A great many are run through dosbox, but others are old win95 games or whatever.
We're talking about a month-long project for a couple developers to convert the low hanging fruit that have an easy deployment target like that. And working out details with more modern indie game studios that natively target linux.
I think it's also important that they're finding a market of Linux users who are willing to pay for games. One of the big complaints that modern publishers have about releasing their games on Linux is that they can't do the same things with DRM on Linux that they can with Windows, therefore no one will pay for their games and everyone will pirate instead. This is one of the obstacles Valve ran into with the Steam Box (which will run Linux) and they fought that perception by encouraging developers to release games as "Steam Play" that work on MacOS and Linux as well as Windows. Getting publishers to make their games Linux-compatible would mean that the PC gaming audience could finally run Linux without having to worry about having Windows for games.
One of the big complaints that modern publishers have about releasing their games on Linux is that they can't do the same things with DRM on Linux that they can with Windows, therefore no one will pay for their games and everyone will pirate instead.
Which just demonstrates how clueless and out of touch modern game publishers really are. DRM does not stop piracy on Windows or even slow it down. As a rule, Windows game DRM is cracked and DRM-free copies are widely available for download within hours of release, sometimes even before release.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.