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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.
Your snide comment aside: what they discovered is a desire to test the market for circa five dollar legitimate copies of good games with tested and updated DOSBox and/or Wine configurations so that users do not have to Google, tweak and retweak things to get a game to run only to find out three-quarters of the way through the game that it crashes.
I would much rather pay a reasonable amount for that rather than spend my gaming time tinkering; that's good value for me. If I liked tinkering, I wouldn't be their target market though and I might be making snide comments on Slashdot with my time.
Tinkering is all well and good; and many times quite relaxing and enjoyable in it's own right.
If I've got time for a game, though, I'd rather be blasting Nazi's (or whatever floats your boat) than tinkering to get there. I still remember when I upgraded my video card to a Savage S4 and Half Life broke, requiring much tinkering, downloading, reconfiguring, rebooting, some more tweaking and finally a reboot to get back into the game. Then it isn't relaxing or fun; it's stopping me from the fun.
So a couple of bucks to GOG for their efforts to make thing run is a great investment, IMO. Plus it great to be able to get all the old titles again, long after the disks have been lost and the patches much harder to find...
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.
ID Software released (at one time) the source to older titles. Why can't GOG do/push for that too?
Even many companies that distribute their old games' programs as free software keep a tight leash on the "assets" (parts of the game other than the program). Case in point: Id Software cease-and-desisted Mozilla for making an Emscripten-powered JavaScript port of Doom available to the public. One reason that a publisher might decline to distribute an old program as free software is that doing so might encourage unlawful copying of the assets into games that compete with the publisher's own products.
Another reason is that third-party libraries often aren't free software. For example, the big three console makers are known for banning copylefted software on their platforms. The original source release of Doom was silent because Id Software had licensed a non-free audio library from a third party. (Source ports ended up replacing it with a shim around Allegro or SDL.) Id had to rewrite the Doom 3 engine to eliminate a patented "depth fail" shadow volume processing technique invented by William Bilodeau and Michael Songy of Creative Labs before its source could be released.
I'm not about to compromise my machine my running proprietary software on it.
Then how does it connect to the Internet? All cellular radios and many WLAN radios contain a microcontroller running non-free software. And how does it boot? Most commodity PCs ship with a proprietary implementation of EFI and not coreboot.
The HIMEM.SYS is a lie!
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.
I'm a Linux-user, and I'm so glad to have found you, because what good is a douchenozzle if you don't have a douchebag?
No offense, but that's a kind of dumb assumption. They explicitly state that they make the games compatible with modern systems. With a large portion of their catalog being 16-bit, and 64-bit OSes not able to load 16-bit apps, they *need* to be wrapping the games in emulators or the like.
Yes, the original game files - or very close, minimally-patched versions - are in there. However, the vast majority of their customer base wouldn't be able to do anything with those game files. Even if they were, it wouldn't be the simple and user-friendly experience that it is today.
Now, as a Linux user trying to run Windows software, you're pretty much writing off "simple and user-friendly" from the get-go (I've been gaming in Wine since 2006; it's better than it was but it's got a long way to go and the goalposts keep moving). Given that, maybe it would have been nice for the small portion of users who care if they'd provided a "here's the files and instructions you need for setting this up in ScummVM on the platform of your choice" option... but that's not their target market, and frankly it might actually be harmful to their goals (never underestimate the cost of support calls from idiots who think they know what they're doing).
Hence, while many of their games have been *able* to run on Linux since GOG released them, the really core portion of the service - the dead-simple installers and updates - didn't. That is what they're now changing.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...