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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.
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...
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.