Heroic is in official contact with CDP/GoG since a recent release IIRC.
edit: [https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher/releases/tag/v2.13.0](https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher/releases/tag/v2.13.0)
Oh shit I bought a lot of stuff on GOG recently, had I known they got a commission from it I'd have bought it from within HGL rather than from the website.
GoG is the original company that tried to bring abandonware back out again in working releases and did so in a DRM free manner. So while it’s sad they’re not supporting Linux as well, they still have done a lot for the community IMO. Just focused on another area.
Look, I'm with you on the whole "if a game doesn't work on linux, drop it and move on" bandwagon for sure.
However, the line is drawn here: GOG is the only place I can get certain games like ~~Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (edit: the linux version specifically on steam does not have denuvo, so this is only half-correct for this specific game)~~, Batman: Arkham Knight, Yakuza: Like A Dragon, and Mad Max ***without*** **Denuvo**. Right now, it's the main way I can hold onto a copy of Fallout 4 that doesn't auto update and break all my mods. It's the only way I can play some of my games when my internet goes out or I'm on my steam deck and don't want to connect my internet when my mobile hotspot hits its data cap. GOG brought back Alpha Protocol, which is a game that deserved more love. GOG (at least used to) actually include patches for older games that steam sometimes didn't, like with Timeshift (the game, not the linux backup tool). Oh, and thanks to Heroic, I *CAN* play them on linux.
GOG is not Epic Games, GOG actually does stuff that makes it worth buying from. They may not be better than steam, but just because they don't have an official client doesn't mean they're worthless. I would be singing a different tune if there wasn't anything like Lutris or HGL, however.
> Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
That is a Windows-only issue. The Linux build (which is available exclusively through Steam) does not use Denuvo either, so if you are interested in playing DX:MD on Linux, Steam is the far better call.
It *was* actually true when I bought it on GOG, which was before I used linux at all, but sure, I'll edit my post to keep it up to date so that my post isn't discredited from one singled out game. I just don't want to purchase a game in a form that has denuvo attached to it at all, windows or linux.
I was at first pretty satisfied with their Linux port when I started playing last month, but for whatever reason I have rendering issues now, so I switched to the windows version with Proton.
Or keep buying it on GOG through Heroic Games to support the company that cares about you owning the games you bought, and to support FLOSS and Linux development? Both companies have their upsides and downsides, it's not as clear cut as that.
Yeah, as much fun as Steam is, there's still plenty of it being the closed source client that it is I don't like. I would love to use something like Heroic for Steam games, but Steam's DRM prevents that.
edit; hell even something like being able to launch a game without an update being forced on me.
Ironically, lately I’d rather have an update forced on me. PUBG starts the game but then it says you need to update your client.
So, why let me start the game in the first place? Force the update! It’s an online game anyway.
Yes, except GoG is the only store that let's you own what you buy and doesn't have DRM.
I still buy from Steam due to Proton, but GoG is my goto for some title, even when on Steam since I get offline installers and the like.
> Yes, except GoG is the only store that let's you own what you buy and doesn't have DRM.
Might want to read all those End User Licence Agreements again there. Even games you have the physical media for you dont 'own'
True, but good luck revoking an offline installer without DRM that is stored on the user's machine.
So it isn't perfect from a legal perspective, but the closest you can get to owning.
With Steam I can't download old games on unsupported OS like every 32 bit Linux, even though they offer games that would run fine, because I can run their physical copies through WINE. On GOG I can manually download an installer for a version I choose from its website.
It means the Heroic devs now have some back-channel at least for potentially asking questions towards the end of better integrating with GoG and clearly a lot of new features towards that end came out in line with this new affiliate program membership too.
A coincidence? Maybe, probable even for some of those features. But I wouldn't put it past them to have gained some 'unofficial' support perhaps. GoG/CDP has nothing to lose from this after all.
It doesn't necessarily need to give them a special status tho. Just so long as it gives a statistical measure for growth of users willing to spend, CDP's interest in supporting them can grow over time.
What does heroic do that lutris doesn't? I connect my gog account to lutris, it fetches my whole library, then it's pretty much just click and install from there
Heroic allows you to sign into your Gog (Epic/Amazon) account directly. You can browse and download/install from your library that way with proton libraries and community presets selected and there are QOF features like compatibility ratings for each title.
Lutris is amazing as well, but I use Heroic when installing directly from Gog.
I believe yes, something like that, provided by Valve, but I honestly don't pay a lot of attention to details.
Just to put a finer point on it, since Gog/cdpr obviously aren't interested in open sourcing Galaxy, I think their support of Heroic is a great compromise.
Sorry, I meant to ask in the context of gog only. What do you mean by better steam deck support? I also haven't run into issues with lutris on the deck
Dunno fully, but couldn get Fe games (than didn't check the rest) I got from Epic to run On Deck using Lutris. No problem on Heroic.
Additionally adding games on Lutris didn't work for me.
Thought than that it doesn't have to be compatibility with (my) Deck, but also bazzite, but I won't look further, as at least one of them works.
Lutris has far more feature than Heroic for GOG games, the most important are numerous scripts available wrote by Lutris community for games that do not work out the box and needs tweaks.
Well it supports the native save game sync for both GoG and EGS. AFAIK Lutris doesn't do that yet.
For the games that don't have savegame sync, you can use [ludusavi](https://github.com/mtkennerly/ludusavi). They have great Heroic support and Lutris support is comming (meaning you can automatically restore/backup save games before/after launching with a simple wrapper command).
Outside of star citizen with the [LUG communities helper script](https://github.com/starcitizen-lug/lug-helper)... lutris has basically never worked for me. But for GoG and Epic stores stuff Heroic has been perfect.
Which is funny because I could never get Heroic working suitably for me. It never seemed to handle prefixes well, and installing certain games from EGS was just a fucking nightmare, so I used Lutris almost exclusively
And this is why I’ve opted to forgo PC building and just use a Steam Deck from now on. I don’t have to worry about some whack combination of hardware mismatches anymore; now it’s just “does it work on the Deck y/n”.
> We also started a partnership with GOG and now every game you buy from the GOG store inside Heroic will give us a commission
They signed up for the affiliate programme.
That's not the same as "in official contract". They're not helping Heroic in any way other than kicking back referral commission.
Would give good PR to CDP/GoG if they started to redirect user to the heroic webpage when you go to download the client on Linux
Because all GoG features work on Heroic even cloud saves.
Also GWENT online works, (sometimes requires manually intervention with some wine dependencies but can easily be done with winetricks)
Heroic probably can do something to support some form of that perhaps however no I do not see CDP giving them special access to GoG's own galaxy cloud services API unless CDP has made sure it's secure enough to make it open to all(and not just heroic) third parties.
edit: someone else here mentioned that gog cloud saves do infact work on heroic.
So I do those official GOG surveys when they ask me to. When the subject of Galaxy comes up, as a Linux user my answer has always been, "it would be nice but honestly Heroic is fine." Sounds like they've been taking the feedback seriously. This is a good solution, imo.
Same, except I've always said I'd rather see them do more to support Heroic & Linux. And since I've got a library of over 300 games with them I'd like to think they at least give it a glancing look. So maybe we do have some minimal impact. :)
Frankly, I'd rather they offer a helping hand to the Heroic Games Launcher guys in terms of adding Galaxy functionality like [multiplayer ](https://www.gog.com/forum/general/lists_games_that_need_galaxy_for_multiplayer_and_the_ones_that_dont/page1)to that than porting Galaxy itself to Linux. I don't even use Galaxy on my windows dual boot, I use HGL. It's just better IMO.
100% agree! I've made the same comment before. Take whatever resources would go into developing a Linux launcher and just use those resources to Heroic and/or Lutris development.
Frankly if they dropped galaxy altogether and embraced Heroic/Legendary officially and got involved fully in developing those it might be a more economic option for them too. But while I expect their devs to comprehend the concept I'm not holding my breath on the C-Suite comprehending it.
Also CDPR is not making a lot of money with GOG, so lack in support is understandable. It is not like Epic Games where money is burn in the air just because and launcher still sucks.
They sell games with the DRM removed and an offline installer so you're not tied to their store in any way. How is that "hostile to users" compared to the other game stores?
Sometimes. They happily stuck DRM into Cyberpunk 2.0 and still haven't removed it, even after screwing their launch for nearly a month and have and still include DRM in many games on their store.
* Many of their offline installers automatically open and require Galaxy to run
* Galaxy itself is a buggy mess on Windows let alone Linux
* Scrapped regional pricing
* When problems arise they often go radio silent until it triggers media attention and only then fix things
* They still charge a 30% cut and have no intention of changing
* They refuse to update their publisher backend that requires a complex and completely manual push of updates and causes GoG to get updates much slower, never at all or in many cases, devs have publicly stated that they wont release to GoG because their backend is so terrible and it's not worth dealing with it
The DLC and unlocked rewards are inaccessible unless you run the game via either Galaxy, REDLauncher or use their offline authentication, which isn't accessible unless you manually disable their GalaxyServices DRM in the install folder and is re-enabled every update, as well as resets your auth every proton update.
Plus on launch of 2.0, many people couldn't even start the game. It would repeatedly crash on start during the splash screen when the DRM tried to activate. When they 'fixed' it (took multiple goes) then it would get stuck on the splash screens for a few minutes waiting for the DRM process to give up trying to contact GoG's servers cause it was completely broken.
Pretty sure this is fixed now. I do remember the dlc causing the game to crash if you used the offline installer but the next update fixed that for me and I have beaten the game and dlc without ever using the gog client. All I did was install the base game and dlc and clicked play.
Hell I never have installed the gog client and only use offline installers and have never had any issues other then that dlc.
Sorry I'm confused what drm is still there?
I can download the offline installers for the game and dlc install them completely offline and play the entire game and dlc without ever logging in to the gog client. I did that back in December and everything just worked.
Yeah I go in, get the offline binaries, and then get out and run that stuff on wine+dxvk. I prefer that than to have games tied to a middle man whether that be a windows vm or steam or lutris etc.
>Love GOG but given how they barely even support the windows launcher
When was the last time you've used it on Windows. I've had little trouble with it.
I never tried to install it after the fact. Might be worth trying out again, the devs have made lots of quality of life improvments in the last few months.
The wishlist entry for a GOG Galaxy Linux client has the largest number of upvotes out there. People want it.
But the more I think about it, I'm not sure people need it anymore, or that they have thought it through.
At best GOG would give us something like Steam client's support for Linux games: Built-in integrated wine support for windows games and otherwise native client support for linux games. This way we would get all the functionality, including achievements and multiplayer. This would be the dream scenario. However, is this actually feasible? GOG is barely making any profit, except for during the years CDPR releases something. They are a small company, and to be honest, lost any ability to do Linux development for years now.
The alternative? Support FOSS utilities to give us the same. Heroic has almost everything we need already, minus achievements and multiplayer functionality. These, I am told, are also coming. Lutris too. It's a shame (and a bit embarrassing) that one/two-man FOSS dev projects working for free in their own spare-time, are better than anything multi-million dollar companies can do, but there it is. Just let GOG help them and support them, and let's all be happy.
Just wanted to give exposure to this tool as well: for the non-client users out there, there is also the amazing lgogdownloader CLI offline installer utility to improve (and fix) your GOG Linux gaming experience.
>It isn't as if GOG is a multi-billion dollar company
But they *are* a publicly traded company... and that alone should explain why they haven't felt they need to cater to linux gamers.
Tbh, GOG is owned by CD Projekt and they're one of the largest game devs/publishers in Europe by revenue. Their market cap is almost $3 Billion (still tiny compared to something like Microsoft or Tencent). Embracer and Ubisoft being the top 2...
As much as I love this idea (honestly the only reason I have Windows LTSC installed on another partition) if it takes the focus or resources away of GOG's main goal, i.e. provide DRM games and scrounge the planet for licensing information decades old, then I'll let it go, we have third parties doing amazing work already
I've done it like that for some games but honestly the version management is a pain. Maybe it's Steam that raised my expectations as a user, but having to log-in to GOG website, looking for my games in my library, check if a newer version is available for my platform/language (for which I need to know what my game version currently is), download it and run the installer (if I'm lucky; sometimes I would even need to backup the save folder, uninstall the previous version, install the newer and import back the save folder) - then do it all over again for the next game - that's just not practical.
Single part of online installer capts at 4GB. Many games, including GOG's first party ones, take upwards of 40GBs. Each part of the offline installer must be queued up for download manually. Also, patches.
Have fun. /s
Used to not be a problem thanks to the GOG Downloader, which, coincidentally, had Linux version. But guess what GOG killed *immediately* as soon as they have released a beta of Win/MAc-exlusive GOG Galaxy..
I would say heroic games is a good alternative.. but its not. It looses my save data constantly, fails to download things, and then just straight up doesnt work even with games that are linux native. I tried to play the witcher 2.. didnt work. Tried to play the witcher 3, and it crashed nonstop, then all my save data got deleted. So yeah, would be cool to have a native gog galaxy.
News flash: a site that mostly deals in old games and thus doesn't have a lot of game updates doesn't have a huge, bloated, proprietary launcher program and instead just gives you installers from its own site.
Wow.
Heroic works just fine with me. Of course would be nice to have official endorsement and support, but right know community effort have made many strides
When all is said and done, I will take gog's freedom to install games without the obligatory shop over steam any day. There's even the freedom to extract the game assets from the installer without installing the game at all, which is pretty useful for open source interpreters.
Which, of course, doesn't mean that I won't be cheering if they decide to leverage the open source community by supporting stuff like the heroic launcher more directly. That is, however, of secondary importance to me.
At this point I don't care any more, I use Lutris on the go.
But for years my prefer choice was Gog, and I said, it "was".
I have more games from them than Steam in more years, so go figured. But now the preference is reverting and numbers are getting close. I'm still buying from them, I love Gog, but not at the same rate as before any more.
We just need the Galaxy API to be documented publicly to help Linux (just that, nothing more than a gesture).
The best thing about GOG is that games aren't tied to a launcher and they install and work, that's my opinion anyway. I miss the days when applications were their own programs and installed without launchers and such.
No need to, heroic is plenty good, also solves the epic games hell (and amazon games if anyone even uses that), so why not keep that. I install heroic on linux and windows, it's much better than gog or epic
I don't care, because I'm an owner of the game i bought and i select if i want to run it on bottles, heroic, steam. For a bit of convenience i won't rent my games which are permanent steam drm.
Well realistically they all use wine-proton to run the games, steam or whoever else. So can you ;). No need to wait for "support" which is just repackaging of wine and a wrapper to launch the store app under it. Just use your distro package manager to install wine-proton and run whatever game you want (or wine-staging for recent production or generic apps, or wine-vanilla for older ones).
Lutris worked fine for GoG stuff for me, even getting mods working for them which is impressive considering we're talking about DOS-based games for a lot of these things.
GOG is well supported through Heroic Launcher and Lutris. Just because companies don't have an official launcher or store front for Linux doesn't mean they don't support open source efforts.
Is the native version that important when there's Heroic launcher, Proton and the like? GOG is a much smaller company than Valve and does a lot for game preservation. The majority of PC games release on Windows so focusing there makes sense. I'd rather they focus on making and maintaining quality releases on a relatively stable target platform with the resources they can dedicate than supporting a plethora of distros with potential weird bugs slowing them down/reducing their quality. Maybe as Linux gains more traction and a distro suitable for the masses emerges the situation might change though.
I think I actually have to download the offline installer and then the game will work. I am trying that out now. I want to play SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition.
EDIT: The offline installer works! I can play my GOG games!!!
I imagine the venn diagram of "people who care about drm free" and "people who use Linux" has a decent amount of overlap. Their potential Linux market share is probably higher than most other companies, so it's odd that they aren't embracing it.
I obviously am not involved in the company or have any advanced marketing research, so I could be wrong.
But I personally am a Linux user who would love to use Gog for the DRM free support, but I usually buy from Steam instead because they support Linux more. I also have a couple IRL friends who do the same.
I just think a lot of people with the mindset "I don't like DRM in my games and want to avoid it" are the same people who would have the mindset of "I don't like DRM in my operating system and want to avoid it".
I stopped buying games on gog, because there a so much problems, even with heroic and lutris. I bought also two gog games again on epic and steam because i cant play them with gog.
It's such a shame that gog doesn't support lunix.
And then crash. Like anything you do on it. Lutris is so unstable and overly complicated designed, it hurts. Was ok for it's time it first released, but today it's a underdeveloped mess.
Afaik CD Projekt doesn't have very good relation with Linux in general. The story is that once in a time they've released a native Linux port of The Witcher 2 which was completely broken, so they've received a lot of shit for it (rightfully). CEO (or was it someone else important, idk) got upset and said that they're not gonna make a Linux port ever again. They've fixed the W2 port eventually though (or so I've heard, idk, I've played that game before I knew what Linux is)
Edit: literally why would you downvote this
I'd rather 🏴☠️ than give GOG more money. Just like FacePunch's Gary, regarding EAC through Proton for Rust, GOG would have done something by now if they actually were going to. For those unfamiliar, Gary (FP) talked for a while about a) they were going to bring Steam Deck support for Rust with the EAC through Proton capabilities they were supposedly "testing internally" only to b) start promoting lies that EAC doesn't work on Linux only to c) have EAC themselves say on Twitter that is a lie (calling out Gary and FP) only to d) now say they're actually doing nothing to bring Rust to Steam Deck.
**DO NOT WAIT AROUND FOR CHARLATANS AND LIARS, YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME.**
Most of the time when I pointed that out [criticism that GOG refuses to release native Galaxy client, despite being in the community wishlist for years in top place], I get downvoted. I am surprised that you are not downvoted yet.
Gog does not care about linux, support steam cause they are the only ones who care.Seriously stop buying from gog. Their "promises" are nothing but lies just look at their actions.
That's because you pretty much need to ship devices with Linux in order to get people to use it.
Most aren't chomping at the bit to change operating systems for hardware they already own.
Chromebooks have sold fairly well, especially to schools.
Android tablets and phones have sold fairly well.
Oculus Quest has sold fairly well, and based on Android.
Roku is a household staple, and based on Linux.
Plus throw a dart at a smart tv and it's probably either running android or web os, or just using the linux kernel somewhere.
On top of that, Microsoft is now allowing people to install linux distros in a specialized VM, so a lot of the linux specific software you might've ran another OS for could probably run in Windows.
Also Valve's Steamdeck is doing pretty well, and not only ships with Linux but features a whole desktop mode using KDE.
You're wrong, though. Steam has Linux support because Gabe realized the direction Microsoft was going with Windows 8 might eventually destroy his companies business model, hence why they positioned themselves to become a counterweight to Microsoft's monopoly by embracing and contributing to Linux gaming.
The SteamDeck is just another step on the way, like the SteamMachine were. In a sense the SteamDeck (might) only exists because of Valve's Linux support.
Dude, I was there when it happened. The SteamDeck wasn't even the first "console" they worked on for their Linux strategy, that would be the SteamMachines.
Valve's business model is getting those sweet 20-30% of sales on their store. The goal of their Linux strategy is to not be as reliant on the whims of Microsoft, who might sabotage Steam somehow (as they feared in 2012 with W8).
The SteamDeck simply supports that goal.
Heroic is in official contact with CDP/GoG since a recent release IIRC. edit: [https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher/releases/tag/v2.13.0](https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher/releases/tag/v2.13.0)
Oh shit I bought a lot of stuff on GOG recently, had I known they got a commission from it I'd have bought it from within HGL rather than from the website.
Or just buy it on steam and directly support the company that care about linux.
GoG is the original company that tried to bring abandonware back out again in working releases and did so in a DRM free manner. So while it’s sad they’re not supporting Linux as well, they still have done a lot for the community IMO. Just focused on another area.
Look, I'm with you on the whole "if a game doesn't work on linux, drop it and move on" bandwagon for sure. However, the line is drawn here: GOG is the only place I can get certain games like ~~Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (edit: the linux version specifically on steam does not have denuvo, so this is only half-correct for this specific game)~~, Batman: Arkham Knight, Yakuza: Like A Dragon, and Mad Max ***without*** **Denuvo**. Right now, it's the main way I can hold onto a copy of Fallout 4 that doesn't auto update and break all my mods. It's the only way I can play some of my games when my internet goes out or I'm on my steam deck and don't want to connect my internet when my mobile hotspot hits its data cap. GOG brought back Alpha Protocol, which is a game that deserved more love. GOG (at least used to) actually include patches for older games that steam sometimes didn't, like with Timeshift (the game, not the linux backup tool). Oh, and thanks to Heroic, I *CAN* play them on linux. GOG is not Epic Games, GOG actually does stuff that makes it worth buying from. They may not be better than steam, but just because they don't have an official client doesn't mean they're worthless. I would be singing a different tune if there wasn't anything like Lutris or HGL, however.
> Deus Ex: Mankind Divided That is a Windows-only issue. The Linux build (which is available exclusively through Steam) does not use Denuvo either, so if you are interested in playing DX:MD on Linux, Steam is the far better call.
It *was* actually true when I bought it on GOG, which was before I used linux at all, but sure, I'll edit my post to keep it up to date so that my post isn't discredited from one singled out game. I just don't want to purchase a game in a form that has denuvo attached to it at all, windows or linux.
I was at first pretty satisfied with their Linux port when I started playing last month, but for whatever reason I have rendering issues now, so I switched to the windows version with Proton.
Same with Mad Max.
Except the Linux build is bordering unplayable in my experience
Or keep buying it on GOG through Heroic Games to support the company that cares about you owning the games you bought, and to support FLOSS and Linux development? Both companies have their upsides and downsides, it's not as clear cut as that.
Yeah, as much fun as Steam is, there's still plenty of it being the closed source client that it is I don't like. I would love to use something like Heroic for Steam games, but Steam's DRM prevents that. edit; hell even something like being able to launch a game without an update being forced on me.
Ironically, lately I’d rather have an update forced on me. PUBG starts the game but then it says you need to update your client. So, why let me start the game in the first place? Force the update! It’s an online game anyway.
That's live service game, it's different topic.
Yes, except GoG is the only store that let's you own what you buy and doesn't have DRM. I still buy from Steam due to Proton, but GoG is my goto for some title, even when on Steam since I get offline installers and the like.
> Yes, except GoG is the only store that let's you own what you buy and doesn't have DRM. Might want to read all those End User Licence Agreements again there. Even games you have the physical media for you dont 'own'
True, but good luck revoking an offline installer without DRM that is stored on the user's machine. So it isn't perfect from a legal perspective, but the closest you can get to owning.
I fail to see how GOG's willingness to partner up with Heroic not counted as "caring about Linux".
Because I put a high value on DRM free games
Yeah. Buy it on Steam because they care about supporting DRM on Linux... 🙄
With Steam I can't download old games on unsupported OS like every 32 bit Linux, even though they offer games that would run fine, because I can run their physical copies through WINE. On GOG I can manually download an installer for a version I choose from its website.
They care about themselves. It just happens they use Linux, and more specifically Wine and SDL.
Bingo. They care about preserving their market share. Anything they do to achieve that is tangential.
The partnership is just them being an affiliate though and they added affiliate links in. It’s not exactly some huge thing.
It means the Heroic devs now have some back-channel at least for potentially asking questions towards the end of better integrating with GoG and clearly a lot of new features towards that end came out in line with this new affiliate program membership too. A coincidence? Maybe, probable even for some of those features. But I wouldn't put it past them to have gained some 'unofficial' support perhaps. GoG/CDP has nothing to lose from this after all.
Being an affiliate gives absolutely no special status, loads of people have it
It doesn't necessarily need to give them a special status tho. Just so long as it gives a statistical measure for growth of users willing to spend, CDP's interest in supporting them can grow over time.
Lutris has been enough for me so far. This is my first time hearing about Heroic. Is it better?
Heroic is much more comfortable for running the games from Epic, GOG and Amazon. For everything else, I still use Lutris.
What does heroic do that lutris doesn't? I connect my gog account to lutris, it fetches my whole library, then it's pretty much just click and install from there
Heroic allows you to sign into your Gog (Epic/Amazon) account directly. You can browse and download/install from your library that way with proton libraries and community presets selected and there are QOF features like compatibility ratings for each title. Lutris is amazing as well, but I use Heroic when installing directly from Gog.
The proton libraries seem like an advantage. To be clear, you mean they're custom wine prefixes, yeah? Or something else?
I believe yes, something like that, provided by Valve, but I honestly don't pay a lot of attention to details. Just to put a finer point on it, since Gog/cdpr obviously aren't interested in open sourcing Galaxy, I think their support of Heroic is a great compromise.
Supports more libraries (like said Amazon Games). And has better support for Steam Deck I think
Sorry, I meant to ask in the context of gog only. What do you mean by better steam deck support? I also haven't run into issues with lutris on the deck
Dunno fully, but couldn get Fe games (than didn't check the rest) I got from Epic to run On Deck using Lutris. No problem on Heroic. Additionally adding games on Lutris didn't work for me. Thought than that it doesn't have to be compatibility with (my) Deck, but also bazzite, but I won't look further, as at least one of them works.
For my use case its mostly for better integrating proton on a game-to-game level with Epic
Lutris has far more feature than Heroic for GOG games, the most important are numerous scripts available wrote by Lutris community for games that do not work out the box and needs tweaks.
Awesome, thank you. I'll give it a shot.
When games needs tweaks or complementary software to launch on Linux, it is better to use Lutris,
Well it supports the native save game sync for both GoG and EGS. AFAIK Lutris doesn't do that yet. For the games that don't have savegame sync, you can use [ludusavi](https://github.com/mtkennerly/ludusavi). They have great Heroic support and Lutris support is comming (meaning you can automatically restore/backup save games before/after launching with a simple wrapper command).
Outside of star citizen with the [LUG communities helper script](https://github.com/starcitizen-lug/lug-helper)... lutris has basically never worked for me. But for GoG and Epic stores stuff Heroic has been perfect.
Which is funny because I could never get Heroic working suitably for me. It never seemed to handle prefixes well, and installing certain games from EGS was just a fucking nightmare, so I used Lutris almost exclusively
I guess there's some combination of users HW perhaps along with how well a distros repo build is managed and configured at play.
And this is why I’ve opted to forgo PC building and just use a Steam Deck from now on. I don’t have to worry about some whack combination of hardware mismatches anymore; now it’s just “does it work on the Deck y/n”.
> We also started a partnership with GOG and now every game you buy from the GOG store inside Heroic will give us a commission They signed up for the affiliate programme. That's not the same as "in official contract". They're not helping Heroic in any way other than kicking back referral commission.
Had no idea Heroic supported Windows and macOS, nice
Wait... This whole time they named versions after One Piece characters!?
It's been over a decade, closer to two since I last read any one piece, so maybe. IDK.
Would give good PR to CDP/GoG if they started to redirect user to the heroic webpage when you go to download the client on Linux Because all GoG features work on Heroic even cloud saves. Also GWENT online works, (sometimes requires manually intervention with some wine dependencies but can easily be done with winetricks)
"Brilliant, but lazy. GOG"
Fair enough.
So we can get cloud saves and stuff? :O
Heroic probably can do something to support some form of that perhaps however no I do not see CDP giving them special access to GoG's own galaxy cloud services API unless CDP has made sure it's secure enough to make it open to all(and not just heroic) third parties. edit: someone else here mentioned that gog cloud saves do infact work on heroic.
So I do those official GOG surveys when they ask me to. When the subject of Galaxy comes up, as a Linux user my answer has always been, "it would be nice but honestly Heroic is fine." Sounds like they've been taking the feedback seriously. This is a good solution, imo.
Same, except I've always said I'd rather see them do more to support Heroic & Linux. And since I've got a library of over 300 games with them I'd like to think they at least give it a glancing look. So maybe we do have some minimal impact. :)
Frankly, I'd rather they offer a helping hand to the Heroic Games Launcher guys in terms of adding Galaxy functionality like [multiplayer ](https://www.gog.com/forum/general/lists_games_that_need_galaxy_for_multiplayer_and_the_ones_that_dont/page1)to that than porting Galaxy itself to Linux. I don't even use Galaxy on my windows dual boot, I use HGL. It's just better IMO.
100% agree! I've made the same comment before. Take whatever resources would go into developing a Linux launcher and just use those resources to Heroic and/or Lutris development.
they are already doing that
Frankly if they dropped galaxy altogether and embraced Heroic/Legendary officially and got involved fully in developing those it might be a more economic option for them too. But while I expect their devs to comprehend the concept I'm not holding my breath on the C-Suite comprehending it.
Also CDPR is not making a lot of money with GOG, so lack in support is understandable. It is not like Epic Games where money is burn in the air just because and launcher still sucks.
Love GOG but given how they barely even support the windows launcher, I'd rather not have a half-baked linux client. Just use Heroic.
Best of both worlds, just take whatever resources would go into a Linux client and use it to support Heroic or Lutris.
GoG supports heroic. The heroic teams even gets a commission when buying gog games through hgl client.
They don't. It's just the same affiliate cut that content creators get from them unfortunately. GoG/CDPR is still pretty hostile to users.
They sell games with the DRM removed and an offline installer so you're not tied to their store in any way. How is that "hostile to users" compared to the other game stores?
Sometimes. They happily stuck DRM into Cyberpunk 2.0 and still haven't removed it, even after screwing their launch for nearly a month and have and still include DRM in many games on their store. * Many of their offline installers automatically open and require Galaxy to run * Galaxy itself is a buggy mess on Windows let alone Linux * Scrapped regional pricing * When problems arise they often go radio silent until it triggers media attention and only then fix things * They still charge a 30% cut and have no intention of changing * They refuse to update their publisher backend that requires a complex and completely manual push of updates and causes GoG to get updates much slower, never at all or in many cases, devs have publicly stated that they wont release to GoG because their backend is so terrible and it's not worth dealing with it
I'm out of the loop. What DRM is there in Cyberpunk 2.0? Didn't feel like any when I installed it with the files downloaded through lgogdownloader
The DLC and unlocked rewards are inaccessible unless you run the game via either Galaxy, REDLauncher or use their offline authentication, which isn't accessible unless you manually disable their GalaxyServices DRM in the install folder and is re-enabled every update, as well as resets your auth every proton update. Plus on launch of 2.0, many people couldn't even start the game. It would repeatedly crash on start during the splash screen when the DRM tried to activate. When they 'fixed' it (took multiple goes) then it would get stuck on the splash screens for a few minutes waiting for the DRM process to give up trying to contact GoG's servers cause it was completely broken.
That sucks indeed.
Pretty sure this is fixed now. I do remember the dlc causing the game to crash if you used the offline installer but the next update fixed that for me and I have beaten the game and dlc without ever using the gog client. All I did was install the base game and dlc and clicked play. Hell I never have installed the gog client and only use offline installers and have never had any issues other then that dlc.
The crashing caused by the DRM is fixed, but the DRM is still there, which was the point.
Sorry I'm confused what drm is still there? I can download the offline installers for the game and dlc install them completely offline and play the entire game and dlc without ever logging in to the gog client. I did that back in December and everything just worked.
Yeah I go in, get the offline binaries, and then get out and run that stuff on wine+dxvk. I prefer that than to have games tied to a middle man whether that be a windows vm or steam or lutris etc.
CDPR is the game development studio. A subsidiary of CDP the publisher running GoG.
>Love GOG but given how they barely even support the windows launcher When was the last time you've used it on Windows. I've had little trouble with it.
It doesn’t make sense to me that the store without DRM doesn’t support Linux
Some games even have DRM nowadays lol. I'll keep supporting the company that supports my OS... Which also offers DRM free games...
And heroic is gonna get GOG achievements and stuff too!
Damn really, when's the ETA on that, that sounds cool
https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher/pull/3727
Sure, but it has (multiple) fully functional third party clients and offline installers. That's enough for me IMO.
Do those third party clients support multiplayer? Because a few GOG games require Galaxy for it.
They don't, however online games that require galaxy run fine for me after adding galaxy as a non steam game and downloading the game.
that doesnt allow for native linux gog games
That's still offloading the work to the community.
fully functional? not really, heroic doesn't handle DLCs properly and that is a major issue.
It let's you install any purchased DLC along with the main game when installing. What's missing?
last time i tried it doesn't allow you to install dlcs after the game has been install, it has to be done manually, which is a chore and a half
I never tried to install it after the fact. Might be worth trying out again, the devs have made lots of quality of life improvments in the last few months.
They've added separate DLC control a couple of versions back.
It wasn't handling dlc like 3 years ago. Now all is handled properly.
Lutris :)
Lutris doesn't install patches and updates for you. Or did you mean you can use Lutris to install Galaxy?
lutris uses installers, which takes more space during install and take much longer to install, not to mention how crappy gog servers are...
Do you have a guide on how to setup Lutris? I’ve tried so many times and I could not wrap my head around how to use it
Just use port-proton. Its way simpler to use. https://github.com/Castro-Fidel/PortWINE Or you can find it on flathub as a flatpak
Heroic works reasonably well. But yeah, I think that having Linux and other free OSes support would go hand-in-hand with DRM-free philosophy.
The wishlist entry for a GOG Galaxy Linux client has the largest number of upvotes out there. People want it. But the more I think about it, I'm not sure people need it anymore, or that they have thought it through. At best GOG would give us something like Steam client's support for Linux games: Built-in integrated wine support for windows games and otherwise native client support for linux games. This way we would get all the functionality, including achievements and multiplayer. This would be the dream scenario. However, is this actually feasible? GOG is barely making any profit, except for during the years CDPR releases something. They are a small company, and to be honest, lost any ability to do Linux development for years now. The alternative? Support FOSS utilities to give us the same. Heroic has almost everything we need already, minus achievements and multiplayer functionality. These, I am told, are also coming. Lutris too. It's a shame (and a bit embarrassing) that one/two-man FOSS dev projects working for free in their own spare-time, are better than anything multi-million dollar companies can do, but there it is. Just let GOG help them and support them, and let's all be happy. Just wanted to give exposure to this tool as well: for the non-client users out there, there is also the amazing lgogdownloader CLI offline installer utility to improve (and fix) your GOG Linux gaming experience.
What storefront other than Steam does though? It isn't as if GOG is a multi-billion dollar company
Itch.io does
W itch.io Love them as a company and really enjoy the niche they have in the marketplace
>It isn't as if GOG is a multi-billion dollar company But they *are* a publicly traded company... and that alone should explain why they haven't felt they need to cater to linux gamers.
Yup, there's barely any money in Linux...until this current growth gets to a point when there is.
Tbh, GOG is owned by CD Projekt and they're one of the largest game devs/publishers in Europe by revenue. Their market cap is almost $3 Billion (still tiny compared to something like Microsoft or Tencent). Embracer and Ubisoft being the top 2...
It's weird that it detects if you're using Linux and stops you downloading. Yes, you can work around, but it's still annoying.
the thing that i dont get is that they sell native linux games but dont offer any launcher for them
To this day, I am still not able to install a functioning Cyberpunk GOG version on my Steam Deck D:
Have you seen the windows launcher
As much as I love this idea (honestly the only reason I have Windows LTSC installed on another partition) if it takes the focus or resources away of GOG's main goal, i.e. provide DRM games and scrounge the planet for licensing information decades old, then I'll let it go, we have third parties doing amazing work already
the truth is i dont need gog galaxy when i can download offline installer
I've done it like that for some games but honestly the version management is a pain. Maybe it's Steam that raised my expectations as a user, but having to log-in to GOG website, looking for my games in my library, check if a newer version is available for my platform/language (for which I need to know what my game version currently is), download it and run the installer (if I'm lucky; sometimes I would even need to backup the save folder, uninstall the previous version, install the newer and import back the save folder) - then do it all over again for the next game - that's just not practical.
ok i get it i personally dont plan to use gog for anything multiplayer related so playing whole game on old version is OK
Single part of online installer capts at 4GB. Many games, including GOG's first party ones, take upwards of 40GBs. Each part of the offline installer must be queued up for download manually. Also, patches. Have fun. /s Used to not be a problem thanks to the GOG Downloader, which, coincidentally, had Linux version. But guess what GOG killed *immediately* as soon as they have released a beta of Win/MAc-exlusive GOG Galaxy..
my solution to problem is to buy more 2 TB hard drives also newest game that i have on gog is 19 years old so...
Insane really.
GOG Galaxy has a one click autoinstaller in port-proton and works fine https://github.com/Castro-Fidel/PortWINE
I'd love CLI launchers for GOG and Steam as well like Legendary.
I love GOG, but Galaxy doesn't even work on Windows
I would say heroic games is a good alternative.. but its not. It looses my save data constantly, fails to download things, and then just straight up doesnt work even with games that are linux native. I tried to play the witcher 2.. didnt work. Tried to play the witcher 3, and it crashed nonstop, then all my save data got deleted. So yeah, would be cool to have a native gog galaxy.
Although those seem to be the most supporting GOG- fans… but, oh well.
And they never will.
News flash: a site that mostly deals in old games and thus doesn't have a lot of game updates doesn't have a huge, bloated, proprietary launcher program and instead just gives you installers from its own site. Wow.
no multiplayer
And yet it supports Mac. Are all GOG-apologists few brain cells shy?
Heroic works just fine with me. Of course would be nice to have official endorsement and support, but right know community effort have made many strides
When all is said and done, I will take gog's freedom to install games without the obligatory shop over steam any day. There's even the freedom to extract the game assets from the installer without installing the game at all, which is pretty useful for open source interpreters. Which, of course, doesn't mean that I won't be cheering if they decide to leverage the open source community by supporting stuff like the heroic launcher more directly. That is, however, of secondary importance to me.
Lutris, Heroic & Minigalaxy cover it nicely. https://github.com/sharkwouter/minigalaxy
At this point I don't care any more, I use Lutris on the go. But for years my prefer choice was Gog, and I said, it "was". I have more games from them than Steam in more years, so go figured. But now the preference is reverting and numbers are getting close. I'm still buying from them, I love Gog, but not at the same rate as before any more. We just need the Galaxy API to be documented publicly to help Linux (just that, nothing more than a gesture).
The best thing about GOG is that games aren't tied to a launcher and they install and work, that's my opinion anyway. I miss the days when applications were their own programs and installed without launchers and such.
No need to, heroic is plenty good, also solves the epic games hell (and amazon games if anyone even uses that), so why not keep that. I install heroic on linux and windows, it's much better than gog or epic
Heroic is still missing some features unfortunately
I don't care, because I'm an owner of the game i bought and i select if i want to run it on bottles, heroic, steam. For a bit of convenience i won't rent my games which are permanent steam drm.
Well realistically they all use wine-proton to run the games, steam or whoever else. So can you ;). No need to wait for "support" which is just repackaging of wine and a wrapper to launch the store app under it. Just use your distro package manager to install wine-proton and run whatever game you want (or wine-staging for recent production or generic apps, or wine-vanilla for older ones).
Love and support them but for varying reasons I can’t use their platform… perhaps I will be able to one day…
if its not now then when ??
I use it on Lutris.
Lutris worked fine for GoG stuff for me, even getting mods working for them which is impressive considering we're talking about DOS-based games for a lot of these things.
As long as they continue providing game versions without DRM, it's fine because wine/proton will most likely work.
I just download the files through the web browser so i can archive them on my server
GOG is well supported through Heroic Launcher and Lutris. Just because companies don't have an official launcher or store front for Linux doesn't mean they don't support open source efforts.
Or 2FA that isn't email-based...
I’ve double purchase software cause GOG doesn’t have a Linux client and the one game that was native always downloaded everything every patch.
And that's why I will never buy anything from them or recommend them to anyone!
I use Lutris to install my GOG Games, it is enough for me.
Is the native version that important when there's Heroic launcher, Proton and the like? GOG is a much smaller company than Valve and does a lot for game preservation. The majority of PC games release on Windows so focusing there makes sense. I'd rather they focus on making and maintaining quality releases on a relatively stable target platform with the resources they can dedicate than supporting a plethora of distros with potential weird bugs slowing them down/reducing their quality. Maybe as Linux gains more traction and a distro suitable for the masses emerges the situation might change though.
Minigalaxy does it for me.
I bought a lot of GoG stuff and have not been able to get any of it working with Lutris.
Really? Some titles are unstable, but using to auto generated GOG wrapper works really well for me.
I think I actually have to download the offline installer and then the game will work. I am trying that out now. I want to play SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition. EDIT: The offline installer works! I can play my GOG games!!!
I am not even mad at gog. literally the best store someone can ask for!
Ah, $CURRENT_YEAR, the best argument of them all.
Why would they? Linux has only a marginal market share.
mac too
Mac users tend to have money.
I imagine the venn diagram of "people who care about drm free" and "people who use Linux" has a decent amount of overlap. Their potential Linux market share is probably higher than most other companies, so it's odd that they aren't embracing it.
I imagine it makes sense for them not to. From a business perspective.
I obviously am not involved in the company or have any advanced marketing research, so I could be wrong. But I personally am a Linux user who would love to use Gog for the DRM free support, but I usually buy from Steam instead because they support Linux more. I also have a couple IRL friends who do the same. I just think a lot of people with the mindset "I don't like DRM in my games and want to avoid it" are the same people who would have the mindset of "I don't like DRM in my operating system and want to avoid it".
I stopped buying games on gog, because there a so much problems, even with heroic and lutris. I bought also two gog games again on epic and steam because i cant play them with gog. It's such a shame that gog doesn't support lunix.
I run GOG Galaxy via Bottles, it runs faultlessly.
Lutris will pull down your entire GOG library if you sign in.
And then crash. Like anything you do on it. Lutris is so unstable and overly complicated designed, it hurts. Was ok for it's time it first released, but today it's a underdeveloped mess.
It’s rock solid for me. Been using it for 3 months so far and only a couple hiccups with mouse capture.
Afaik CD Projekt doesn't have very good relation with Linux in general. The story is that once in a time they've released a native Linux port of The Witcher 2 which was completely broken, so they've received a lot of shit for it (rightfully). CEO (or was it someone else important, idk) got upset and said that they're not gonna make a Linux port ever again. They've fixed the W2 port eventually though (or so I've heard, idk, I've played that game before I knew what Linux is) Edit: literally why would you downvote this
I'd rather 🏴☠️ than give GOG more money. Just like FacePunch's Gary, regarding EAC through Proton for Rust, GOG would have done something by now if they actually were going to. For those unfamiliar, Gary (FP) talked for a while about a) they were going to bring Steam Deck support for Rust with the EAC through Proton capabilities they were supposedly "testing internally" only to b) start promoting lies that EAC doesn't work on Linux only to c) have EAC themselves say on Twitter that is a lie (calling out Gary and FP) only to d) now say they're actually doing nothing to bring Rust to Steam Deck. **DO NOT WAIT AROUND FOR CHARLATANS AND LIARS, YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME.**
I prefered the pre-Galaxy client instead of this cluttered mess. One reason Heroic Launcher is better
It never worked for me on Mac either so no big loss...
Most of the time when I pointed that out [criticism that GOG refuses to release native Galaxy client, despite being in the community wishlist for years in top place], I get downvoted. I am surprised that you are not downvoted yet.
Thanks for this post. I just acknowledged Heroic launcher, is exiting news.
A native GOG launcher would be rad, but fortunately Lutris manages my GOG library just fine. You need to sign in with your GOG account though.
Is this really a problem? I think there are other launchers that can connect to GOG. I am pretty sure I installed one in my home PC a while back.
Gog does not care about linux, support steam cause they are the only ones who care.Seriously stop buying from gog. Their "promises" are nothing but lies just look at their actions.
Also proton doesn't support kernel anti cheat
Year is 2024 and Heroic works fine for me
Year is 2024 and Linux barely has any market share.
That's because you pretty much need to ship devices with Linux in order to get people to use it. Most aren't chomping at the bit to change operating systems for hardware they already own. Chromebooks have sold fairly well, especially to schools. Android tablets and phones have sold fairly well. Oculus Quest has sold fairly well, and based on Android. Roku is a household staple, and based on Linux. Plus throw a dart at a smart tv and it's probably either running android or web os, or just using the linux kernel somewhere. On top of that, Microsoft is now allowing people to install linux distros in a specialized VM, so a lot of the linux specific software you might've ran another OS for could probably run in Windows. Also Valve's Steamdeck is doing pretty well, and not only ships with Linux but features a whole desktop mode using KDE.
In gaming it has a bigger share than Mac, and Galaxy supports Mac. So this by far not an valid argument.
Steam wouldn't be supporting it either if not for SteamDeck. Let's get real here.
You're wrong, though. Steam has Linux support because Gabe realized the direction Microsoft was going with Windows 8 might eventually destroy his companies business model, hence why they positioned themselves to become a counterweight to Microsoft's monopoly by embracing and contributing to Linux gaming. The SteamDeck is just another step on the way, like the SteamMachine were. In a sense the SteamDeck (might) only exists because of Valve's Linux support.
Naive
You did realize that there are about 10 years between Steam supporting Linux and the SteamDeck releasing, right?
In his defense he's 12 so he was 2 years old then. The only "game" he was playing was peekaboo.
You did realize that it takes many years to develop from scratch a new console, right? Adding Linux support was merely a first step.
Dude, I was there when it happened. The SteamDeck wasn't even the first "console" they worked on for their Linux strategy, that would be the SteamMachines. Valve's business model is getting those sweet 20-30% of sales on their store. The goal of their Linux strategy is to not be as reliant on the whims of Microsoft, who might sabotage Steam somehow (as they feared in 2012 with W8). The SteamDeck simply supports that goal.