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I still don’t like their AI stance.
- can’t you just copy the game files to another engine, Only Buy non steam DRM games or copy some DLLS that makes the game playable on Steam(not sure if this is fine to do) ?
How is this not also true for Steam? Unless the game itself has DRM, I can copy game files to an offline machine that doesn’t have Steam installed and launch and play them normally.
“Unless the game itselfhas DRM” is the key phrase. Steam itself is a form of DRM if you must install it and login to install and/or run a game.
DRM-free Steam games are the exception, not the rule, unfortunately.
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_games_on_Steam
If the game itself has DRM, then it has DRM on GOG too.
Steam itself is a form of DRM if you must install it and login to install and/or run a game.
Did you read what I wrote?
GOG is drm free and provides offline installers for the games, updates, and dlcs. Even games with drm on steam.
You don’t even need to install their client to download the installers or extras.
If a game has DRM on one platform, but not another, that’s because the publisher required it. That can be for any number of reasons that don’t have anything to do with the platform.
I guess what I’m asking is, what’s the benefit to having the installer instead of the game files?
You have to be online to download the installer. The end result is being able to play normally, offline, from portable storage if you choose. Besides a few gigabytes, it seems like a distinction without a difference.
Gog literally won’t allow you to sell a game if it has DRM, that’s their whole deal as a Platform.
Also having the installers means that if you can install the game files, set whatever environment variables the game needs, create the necessary folders, install the redistributable runtimes the game needs to run,and link the dlls properly. If you only have the game files you have to manage all of that yourself
Yes.
Witcher 3 hard copies required activation to your GOG account before they could work. Hitman (2016) was 70% locked behind the worst DRM in human history, but they sold it on their store until they were pressured by customers not to.
And Devotion still ain’t ‘preserved’ because the CCCP hivemind told them not to have it on their site, and they obeyed instantly.
GOG can suck all the dicks with that self-righteous bullshit.
Oh shit they’re not 100% perfect
So your examples for why they’re bad are something they did a decade ago and something they did because the alternative was losing their entire Chinese market.
You’re scraping the barrel. GOG must be doing things right if this is all you can come up with.
And they don’t do regional pricing. Buying a game on GOG is nearly twice as expensive in my currency compared to someone in the US or EU.
Pull out disc with a game from 10 years ago
Installs just fine and launches
“Connecting to online services…”
“Timeout: Retry? Quit?”
Huh?
Are we just forgetting that Gog is ran by nazis?
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Wait really? Not disbelieving you. Just genuinely didn’t know.
ngl if this is the only proof there is of them being nazis then I don’t believe they’re nazis. If they were, there would be more evidence beyond an email subject and I doubt a nazi organization would put these symbols in a random email anyway.
This is just fodder for people who like to performatively accuse everyone of being a nazi for their dopamine fix while knowing zero about how actual nazi organizations function or behave.
I never actually saw the mail before. I read the GOG apology and assumed they used runes that looked a bit too similar, but looking at the screenshot they full on used the Siegrune at least.
Rereading the apology, they might not be Nazi’s but they’re definitely not sorry enough to give a proper apology for using Nazi imagery. That’s not a good look either.
So basically some idiot intern stuck Nazi symbols in a mass email to see if they would get away with it. I’m sorry but I’m going to need stronger evidence than this before I believe the claim that “GOG is being run by Nazis”.
paywall poop
I posted another link as well.
Didn’t know
Sonnenrad (Black Sun)
Kolovrat (Spinning Sun)
Double Siegrune (SS)
This is the message we need to hear. The bread and butter. I get so tired of people nitpicking GOG and Mozilla over every relatively minor thing when they are some of the only people trying to hold back the deluge of bullshit.
Agreed. Someone complained Firefox moved to updates every few days or something.
They had no clue Firefox updates like all the time.
Do they? Maybe for minor releases but I’m pretty sure Firefox is currently doing major releases every 4 weeks and starting from September they’re going to do it byweekly. Personally I don’t see what the big deal is but I can absolutely see someone on the fediverse being outraged by the idea of a more frequent release schedule.
byweekly I think you mean semi-weekly. Bi-weekly is twice per week
Also it means every 2 weeks. Which is the case here.
Semi-weekly however ONLY means twice per week.
Also it means every 2 weeks
Only for people that can’t speak English
https://writingexplained.org/bi-weekly-vs-semi-weekly
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/semiweekly
https://www.grammarbook.com/blog/definitions/bi-vs-semi-weeklymonthlyannually/
You are pedantic-ing and getting it backwards.
I’m done with GOG after the NeoNazi shit.
I can’t believe you got downvoted for pointing out their nazi comms lmao
Can you provide further information so more people can decide to boycott them too?
ACK! I saw the comments!!!
Seriously, that’s proper fucked up. I thought it might be one of the more obscure, mystic symbols… NOPE! It’s the SS.
OOPSY
What’s this now?
They sent out an email for a game, and included a bunch of very sus Nazi related runes in the title.
They first said they noticed how it would look and opted not to include them in the German email, showing they knew how it would be seen and still did it.
They changed their story a few times and later issued a weak apology without explaining anything or showing how they plan to ensure it doesn’t happen again or hold anyone accountable.
deleted by creator
If only they would post more stuff on Bluesky or even use Mastodon instead of TwitterX
(Yes, i am aware they have a bluesky profile but they post less stuff on there, it seems)
GOG trying to drum up positive pr after that Nazi symbol newsletter.
Didn’t they instantly flag that? It was for some slavic game thing and all of those symbols are rooted in cultures long gone that nazis appropriated.
The symbol alone was OK, but they doubled it to read SS, and they didn’t send it to Germany; which means it was 100% intentional and not just a little oopsie.
That’s because the German team flagged it.
I don’t think it’s a good look but to decry they’re nazis for an email showing runic alphabet and slavic symbols doesn’t exactly trigger me too hard. It really sounds like someone fucked up.
People out there still buying Bayer products and they genuinely were part of the Holocaust, a huge part of it. Ford, Volkswagen, etc.
There’s a world where someone uses a kolovrat or a sigel without intending to relate them to the Nazis. There is not a world where they use both a kolovrat and two sigels in a row and don’t know what it means. Maybe someone at GOG didn’t catch on, but the devs knew what was up.
So we think the entire dev team, marketing team and anyone else involved had a whole meeting and plan to do this? What’s the end goal?
Hanlon’s Razor dude. Going to need more for me to decry the Nazi label onto someone.
No one listens to the logos of God. It’s either the pathos or the ethos; the emotional arguments or the ones that fall squarely on authority holding up what they say is true. Like, I can explain to you that everything you experience is in your brain, so all experiences must correlate with something in your neurons, so these words you’re reading on this device are actually inside you, and thus the Earth isn’t real as the Buddha and the kid that bent spoons at the Oracle’s in the Matrix explain. Cognitive dissonance is king in this world, because the rift between what we’re told is going on and what is really going on is absolutely enormous. Some game studio trying to capitalize on a demographic doesn’t perturb me. Corporations are going to corporate. What bothers me is how the sheep behave in response to such dipshit shepherds who have taken the reins of the flock. You’ve let this happen to yerselves.
Wow what a super condescending way to say absolutely nothing worthwhile.
This rune displays differently depending on what program or app you view it in. The game itself was something about a sun which is what the symbol represents.
If GOG was full Nazi I’m sure they have better ways to express it. I think it’s super pathetic and screams of pearl clutching to dive on the Nazi label and freak out. It’s also so dumb to assume the entire team is in on it like they sat down and plotted this whole scheme. Could be a stupid intern, could be overworked skeleton crew, could be AI.
Sorry you’re gonna need more than that for me to become a giant weiner about a stupid game company I could not care less about.
Also stop being such a tool.
The symbol alone was OK
Not really
No, it was the lightning SS symbols.
Hey, watch you don’t criticize gamers’ favourite Nazi bar.
You guys really trying to make an elephant out of a gnat.
sorry I like to remind people not to get cozy rooting for for-profit corporations that’ve shown some ick recently. took as much effort to remind as it did for the post, but whatever constitutes “elephant” in your book.
Yeah, that was a major WTF moment
You could do this before that incident as well.
No shit, you somehow didn’t understand their comment.
I absolutely adore GOG for being like this, and for consistently applying pressure to publishers and other marketplace vendors alike.
I just also have A Steam Library with like 1200+ titles, and it’s measured in Terabytes. And butrot in my physical media ingratitude will be non zero, in long enough timescale.
I consider my continued patronage of buying games to be my subscription costs to the platform vendors. 🤣
Bit rot is already happening to my PS2 games. MGS2 is completely dead for me now. Its a copy I’ve had since I was a kid when it came out.
Archive multiple copies with something that has error-correcting codes. Use btrfs, zfs, par2, rar, raid-5, DVDs etc
The only way to be sure is to save it on a quartz matrix. Only issue is it’s read-only. Not rewritable ever. Once you etch your data into quartz that’s it.
Storage is amazing, though. All of human knowledge (so far) has already been etched into such a storage medium by the UN a few years ago. It fits in the palm of your hand.
Or… you could just follow the 3-2-1 strategy with normal drives and regular scrubs. For most purposes (including a game library) that’s way better.
But I want my game library to survive the sun’s expansion!
Just a quick reminder that discs that you burn yourself at home do degrade pretty quickly, much faster than pressed discs. I personally have had burned discs that failed after approx. 6 years. It can happen even faster if you use low-quality discs. Even pressed discs can fail after 20 years if you are unlucky.
Using 2 big HDDs (2 for redundancy) full of your installers might be safer in the long run and also easier to manage and backup.
From what I recall, only self-burnt CD’s and DVD’s degrade quickly, while self-burnt blu-rays last significantly longer, even if not m-discs.
That’s why I print out all my downloaded games
Print them on clay tablets. Those will stand the test of time, especially with the right level of error correction. (Sorry for the ad cancer - I didn’t want to promote a specific brand or spend forever finding a good review site.)
Can confirm, clay tablets can last thousands of years to archive your
grievancesdata.Unfortunately I’m allergic to clay
I hope you also laminate them for longevity.
Sure, but what if there’s a fire!? My favorite game is Ocarina of Time. I don’t want to risk losing it, so I memorized the binary digits that comprise the code. Can’t be too careful!
I laminate my punch cards for longevity. Wouldn’t want them breaking down.
I prefer to cut archival cards from 0.7mm 316 stainless steel sheet 👍
Clay tablets have been demonstrated to last much longer than paper or metal
Nonsense. I got some high quality copper from a merchant I fully trust and I bet this will last forever.
Was his name Ea? His name isn’t known today for being engraved in copper…
I suspect corrosion-resistant steel alloys haven’t been around long enough to prove themselves in that regard XD
Corrosion-resistent is not the same as non-corrosive.
I suppose gold as a noble metal would be stable over a long period, as it’s non-reactive. But certain kinds of acids can still dissolve it, unlike ceramic
The special ones, yes
I eat those to gain their power.
You should really move to microfilm. It saves so much space!
It just doesn’t smell the same
Try M-Disc, it’s supposed to be as good as microfilm for archival.
Big Disc propaganda
Big Disc Energy
And reminder that solid state drives (including thumb drives) can lose data after a couple years if they are not plugged in from time to time
It can happen even faster if you use low-quality discs.
Yep. I got some no-name DVDs at Kaufland as they were just EUR 1 for a 10-pack. They started having read issues after just 4 years.
Also, they easily peel apart with just fingers and no effort.Edit:
Packaging:
Media ID: MBI 01RG40The worst case I experienced was a disc that disintegrated after a couple years. It got an actual extra hole in it, in a way that looked like somebody spilled acid on it and the acid burned right through the disc. In reality it just lay in my drawer.
In your acid draw?
Use M-Disc media. It’s said to last 1000 years. It’s expensive and very slow to rip at the suggested 4x speed.
I’ve been very satisfied with them, and you just need a regular Blu-Ray drive.
You need an M-DISC BluRay drive.
Verbatim Datalife HTL BD-R discs are supposedly made in a similar technology (some folk on r/datahoarder think they’re exactly the same but idk). At the very least they won’t have the same problem as DVDs (no organic dye) and they actually work out cheaper than half decent HDDs. I can get 25GBx50 cake for £30. I’ve only started burning them a year or two ago so time will tell if I lose my data :x.
Cheapest solution is an HDD + one more for backups. M-Discs for 15-17€ per 100GB are for the games you wanna take to your grave.
I mean they are games that i no longer have to worry about data corruption or loss. Like ever. And i can Will these to family & friends. The cost is easily worth that!
Yeah, normal burners are more like printers, where the write laser activates or deactivates a pigment which then either reflects or absorbs the read laser to represent 0/1. But that pigment can degrade over time, turning 1s into 0s.
M-discs are instead etched and iirc use constructive and destructive interference so the reader (which is the same reader as normal discs, just the writer needs to specifically support M-disc) reads the 0/1. It will also degrade over time, but since it’s a thicker layer of difference, it will last significantly longer than a thin layer of pigment. And I bet that special m-disc specific readers could be made to read it again after it degrades to the point where the interference technique stops working, since an image could still show where the high and low points are, even if the waves don’t align perfectly anymore.
In practice, I’ve found that the drive was way easier to find than the media for m-disc. Like most optical disc writers these days seem to support it but the discs are expensive af compared to non m-disc.
Though when I was going through my old burnt CDs and DVDs, I was surprised at how well they were holding up. I was expecting at least some read errors by now but everything has been fine so far.
Well, other than the data quality lol. Not like the readability of the file but stuff that took days to download back then would download today in seconds and a good monitor I got well after my early files was only 720p for its resolution. The data I prized as a youth is kinda sad today.
What about Verbatim AZO? I’ve heard good stuff about those, and they’re not expensive.
Also, as far as CDs go, I’ve found that an old degraded player which doesn’t read burned discs anymore but plays pressed discs will still play burned AZO discs just fine.
blu ray in this economy?
Are tape drives still a thing?
Yup
If I were more serous I would probably get a couple of those. I remember it being part of our procedures at a gov office.
yup. God knows how many Dreamcast games I’ve had to toss and reburn over the years.
I have bought many games from GOG, but I think there’s a flaw in this argument.
If a publisher decides to revoke GOG’s license to sell a game, wouldn’t they require GOG to remove the game files from their servers? As in, wouldn’t the installer break?
The offline installers aren’t fully complete, are they?
All installers from GOG.com already contain the entirety of the game’s data.
The offline installers are offline. They even contain offline promotions AND require admin to install.
They work offline. If you’re on Linux you can automate the archiving with https://github.com/Sude-/lgogdownloader
Does GOG support Linux?
More like, Linux supports GOG and they don’t try to stop it.
The thing you want is the Heroic Games Launcher, you can login to your GOG/Epic/Amazon and install/launch games (using WINE/Proton) pretty much like using Steam.
It’s even available as a Flatpak so you can use it on the Steam Deck.
GOG does not have a Linux launcher. There were some rumblings about focusing on Linux development when there was a change of hands, but we still have to see anything coming from that.
However, GOG does host Linux builds of games where available.
4 replies and all of them “yes but actually no”.
I’ve been waiting for GOG Galaxy to be Linux compatible for over a decade. When they start supporting my OS I’ll start supporting their store.
But why do you need a launcher though? Is it to play games socially or something?
I just launch from the start menu. My issue is that there aren’t enough Linux titles, but at least GOG is very good about marking Linux titles and making them searchable.
So I can keep my library of games I own in one place, install it on my OS and (ideally) maintain them (patches, mods, scripts etc).
If they really wanted to be a source of competition maybe even something like the community hub of sorts where you could download the aforementioned patches or fixes for your games but primarily for centralisation of my library in app form.
Use heroic? It allows GOG login (amongst others), and does all that.
Yeah, patches and updates is probably a good use case. GOG should probably just make a command line tool for Linux modeled after something like apt, with the difference that you need to log in to access your purchases. I think many users would also appreciate a curated directory of mods.
Yes and no.
GOG games run just fine on Linux, some native and some under Wine\Proton (almost entirely on the game’s devs, but GOG does have their support program to get Wine working on older unsupported games).
GOG Galaxy, their launcher app, does not have a Linux version. You have to download games off their website directly or use Lutris, Heroic, or some other third party management platform to manage them. The advantage of using a game manager–aside from easier monitored game downloads, automatic updates, and community features–is that they’re usually set up Wine for you as well, which can be annoying to set up and use correctly.
GOG is just a storefront. The specific titles you purchase on that storefront may or may not offer Linux files.
But gog makes a launcher and library tool. But not for Linux.
That is GOG Galaxy. So, “Does GOG Galaxy support Linux?” is a different question than “Does GOG support Linux?”, and the answer to that question is “no”. But if you really need a local launcher software like that for some reason, there is Heroic Launcher, which definitely does support Linux. Though realistically, you don’t need GOG Galaxy, Heroic Launcher, or any similar software to play the games. GOG is just a storefront to purchase DRM-free games. You can simply download those game install files using a web browser and install/run them normally.
Yeah, but if they dobt put any effort in, I consider them non supporting. They used to say things like working on it or coming soon. But they never did.
So as far as I am concerned, they dobt support Linux.
Kind of. You can install stuff like lutris or steamdeck plugins that connect to gog and download games for you
The cover question is: do the games support Linux? And with proton, a lot of them do
I’d recommend Bottles over Lutris due to the latter’s unfortunate use of LLMs/AI.
What does the “Linux” filter refer to then?
https://www.gog.com/en/games/new?systems=linuxEdit: I tried with a random free game. Provided was a shell script with binary data appended to it.
Native supported Linux games. Why?
Yeah, I thought that was the question. I never considered downloader/launcher, or whatever their software does.
So Linux users can install the game without having to use some translation software like Proton.
Depends on the game. A giant part of their library is, well, good old games, that only run on Windows natively
To preserve “pagan” games or are we talking about another GOG?
Yeah I’m still pretty concerned about that whole event but it seems like everyone has just forgotten about it.
I could have forgiven the initial email as a rogue nazi intern but their official response being “we made sure not to send it to Germans and its on you all for seeing nazi symbols as nazi symbols” is pretty fucking problematic. Also before anyone defends them as just being pagan symbols, the ones they chose to use were both modern creations by nazi germany
For anyone who’s not up to date: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/gog-apologizes-for-emailing-nazi-runes-to-its-followers/
I definitely agree that using those innocuous Unicode characters in the way they did was someone’s subtle attempt at evoking Nazi imagery, but the whole Germany part of this story is meaningless. Germany is known for having excessive language restrictions, to the point where every marketing department has their standard library of phrases and whatnot to not use in Germany. They are used to making substitutions for the German market to swap out genuinely innocuous phrases simply because they have a different connotation in Germany or whatever. As far as we can tell, that was just yet another piece of marketing material that went through some automated regex filter for German subscribers and no one thought twice about it after seeing that fact.
From their reddit post in trying to cover up:
… I also recognize that placing two such runes next to each other could create an unfortunate association with symbols used by the Nazi regime. This was noticed before distribution, and out of respect for local sensitivities, the material was not sent to the German community.
They knew and actively chose to not send it to the country that criminalizes Nazi imagery. To me the Germany stuff is the most damning part.
Yeah 100%. Their response to the event is pretty much where all of my feelings come from on the subject. They explicitly state they knew they were releasing literal nazi iconography and then explicitly chose to put it out where it wouldn’t get them in legal trouble.
Not only that but IIRC they actually changed the original game dev’s marketing material to use the symbols without the devs even knowing.
It’s all pretty fucking damning and it makes me incredibly sad
It always amazes me when people from anarchist servers bend over backwards to make excuses for for-profit private companies.
That was about their German language newsletter though. They have separate, localised newsletters for several markets, which I’d assume are manually translated. Also, as a native German speaker, I really don’t think it’s all that different than other European language regions regarding sensitivities.
Their marketing team was warned that there was some offense images and it would stir trouble in Germany.
Rather than say, “Oh shit this will look bad.” They said, “Oh let’s just change it for Germany.”
Do you not understand the root issue?
Rather than say, “Oh shit this will look bad.” They said, “Oh let’s just change it for Germany.”
I am saying that this Germany scenario occurs all the time. That is SOP. Very often, a marketing team discovers that “oh, this copy is considered Nazi imagery in Germany” even though it is entirely innocuous to any other culture, so they alter it for just the German market. So, because they are so used to not looking further into common false positives (inspecting the situation and determining if that might actually be Nazi imagery elsewhere as well), it is possible that this is what happened here. Someone may have figured this was just another false positive like all the other German false positives and just sent off a culturally sensitive version like they always do with false positives. This situation might just indicate that they need to make it SOP to investigate every false positive and question if they might actually be genuine.
Again, I do think it was intentional Nazi imagery for other reasons. I am just saying that the “Germany” reason isn’t a valid reason because that situation could have potentially been incompetence instead of malice. Even their corpospeak explanation of the situation complies with this possibility.
That’s conjecture. And I feel like that there are certain things that, when flagged, should be sent back up the pole. Not cause it’s part of the teams job explicitly, but because it should be common sense.
Going forward any gaming purchase I make will be from GOG.
Or itch.io!
