GOG formally announce their GOG Patrons subscription donation system

Quoting: lilovent

Quoting: tpauThe question is how can we keep the almost monopoly of Steam in check and balance it out?
I buy my games only on Steam if there is no other option.

The answer is simple: provide competitive good enough services and shopping experience that are on par at least with Steam.

If any other game shop does not want to provide that or cannot do that, they won't get better market shares.

For example, Epic is still burning Fortnite money and any of their underhanded tactics did not work out, instead of treating customers better.

Steam does exactly that, that is providing in comparison to other stores the best services.

Steam's behavior is so interesting.
They behave themselves as a monopolist that fears anti-trust law, which is such a weird situation.

You know Valve's reputation of "winning by doing nothing".
That's how you win as a legal monopolist.
Let the economy of scale and ages of product refinement carry you, because a reaction would by definition be anti-competitive(quite literally you take actions to minimize the amount of competition you face).

I've cleaned up the comments a little after having time to think about the language being used here. Please try to stick to the rules, and refrain from being intentionally inflammatory. We have people from all countries reading, let's play nice. Thank you.

Quoting: BrokattI don't see what's so controversial with this? GOG's Game Preservation program is not a money maker (who could have guessed) and they are asking for donations to keep it strong. That doesn't mean GOG's going out of business. They can close down Game Preservation tomorrow, go back to being a regular DRM-free game store and be just fine.

Now would it be better if a foundation did the game preservation? Maybe but GOG have the distribution and the knowledge to actually make the games run. They are more than just an archive were you can download an .EXE file.

Older games are being lost to time. Now is not the time to look a gift horse in the mouth.

I agree. I feel like people are struggling to see any gray areas in things anymore; it’s just black and white—good and evil—regarding everything. I’m guilty of that too in many circumstances, but I feel like GOG genuinely cares about game preservation and is doing their best to ensure that as many games as possible are available to play, just like any other game, for the foreseeable future. That costs money because there is a ton of work that needs to be done, just to handle all the legal issues alone, let alone packaging these games and making them work on modern systems. I am completely fine with this as long as they continue to show consistent efforts in preserving more and more games. I'd love for them to release a documentary about what goes into the actual process of game preservation, so people could see whats truly involved.

Last edited by Tethys84 on 16 Dec 2025 at 8:41 pm UTC

Quoting: ShmerlI buy games only on GOG lately. I wish it was bigger. Catch 22 creates a problem that their Linux users focus is very minimal, since Linux users are only a small part of their total user base that's already quite smaller than Steam's. That doesn't give them a lot of incentives to back efforts like Galaxy for Linux, which is easy to understand.

The other side of it are developers like Hellish Quart's, who pull their games from GOG, saying that all their users are on Steam. It's very annoying for actual GOG users.

I would agree with the "number of users" problem if they only had support for Windows, but they support MacOS too, I don´t think that the number of Linux users are so far behind those on MacOS, if we go by Steam numbers they are even ahead, although I understand that things like the Steam Deck might increase the number of Linux users there, but event taking that into consideration I don´t think that the difference is so big to justify that.

And if we go with the GOG stated goal of "DRM free" games I'm sure that the average Linux user is much more interested on that difference from Steam than someone that uses Apple's ecosystem to chose it over the alternatives.

Right now there are 3214 MacOS games and 2549 Linux ones filtering on their website, if we exclude newer games that support the former but don´t have official support for Linux that would be even less, and if we add games that run through Proton on Linux we would have more Linux executable games on GOG that MacOS ones. I run quite a few "Windows only" games from GOG using Heroic.

They probably cannot do things like maintaining Proton, and much less building something like the Steam Deck, but they could delegate some support to the community collaborating with projects like ProtonDB or Heroic to mention some of them, I don´t think that anyone is asking them to be Proton maintainers as Valve, and Linux users are already used to rely on the community even for Steam verified games.

Quoting: DevlinI would agree with the "number of users" problem if they only had support for Windows, but they support MacOS too, I don´t think that the number of Linux users are so far behind those on MacO

I agree, I think the reason is mostly historic. They added macOS support when Linux gaming was indeed smaller. Today I'd argue Linux gaming is way bigger than macOS gaming.