GOG is so contradictory. On one hand it's really a DRM-Free store doing awesome things such as the game preservation program. On the other hand, they have been very borderline with what they call DRM-free in the past and asking for tips when you are a company listed on the stock market feels weird.

They should stop this contradiction by making GOG a foundation. Foundations can have employees so it won't change anything for them. Actually it would make GOG more democratic which would be a very good thing. And it's much more rational to give donations to foundations than to for-profit companies owned by shareholders.

There's another things that feel strange. For a small store (no offence, but we can't say it has stream's market share), automatisation should be the top priority as it lowers operational costs. GOG being unable to provide Galaxy for Linux while Itch manage to do so is very surprising. With the right tools and the right mindset you can even do it for free! How long do you think it would take the community to port Galaxy on Linux if it was open sourced? Why not doing so? They can even drop Galaxy and support the Heroic launcher officially.

I want to buy on GOG because DRM-free is just better for consumers. But I just asked a refund on a game because I'm not sure multiplayer would work on Linux. Developers confirmed me that Galaxy is used to login into multiplayer. Sorry GOG, but your stupid decisions prevent me from giving you my money.

At that point we should call GOG the suicide store given how much it tries to sabotage itself.

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Prey at less than 2€ is an awesome deal. It breaks my heart a game so good has been so massively ignored.

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I've used lots of distros, including Slackware back in the early days, the simplest is by far Arch. It just works. Updating it is simple, it's up to date, AUR always contains the package I need and there is no added configuration layer. I love how close it is to upstream.

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A small update is worth mentioning I think. The game appears to be delisted from Itch as expected. But it is still downloadable. I can still see it in my library and the download files are still there. So it is a "usual" deslisting and not a complete removal.

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Tim Sweeney is the best comedian of this century :grin:

Do you remember when he said "Installing Linux is sort of the equivalent of moving to Canada when one doesn’t like US political trends. Nope, we’ve got to fight for the freedoms we have today, where we have them today."? True to his words, he created a new store so that editors could move to Canada instead of fighting for their freedoms on Steam :D And now, after all the Epic exclusives, including the ones whose release was already planned on Steam, them dare saying "Launch Everywhere" ??? It's just plain mockery.

Meanwhile in Steam-Land: Yet another Steam Deck Verified game gets unplayable.
It's funny to see how Epic Games apparently puts it all into their platform while Valve just waits & hopes for the best.
Must be very hard for you guys to see the "enemy" do exactly what you expect from Valve.

I'm by no means a Steam fan person. Actually I tried to avoid Steam as much as I could. I was focusing on Humble Bundle and GOG. When HB was dedicated to porting games on Linux and against DRM. But I had to recognize that Valve did a lot, for Linux, and gaming in general.

1. They did fund DXVK and Wine development.
2. Even If I don't like their DRM, it was much worse before Steam. Do you remember games with 5 activations, no more?
3. They showed that gaming handhelds can be successful with Deck.
4. Even after many years Alyx is still the best game on VR.
5. Their client have been supporting Linux for a decade while competitors often don't support Linux at all or very badly. Note: Itch has a very good Linux support too!.
6. Steam sales were one of the few ways for many to get games at affordable price.

There are many things to say against Valve, starting from their cut being way to high. But saying they do nothing is just not true. Especially if you compare Steam to Epic! Comparing with GOG and Itch could be understandable. GOG has the merit to be against DRM and Itch is the platform for very indie games. There are reasons to love these two stores. But Epic? :D

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A very good Immersive Sim! Actually, I didn't expect it to be that good and faithful to the Immersive Sim meta genre. It even brings a neat solution to one of the main issues with these games. AAA Immersive Sims are generally massive critical hits (Dishonoured, Prey, System Shock, Deus Ex, etc) but they cost a lot and have often low sales (lower than expected at least). Fallen Aces' 2D sprites are probably way simpler than 3D models to do but it works amazingly well. It gives a lovely Comics style to the game that fits its story so well.

The only complain I have is that, for the moment, it's a bit short.

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Quoting: scaineI only know of one instance of this, when Driver: San Francisco was delisted entirely.

It seems to works flawlessly on Linux ;)

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Quoting: razing32stories like these make me realize that when push comes to shove its best to have a backup copy of your game.

Quoting: IrisNebulaYou bought your game, you got your game. It has given you a DRM-Free installer that you can use whenever you want, as many times as you want. Even if new downloads are pulled, this shouldn't affect anyone much. Imagine going to a store and demanding a new copy of your game because you lost the game CD you bought there last year and being angry they won't service you. Infinite downloads for DRM-Free stuff is a courtesy and honestly they aren't even always provided by some software shops.

I get your point, but it's unfair. What I'll say won't concern Itch because they certainly have no responsibilities in this situation. And Itch's cut is freely set by the developer I think, so Itch is not responsible here. But here's the thing. The ability of to make a backup is very nice. It protects against the store shutting down, which happened for more than a few stores. And it protects against game updates that make old-version not accessible anymore. I'm a huge fan of backups and I did backup some of my games.

But we can not backup all our games. A modern game take around 50 to 100GB. Given that on modern computers, hards drives are around a few terabytes, a gamer could backup between 20 and 50 games on one hard drive. We could instead store backups on BD. They are much cheaper but keep in mind that modern games have regular updates. Updating the backups on BD to keep it up-to-date is not a simple and easy task. It takes a lot of time, effort and money. We need to take into account that physical storage's life span is not infinite. We need to make several copies to prevent fires, drawings, robberies, ... making some inaccessible. We could also store backups on cloud storage. But it's expensive and we would still have to update the backups every time a game is updated.

When games where distributed by physical copies, patches were rare and small. But today's updates are frequent and big. How much time and money would require maintaining all your backups up to date? Maintaining backups for more than 50 or 100 games would be quite big, both in terms of money and time. With sales and bundles, our collections grow very rapidly beyond that limit. What would you do when you would reach your limit of 50 or 70 games? You would be forced to stop playing new games until your limit increases.

The deal we make with a digital stores is that a cut of the price covers infrastructure cost. Digital stores act as cloud storage systems. I know that I can safely delete a game to make some space for another one because I will be able to download it again. They even save my saves in the cloud! That's a good model for us as long as they indeed let us download games again. And it's a good model for them. Storage is much cheaper for them because they can mutualize storage costs between customers. By taking care of storage for us, and being paid for that, we can buy more games. It's a win-win situation.

Of course the deal I'm talking about is an implicit one. Legally, the terms of the license are more more restrictive than that. But implicit deals do matter. Even if nothing forces stores, developers and editors to completely remove a game from a store, common usage when delisting a game is to let owners the ability to play it. As probably many here, I own several delisted games that I still play. I bet that a store that would have a limit or deadline for downloads would close very quickly.

What Night School is doing is awful. Dismissing the awfulness of their action by saying we have to do backups is unfair. The industry standard is to let owners play. I'm even sure that stores are OK with it. When you release a game on a store, when you take money from people, you have the moral responsibility to the people who bough this game. I know it's not a legal one, it's a moral one. Because it can be legal but unfair. This is the case here.

To Night School Studio: I had nothing against you. But such a bad move against your customers is really a huge betrayal. It shows that you have no respect for the people who supported you. Because taking the game on Itch is also a way to give you more money as Itch takes a lesser cut. Taking the game from our hands is unfair. How would you react if we took the money we gave to you back? Would you be happy? Another point. Do you really think I will pay again to play a game I already bought? You're forcing legal customers to rely on piracy, with all the risks it entails, to play a game they legally bought. Do I need to explain why it's bad?

If you can take the game back, then give the money back!

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So then, how about Fortnite on Linux / Steam Deck? Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said when it hits "tens of millions of users" that it "would actually make sense to support it". We must be pretty close by now right? Why ignore a platform that's sold multiple millions, and is clearly just continuing to fly off the shelves?

I've seen more consistency in /dev/random's output than Tim Sweeney's statements.

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Quoting: IvancilloI don't like all of this emulation things.

It's OK for old games that doesn't make sense for the developer to port, because don't worth.

But at the same time desincentivates them to make native Linux version of new games.

Yes, that's right. But the vast majority of developers have proven they don't know how to develop natively for Linux. Proton is not ideal but is the best option we have for Linux gaming. Most games runs better on proton than natively.

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