Is it really surprising? GOG built all their branding on their values. The store has a strong community of customer who are really attached to these values. I would even say they are the first and probably only reasons why people buy on GOG: being dedicated to DRM-free, being customer-centric, offering top-quality services, human values, etc.

Is GOG really customer centric? One the most voted feature is Linux support in Galaxy. It was said to be coming soon for ages (something like 7 years) and is still marked "in progress" ( https://www.gog.com/wishlist/galaxy/release_the_gog_galaxy_client_for_linux [External Link] ) . I know the usual arguments: we represent only a small faction of the market, around 1% of PC gamers according to steam. But when your main selling point is your values, treating customer like that is not a good signal to emit. Let's be serious, it is not a difficult task! Itch.io, whish has far less resources than GOG, has a Linux client for years! My point is that if they're OK to treat us like that, they're probably not as attached to their values as they say.

Is GOG really attached to DRM-free? There have been a lot of issues regarding DRMs on GOG over the years. The last one is Hitman but there was also Armello whose GOG edition had to be renamed "DRM-free" edition to signal the lack of features, etc. Competing with Steam is overly hard. As a store, you either have to avoid the competition by finding a niche like DRM-free for GOG or game jams/prototypes for Itch, or burn a lot of resources in free games and exclusivity, like Epic, until your customer base is large enough for the store to be profitable. GOG is stuck. The DRM-Free niche is too small for them to grow. They improved the user experience (Galaxy is all about providing a steam-like user experience with cloud saves, achievements, etc) and hoped it would be enough for gamer to switch. But for a store to be attractive, it has to offer something: more games, cheaper games, better gamer experience. Unfortunately for GOG, most gamers are perfectly OK with noninvasive DRMs such as Steam. If they want to grow, they have to follow the Epic way. I'm pretty convinced that GOG keeps the DRM-free thing because they know it's their only selling point.

Is CDPR really attached to their values? I know, CDPR is not GOG, but they're part of the same company and have the same DNA. CDPR had an excellent reputation but recent events showed that they're not that much involved in bringing quality and respecting their employees as much as they claimed. When most of your branding is about your values, such events hurts badly.

Of course there is no one single reason for GOG loosing attractiveness, but a fair amount of small ones. I sincerely hope that they'll get better because I still have a descent library there I don't want to lose. But I can't buy games on GOG anymore. Every time I do, I end up regretting it because everything in the GOG linux experience is awful from installing games with DLCs to updating them (you have to download every DLC as a file and install them by hand! in 2021!).

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Looking at reports on ProtonDB, and having experienced it too, Proton often offer better performance and stability than native versions. But, games with a native port tend to be better supported by Proton. I imagine games with a native port must use cross platform middleware with improve Proton compatibility.

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Just when I though I got rid of my addiction...:grin:

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Oh my God... when GOG tells you they'll do something soon, that doesn't smell good. How long have we been waiting for the Linux port of Galaxy that was supposed to be "comming soon" and still marked "in progress"?

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I'm really sad for the people at Feral. They did a wonderful job with all their ports. They made among the best native ports and their support is excellent. I only had to contact the support once. They managed to find that my keyboard was making the game crash. I don't even understand now how they were able to find it but they were right.

But the next step for Linux gaming is definitely Proton so I guess we will see lesser and lesser native ports. Maybe if the Steam Deck becomes a massive success and the next version Proton's compatibility isn't perfect, then native ports may become a thing again.

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I love PR statement so much ... or not. The "if the Steam Deck is a success, we may consider doing a native port" is a complete nonsense and shows a big misunderstanding. Valve's efforts with Proton, Steam Runtime and Pressure Vessel are there because the native port approach failed. It failed because porting natively is neither free not trivial. It requires some developers experienced in Linux (game) programming, OpenGL/Vulkan, dsitro-agnostic futute-proof packaging, etc. It also requires new QA and support pipelines and either duplicating efforts and money working a separate version of the code or making compromises to keep only one version (say goodbye to the Windows only lib you want to use :grin: ).

Proton solves most all the Linux related issues. No need to hire Linux game developers or teach your current Windows/DirectX-only developers Linux and OpenGL/Vulkan. But Proton is still a different platform that requires its own QA and support pipeline. I bet that if the Steam Deck is a success, developers will have a dedicated QA for the Deck. When games do not run well on Proton, the current usual answer is "we don't care". But if the Deck is a success, this answer will probably not be acceptable anymore.

So Frozenbyte, you're wrong. Proton is indeed the way to go for Linux gaming. If I remember correctly, you stopped porting on Linux because of the costs. I perfectly understand and accept that. The cost of doing a native port won't change so if the Deck is a success and you want your games to run well on it, test your windows build with the Deck and modify your windows build when it breaks Proton. But what you will probably not do if the Deck is a success is telling Deck users "we don't care" like you just told us.

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Quoting: GuestFunny, my save game will be obsolete again before i can scrape the surface of the game. I like this game but i am too casual for it. It is for people who clock hundreds of hours in a game. And fast enough as not to be caught in an update.

Using the paradox launcher I think you can choose which version you want to play.

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I've been playing Stellaris a fair amount of time recently, including a lot of multiplayer. I had a desync once in almost 100h of play. The end game is still slow but very playable. In 400h hours of play, i've seen only 3 annoying bugs (an invincible fleet, the enigmatic fortress and the engigmatic cache in a jump loop). That's not huge.

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This is a very reasonable move. According to Github, there only a few major contributors. Pull request may take them a lot of time, time they prefer using to move the project forward.

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Quoting: GeoGalvanicHuh, I'm actually kind of surprised that the Linux sales are so small. I always thought small indie games like this tended to have a bigger skew towards linux.

I haven't bought this game yet myself, but the demo seemed pretty promising, I'm just waiting for it to get some more features.

Considering the Linux market share on Steam is 0.9%, doing 1.72% of sales on Linux is actually pretty good to me.

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