I've never played Minecraft, but I'm very interested in playing other Telltale adventure games on GNU/Linux such as Tales from the Borderlands and Jurassic Park: The Game.

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Quoting: dubigrasuIdiegala accepts Bitcoin too.

I did not know that. Nice!

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@Sabun Don't forget the other awesome thing about Humble Bundles - Bitcoin payments. You could buy any bundle, or even make store purchases all with Bitcoin. Not anymore though. Right now for example, of the four bundles available, only the book and mobile bundles - the two least interesting bundles IMO - accept Bitcoin payments.

They completely lost their way back in 2012. I wrote an angry post about it at the time.
https://systemsaviour.com/2012/11/30/my-letter-to-humble-bundle/ [External Link]

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Quoting: liamdaweIf VP joined Wine, guess what would happen? They would go out of business obviously, their business is based around their tech and so be it. Not to mention Wine sales count for Windows, not Linux, so go figure.

Not sure I can agree with you there. A lot of games getting ports (such as the recently announced Overlord 1 and 2) have long since ran perfectly under Wine, and yet contracts are still handed out to release native game ports for such titles. There are many reasons for this, such as short-term advantages in distancing the main developer/publisher from testing, packaging and support responsibilities.

If VP took Wine, add compatibility for Saints Row 1 & 2, and used that solution to package the wrapped game and support it, everyone would win. VP would still get their $$, would have had less work to get there, and end users would end up with a better version of Wine at the end which doesn't cut into VP's profits (but could help them save money in future).

The other problem you mentioned is Wine sales counting for Windows - but is that really happening? If so, is it really a problem? As of today, http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey [External Link] says Windows is at 95.71, OS X is at 3.23, and GNU/Linux is at 0.94. That comes to 99.88% of operating systems accounted for, so what about the other 0.12%? Probably, that's your percentage of people running Wine.

Regardless, Valve knows the number of people who play under Wine. When you submit the Steam Hardware & Software Survey form, it shows you the data sent, and it clearly detects and sends information about Wine (if applicable) such as the version in use. I'm sure Valve could make that information available to developers if there were enough interest in doing so.

I'm not sure what Beamboom means exactly by "if VR[sic] instead had joined the Wine crew", but I do believe VP should have based their work on the Wine project and gave back to the community, both for the cost savings and for the betterment of Wine for all.

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I brought these games ages ago, and they work perfectly under Wine - better than some native games. The port should be fine.

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Man-made vehicles can't compete for manoeuvrability and stealth at very low speeds, and insects are too slow and generally only fly at a much lower altitude. For the best flying experience, fly like a bird.

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Thanks for pointing out that it's on GNU/Linux now. I was looking at this the other day and thought "meh", I'll pass for now if it's Windows-only. Now I'll just have to buy it.

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Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: Quote from TheEnigmaticT

Quoting: Quote from Quote from liamdawe

Quoting: Quote from Quote from Quote from TheEnigmaticTMaths stuff

I understand your reasoning now but I completely disagree, using market share like that (and a complete estimation of the actual marketshare which is heavily debated pretty much anywhere) should never be used like that.

Sure. Let me just add a coda here that, while I did not use any of our internal numbers for discussion here, we do know how many of our sales come from users who are on our website using Linux, and we were able to draw our own conclusions as to what expected growth we would see after we officially supported Linux--based on our own experience with MacOS--and while our numbers were quite different, the conclusions we reached are the ones I'm giving you.

Now it's getting interesting ;)

I am glad to see you track Linux sales stats in some form.

Just discovered this site (I'm a Phoronix reader - hi GOL) and have been working my way through this thread. I've got a few things to add to the discussion.

First off TET, I hope then that you're using your server logs and not Google Analytics (which I see GOG also uses) to determine these stats. I'm a GNU/Linux user, have 130+ GOG games (I only buy ones that look like they'll work under Wine, ScummVM or DosBox) and use RequestPolicy so all Google Analytics domains (for example) are automatically blocked in my browser. I know a number of people in my local free software user group that use it too - it's normally packaged as xul-ext-requestpolicy. I also use NoScript, AdBlock Plus, Change Referer Button, Flashblock, etc. I think you'll find a large percentage of privacy-concious DRM-hating GNU/Linux users (your potential audience) falls into the same boat, but this is obviously extremely difficult to prove.

I'd like to add that (as a GOG-unsupported GNU/Linux user), even while I have to support the games I purchase myself, you are still missing out on sales. For example, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs - I had to pre-order this from humblebundle.com to get a DRM-free native version. I'm certainly not going to buy a non-native version if I don't have to.

While on that last point, you have a number of people on this lengthy thread begging GOG to just release a binary in unsupported form, when already available. GNU/Linux end-users are used to supporting themselves, so why not just make an "unsupported downloads" category in your download section and be done with it? I've heard your argument that you want to ensure customer satisfaction by providing quality support for everything, but you can't seriously think that having customers such as myself screwing around with Wine and/or innoextract, extracting files from your Windows installer for DosBox, etc. is a better customer solution? No matter how you look at it, offering unsupported native binaries that already exist to your customers, would cost you basically nothing. To not provide it (despite customer demand), and drive customers to alternative platforms for some "we must support every possible download" ideology is simply insane.

And another thing - when I first started purchasing GOG titles, GOG almost exclusively consisted of old games (not many new indie titles, if any) and native commercial GNU/Linux games in general were still quite rare (Steam didn't sell GNU/Linux titles yet). TET, look at my GOG sales history if you can (also 'boltronics' on GOG). I sure haven't been buying games like I used to, have I? Now you know why. Not providing GNU/Linux binaries - even in unsupported form - is *already* costing your company money. I hope you realise that, and factored it into your conclusions.

I appreciate the time TET has given to explaining GOG's position and the information provided so far on how it was derived, even if I fully disagree with it.

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