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.
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
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!
Fully agree. This is why I've made multiple children. Then I train them on the binary digits the way other parents teach shapes, numbers, and the ABCs. Can't be too careful, it's best to have multiple backups
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.)
Typing them back in after the apocalypse will take a while, but you'll be able to impress all the other wasteland mutants with a working copy of Half Life Alyx.
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.
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 ÂŁ30. I've only started burning them a year or two ago so time will tell if I lose my data :x.
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.
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.
The 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.
Apparently blu-rays are even worse than other discs. This is from the abstract of an accelerated ageing study (sadly I don't have access to the whole paper):
Overall, the stability of the Blu-ray formats was poor with many discs significantly degraded after only 21 days of accelerated ageing. In addition to large increases in error rates, many discs showed easily identifiable visible degradation in several different forms. In a comparison with other optical disc formats examined previously, Blu-ray stability ranked very low.
The BD-R write-once type is based on a completely new concept for the recording layer utilizing a two-layer structure composed of silicon (Si) and copper alloy (Cu) inorganic materials. When heated by the recording laser beam, these melt and the Si and Cu alloy become a composite forming recording marks. Because the material is inorganic, it is not affected by light, thus realizing a disc with outstandingly high reliability in terms of archivability.
And another quote from the same source
Write-once recordable DVD-R/DVD+R media (as well as CD-R media) all uses synthetic organic based dyes -- usually azoic dyes (metallized azo chelates or azo metal chelate). Some of them are based on other synthetic organics, such as cyanine, dipyrrometheme or oxonol.
Your source is just a forum quoting manufacturer marketing texts.
In an accelerated ageing study blu-ray performed worse than other discs:
Overall, the stability of the Blu-ray formats was poor with many discs significantly degraded after only 21 days of accelerated ageing. In addition to large increases in error rates, many discs showed easily identifiable visible degradation in several different forms. In a comparison with other optical disc formats examined previously, Blu-ray stability ranked very low.
You can get a 50 pack of Verbatim's standard BD-R for ~$40 AUD, or their premium Datalifeplus discs for ~$100 AUD. I've used both of these discs, and I've run burn quality tests and they're both great. This is just talking about single layer discs, so 25GB per disc. 50GB discs are reasonably priced, 100GB and 128GB start getting a bit rich.
Oh yeah, its the very long life ones I was thinking of that cost a lot. If there are more regular ones at lower prices with still a moderate lifespan then that probably makes more sense.
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.
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.
Ran into someone complaining about the same with Edge and updates going to every 4 weeks. Showed them the release log where they have been releasing one to two times a week - minor updates but still updates that require the browser to be restarted but that the person never noticed.
Yea, they mean Firefox. Mozilla is the non-profit foundation, along with its subsidiary company by the same name, that makes it along with other open-source software.
I'm not convinced GOG owes us any explanation beyond that. Even in the worst case where the accusers are right and it was an intentional dog-whistle, the marketing guy who did it probably gave his superiors the same explanation we got, in which case GOG management genuinely believes they already 100% told us what happened.
Also, the argument that GOG not sending the email to Germany proves they knew that it was bad ahead of time on an organizational level is common enough to be worth addressing here. It ignores how localization is often done, one person writing a template that then goes to others to localize and send out individually. I assume adding some review time between localization and send out is among the process changes they mentioned.
Is this about the Gog Newsletter thing? I’m not 100% informed, but didn’t they pretty much admit that they weren’t aware that ᛋ displayed as ϟ in some devices?
It’s not even a “sorry we got caught” thing, they had nothing to gain by sending a Nazi symbol in their newsletter. What more are they supposed to say?
They specifically didn't send it to German accounts cause they knew it could be shown as Nazi symbolism.
This isn't a "sorry we fucked up" this is a "we knew it could go wrong but didn't care enough to do anything about it".
Personally I don't really care that much. These promotional emails aren't reviewed by every company member, so even if it was deliberately used Nazi symbolism, its at most someone in the advertising department. But I also understand why people are really upset about this.
An explanation for them not sending it to Germany could be that the localization team for the German region, probably being more aware of such nuances, spotted it and removed it whereas those who did the localization for other regions just didn't spot it, so it slipped through.
There could be arguments about communication between teams but, honestly, localization teams don't really need to communicate with one another so it isn't surprising that they didn't.
Most likely it actually is a "oops we fucked up" situation.
It's not a nitpick, but also that newsletter is not indicative of GOG being a Nazi organization. The idea that they specifically decided to advertise a new game based on Slavic mythology specifically so that they could send a mass advertisement to half their user base intentionally using Nazi symbolism is wild. It is much more likely that some marketing dimwit Googled "Slavic runes," and copied some random ones from the first site they found.
It's one data point, not a pattern. Definitely something to watch out for, but there's literally nothing else in the history of the company to suggest that they have any white supremacist tendencies
Given it was an advertisement for a game inspired by Slavic mythology, "Slavic emoji" means "advertisement for a game inspired by Slavic mythology" in this case. Do you think the developers of The End Of The Sun are nazis?
It's literally the first result when searching the phrase "Slavic emoji" on google. Hanlon's razor applies. Most normal people are not aware of any nazi symbols other than the swastika
Yeah I agree with most of what you said. It's concerning though, they could have easily responded with a responding “Nazi shit has no place here, super sorry we let that slip through”
It is much more likely that some marketing dimwit Googled "Slavic runes," and copied some random ones from the first site they found.
That's the part I find doubtful, this sequence can only be found on a site by or about Nazis. I feel like even the dumbest idiot would clock that, but I've underestimated idiots before
this sequence can only be found on a site by or about Nazis.
I mean, that exact sequence is in the header of the first result for an ostensibly innocent google search. Spend some time where normal people hang out, and you'll find that a lot of them can't clock Nazi dogwhistles. I've personally had to explain the significance of "14/88" to people who thought I was nuts for calling the My Pillow guy a nazi
I've been a gamer for almost 4 decades, so I have quite a lot of experience wanting to run games that I remember were a lot of fun and it turns out they are so old they won't run anymore.
Typically it's one of 3 things:
The hardware I have now won't support it (say, I don't have a floopy drive anymore, or they're from an entirelly different architecture such as the pre-PC game consoles). There's also quirky ones such as games made at a time when CPUs were so slow that the game just runs as fast as it can (which was fine for older CPUs, but not for CPUs which are thousands of times faster) rather than use the system clock to set its tempo.
The OS I have won't support it. Say, it's a DOS or Windows 3.1 game
The game has DRM which relies on shit which doesn't apply anymore (for example, OS quirks that aren't present in newer OS versions).
There are often ways around the first two - for the hardware sometimes you can get modern versions of older hardware (for example you can actually get an external USB Floppy Disk Drive) and if it's old enough there will be emulators, whilst for the OS it's either emulators or adaptor layers.
Only way around the third is either a game crack or the game having no DRM to begin with.
Now, outside the transition of hardware architectures (say, from Amiga to PC) this used to apply maybe after a game was out 10 - 20 years. In the Phone-home DRM generation this seems to apply much faster - the game maker just turns off their servers 5 - 10 years after the game is out and now you can't legally play that game anymore.
All this to say that GOG and Pirates are the only ones fighting the good fight on making sure we won't suffer this shit some years from now, which is even more important now that we're in the Phone-home DRM age.
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.
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.
no goal beyond having a laugh at triggering people with nazi symbols; same as NYT did with their Nazi symbol crossword.
The fact the apology didn’t make an effort to say something like “those responsible have been sacked” and instead said something like “nazis shouldn’t have all the Nordic symbols” told me all I needed to know about their workplace environment and the types that work there. no bueno for me.
Not saying I’m boycotting them, because ethical consumerism is near impossible, but I’m not going to rally behind them or applaud them for anything like they’re to be championed sans asterisk.
I really doubt that's even what happened here. I don't think the people who run the company, any member of the marketing team or even anyone important sat down in a meeting to decide this for a fuckin laugh.
It's probably some dumb AI, some intern or some individual fuck or just a genuine mistake. The character doesn't even render the same on every platform. Maybe if there was more than this one event I'd be more interested but I really think this is goofy.
Especially because I know most people crying about it have definitely owned something Microsoft or IBM related and don't even consider it.
Most people only care cause they read an article about it and are genuinely looking for any excuse to hop on their high horse and act high and mighty.
It's silly. I bet you can get most Wolfenstein games on GOG. We gonna be mad now because that game has Nazi symbolism in it? C'mon.
No matter who flags “you platformed Nazi shit”, you immediately escalate this, halt all outgoing communication until you got a lid on this and fix whatever led to that happening.
Maybe if it was more severe. But like I said in another comment, what did they accomplish here? Is there some huge master plan? Did they all sit down and come up with a plot to transform us all into nazis? What's the end game here?
Hanlon's Razor dude, likely it was something stupid that happened.
There is no benefit for them doing this. And doing what you suggested would be some serious pandering for a bunch of unserious pearl clutchers who likely own hanes clothing, buy coke products and drive fords without a second thought of how it has affected the planet and other humans. The only reason most people care about this is because the news told them to or they read it on reddit. Unserious people.
Are you kidding me? They sent Nazi symbols to users.
Not just “nordic symbols that happen to be used in Nazi symbology” but an unmistakable sequence of symbols only used by Nazis (and people teaching others about Nazis).
Also how are you supposed to learn about anything if not the news lol? What weird argument is that supposed to be?
And now we're all nazis for it, they sure got us 🙄
Have you never heard the revolution will not be televised? The government will not educate you about their own wrongdoings? I'm pretty sure most of us here treat all news with a little skepticism which is why most are here and stopped using reddit.
Sorry someone sending an email with some symbols as the tagline isn't enough for me to get out the noose and piss my pants.
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.
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.
It's exactly GOG's thing that games sold there can't have any DRM, so this scenario is out. (Also, no disk with GOG games ;))
Probably why you won't find things like Red Dead Redeption II (PC) in GOG, since Rockstar wants to force you to register in their systems to get your sweet, sweet private info. (Curiously, the pirated version has no such anti-consumer crap)
In my experience as a gamer for almost 4 decades, the most likely scenario with a really old game is that it simply won't install or run in the OS version or even hardware that you have now, though give it enough time and somebody out there will have created an emulator or adaptor layer for it (like DOSBox).
But yeah, any game from the Phone-home DRM generation which isn't bought from a seller which has No DRM policy (which only GOG has, as far as I know - even itch.io doesn't have a No DRM policy) will almost certainly have an artificially created end-of-life that has nothing to do with the OS or hardware you have being too new for the game.
They sometimes also provide alternative versions of games. I was very happy to buy Kane and Lynch (1 and 2), but the co-op feature is missing (both local and online). I guess that part was licensed differently or something
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 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. 🤣
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.
Yes! GOG is absolutely excellent!
For what it's worth, Steam Support from Valve can absolutely issue refunds past the two weeks window, and I've done it for me in the past if the request was justified.
The inside two weeks window that everyone knows is just for a no-questions-asked refund as long as the hours count is below two played.
I'm glad to hear GOG has an even better method of handling.
You can add any gog game to steam and run it through whatever proton compatibility layer you would like. The Heroic launcher and Lutris both also allow this.
I guess I have to give Heroic a try. I've been using lutris but the auto-generated install scripts are kind of a hit and miss due to gog changing their naming convention on some games.
Heroic lets you log in on your GOG, Epic, and Amazon accounts and then can install your games directly from your library and sets up Proton like on Steam. It's not 100% as user-friendly, but it's pretty effective.
Lutris does the same. I don't know if it has Amazon integration but it has itch integration which is more relevant to me. It also used to have pretty good gog integration where you just log in with your gog account, pick a game, click install and play. It would even find all the DLCs you have for the game and offer easy installation of those as well.
But recently gog has started changing the names of their install executables so the installation scripts lutris autogenerates fail due to not finding the correct installer. It's not every game as some games still use the old naming convention but some games require manual installation and if those games have DLCs then those become an extra annoyance due to how gog handles the installation of DLC.
That's why I'm interested in Heroic because if it's still as convenient as Lutris used to be then I'm willing to sacrifice itch for better integration with gog because my gog library is much bigger than my itch library. But if it's having the same issues as Lutris I don't see a reason to pick Heroic over Lutris because Lutris has more relevant (to me) integrations and I'm pretty familiar with how to use it as a tool to get troublesome games running. I just don't the benefit of learning a different software if it's not going to give me any benefits over what I already use.
I don't even buy on Steam anymore. I'm tired of my shit being stored on other people's computers. If I won't own the game I buy, then I don't buy the game.
Steam does not have such a pricing policy though. You can sell your game for cheaper on other stores just fine as long as it's not a Steam key generated on steam that you are selling.
I buy on steam mostly cos it has a Linux client and Proton is built in. I still go to gog for some 90s stuff cos they fix them up a bit.
When gog release a Linux client, it'll get the same consideration as steam, that's all they've gotta do, I'm not even asking for any packaged compatibility like proton
GoG is doing well in the convenience category too though. Their GoG launcher is amazing and syncs with all your online libraries (steam, ea, epic, etc).
But yeah, I think until Steam screws up or goes public or something, and gives people a reason to switch, there's not gonna be a ton of people jumping ship.
I pick whichever is cheaper with a heavy preference towards GOG. I am also a patient gamer, so I'll watch and wait for deals so I can get it on GOG but that doesn't always happen. Also Steam bundles can skew price deals for me making it more attractive.
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
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.
... 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
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.
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.
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.
Hey, as a "pagan" (practitioner of a Left-Hand Path centered on Lilith) myself, I'd warn you not to commit to religious intolerance conflating paganism, which includes Rodnovery, a Slavic Native Faith likely the one depicted in the The End of the Sun game, with the shitty nazi dog whistle done at the sole discretion of GOG. The devs of the game made it clear that they had absolutely nothing to do with the infamous GOG newsletter and its nazi dog whistle. We pagans have nothing to do with shitty far-right bigotry.
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.
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.
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.
There's this revolutionary new technology I guess the start menu gamers haven't caught onto yet known as "cloud saves" which make it a lot easier to continue playing games on different devices and through uninstalls.
I bring my home directory with me across installs, but I never felt the need to continue on a year-old save. Across devices I can maybe see, if you have both a gaming PC and a Steam Deck, but I think that's a fraction of players and I don't think I'll join that group any time soon.
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.
Have you ever even tried Heroic or Lutris as launchers rather than the store-specific launchers?!
They integrate with pretty much all big stores so you can see your entire games collection (not just the subset for a single store). Also they're way (WAY) more customisable and flexible in how you run you game, so for example most of my games running in Lutris run behind a proper sandbox (firejail) with networking disabled (something that the No DRM of GOG games also helps make possible, as to be sold via GOG games can't require a network connection to run).
Furter, the Open Source launchers don't care how you sourced some of your games - if you have it you can add it there and launch it, even if it's an old game with a CD installer or something you got from sailing the high seas.
I have both the Steam Store App and Lutris and whilst Steam has a slicker UI and deeper integration with many games from that Store (for stuff like Achievements), using Lutris is IMHO a better experience, especially when it comes to supporting my entire games collection, what I have access from the UI to tweak to get the more stubborn Windows games to run in Linux (you can easilly change actual launchers - including but no limited to Proton - as well as seriously customise how the game is run), overall privacy protection and digital safety (the whole sandboxing with networking disable thing) and, curiously, even because games in Lutris launch way faster since unlike Steam when I launch a game in Lutris I'm not constantly forced to wait for the store app to update before the actual game starts.
Things like Lutris and Heroic are done following an Open Source ethos (highly customizable, which also means you can get overwhelmed with options if you try and change anything from the defaults) and no trying to serve objectives which are store-specific (i.e. they're not at all trying to do what's good for that store, such as shoving adverts in front of you to buy more games or supporting high integration of specific games and a specific store).
Whilst in Windows I actually tended to avoid launchers (literally installed GOG Galaxy once, checked it out and then uninstalled it), after switching to Linux I have come around to really appreciate Lutris. I haven't got around to appreciate Steam all that much - it constantly gets in my way when all I want is to enjoy the game (generally because I often start the game from a desktop shortcut and have to wait for Steam to update before the game starts) and it's a bigger hassle to try and tweak stubborn Windows games to run in Linux via Steam than via Lutris and, of course, there's the whole "can't cut networking for it" thing.
Absolutelly, GOG's lack of support for Linux beyond just having Linux versions of some games available (which sometimes don't even work well) and the open REST API so that open launchers like Heroic and Lutris can talk to the store and fetch and install games directly, is a negative.
At the same time, the Steam app is also an inferior game launcher versus Lutris and Heroic, and I suspect so are all game store specific game launchers since they're designed first and foremost to benefit the store, whilst Open Source game launchers are designed to benefit the user.
Again, has nothing to do with GOG. I have no idea why you are bringing up other launchers. Maybe to be helpful I guess? But its really off topic. Point is gog kept telling me they would do something for LInux, yet never did. My only OS has been Linux since about 2002. I have been a member of GOG's since 2010, so its not like I am against them.
But what the heck I have some time:
Open Source launchers don’t care how you sourced some of your games
Steam doesnt care either. Although Steam also makes "sailing the high seas" pointless (as does gog frankly) as they are so cheap on sale.
I suppose you haven't used Lutris long enough to remember how bad it was. Started out great, then It became nearly unmaintained, scripts were breaking, there were regressions. I quit using it a long time ago. Now people are questioning the devs use of Claude AI, so I think I will pass.
Heroic on the other hand is pretty good, I have it on my steam deck. I don't use it much though.
I disagree with you on Steam though. It is the easiest and simplest tool of them all. Remember when you could link your gog games to steam, so that was all taken care of?
Really I don't want to launch from GOG galaxy, I just want to be able to log in, browse my library and download on any device. Like steam does.
I often start the game from a desktop shortcut and have to wait for Steam to update before the game starts
Yikes! I hate desktop shortcuts. So much so that I have my desktop set to not allow items in the desktop folder. In any case how long does it take steam to update? 10 seconds maybe? Its never frequent.
Worth mentioning that Valve contributes greatly to Wine and Proton obviously (as does Codeweavers), and none of this would be as good as it is without them.
GOG offering the API is a good step in the right direction of course. Their mission is even better, so don't think I am against them.
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.
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.
I did not at all like using launchers back when I gamed in Windows, but I really got around to liking Lutris now that I game in Linux - it integrates with my entire games collection (including older titles from physical media), is not trying at all to push me to buy, buy, buy and it doesn't get in my way when all I want is to start a game and have fun (i.e. no waiting for store app or game updates).
Also I figured out how to configure it to run my games sandboxed with networking disabled, so that's my default game launch config now. Can't do that at all with Steam.
Finally, it's way more flexible when it comes to force the more stubborn Windows games to run in Linux (including the funny and more extreme case of a certain game that wouldn't run in Steam no matter what I did, but the pirated version wasn't that hard to get to run fine in Lutris).
No, but they support MAC now. I had a little reactionary chuckle reading that. I know the Apple arm chipsets have been really good, and most games from gog are not very demanding, its just funny to me that historically Mac has not been known for gaming and they get support before Linux. Shout out to the Heroic Launcher Team.
I just made my first purchases from GOG a few weeks ago, and did it from a Linux machine. I believe it auto-detected I'm on Linux and said "Hey, this game does not natively support Linux" right at the top of the game's page, and even said "Hey, X games in your library dont natively support Linux" when I was at the checkout. As for the ones that did, it changed to saying "This game does support Linux" on the game's store page.
Honestly, feels good to see this sorta stuff, but this is just each game on an individual basis, independent of GOG's launcher.
Edit: Thankfully, throw in a smidgen of wine or proton, and it's likely all the incompatibilities are compatible.
Well, if you download an installer from gog and save it to a disk, it's yours forever, regardless of what gog does. Of course, the window to do so might close with very short notice.
You don't need to back up games yourself. Piracy exists. If a storefront disappears, or otherwise you lose access to a game you licensed, you can always just fish it back from the high seas. Just only buy games without DRM or which's DRM has been cracked already.
Anyone ITT saying GOG is run by Nazis because some AI or intern or something used slavic symbols on an email newsletter better not use any of the following brands:
If you've ever bought any of these brands or even used one of their products once you're also a Nazi, you exploit humans and animals and should be blacklisted from all jobs probably even killed or something idk.
There's probably more brands. Comment them as you see fit!
Could be something wrong with CDNs in your area. I personally downloaded Witcher 3 offline version 2 days ago and I got the full 600mbps my ISP provides.
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.
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.
Always confuses me how the one outlier thing always catches flack for not being PERFECT, like fuck, do you want DRM-free games or nah? What other legal sources are there????
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?
You raise a good point: with all online game stores, including GOG, if you don't have the game installer in your system you risk losing it because of some licensing reasons.
So to fully protect yourself from that risk with GOG you have to download the game offline installers.
The difference in this between GOG and other stores is that:
GOG actually has offline installers and makes it easy for you to get them (either from their web pages or, as explained by somebody else below, using software that connects to their systems and just fetches them automatically)
GOG enforces that games sold via their store do not have DRM and cannot require networking access to install or run
For all their games GOG makes available the tools for you to protect yourself from losing games due to the store having to pull them door or going bankrupt, plus makes sure they won't stop working (at least for single player mode) at some point due to some 3rd party switching their servers off, but you still have to do your part.
The other stores don't even give you that option or protection. I mean, sometimes for some games you can make it happen (for example some game installers can be copied from the Steam cache and later used and the game run without Steam), just not reliably, not seamlessly and you're not told upfront for which ones that works, so you don't get to make an informed purchasing decision if you care about still being able to play a game a decade from now.
Unlike the others GOG give you the option and the guarantee that it works, the rest if up to you.
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.
Edit: Glazing GOG for this while insisting "sTeAm iS dIfFeReNt" is like buying the cereal box that says "Asbestos Free!" on it.
Ever since that Sony tweet, all these kids are, overnight, developing all these strong opinions about shit they never cared about before, based on nothing but hype, memes, and regurgitated streamer slop.
Physical media has licenses too. GOG purchases come with licenses too. Optical media rots. And Steam isn't secretly Sony (yet. They probably will be after Gabe dies).
Downvote me all you want, it doesn't change the truth and reveals much more about you than me.
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
While thats a list of plenty of unfortunate things, it's not exactly what people mean by drm, and in some cases kind of absurd for them to conflate.
DRM is generally refering to restrictions on your ability to install, share, and use a game.
Games having extra content thats connected to an online server or the creation of an account is unfortunate but not drm, theres also out dated ones in that list like the twitch drops in cyberpunk just being in the game now.
Online games having anti cheats and dependencies, or wanting you to have an account is also unfortunate especially if invasive but not a restriction on your ability to install or share a game.
In that list im only seeing DEFCON and Multiwinia having a key verification server which is supposed to be disabled in the offline installers. other games mention having verifications removed some seemingly unsuccessfully at the time of that post.
Alot of these things are issues with games preservation in general, something that GOG actually does alot to help with, theres plenty of old games that come with fixes, patches, and dlls that make them run on modern hardware that other online stores that still sell the games don't provide.
The thing about it not being drm is you can backup the installers, you can just give them to a friend, it doesnt phone home and check if this computer has some license, it doesn't try and match hardware, or limit you to a certain number of installs.
Gog literally won’t allow you to sell a game if it has DRM
So, Steam respects their customers enough to offer them a choice while GOG doesn't; good to know.
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
Ok, and? I can do all that on Steam too. I can even launch the game directly without involving Steam at all.
If you only have the game files you have to manage all of that yourself
Yeah, and all that is a huge pain in the ass. Having it to do myself isn't a positive.
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.
I'm amazed that noone here is complaining about the fact that the offline installer for the product you paid for contains ads. Yes, offline ads that do not track you and only for other games on their plattform, but still ads. Not the worst thing in the world, I know, but still annoying.
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) ?
Use AI for what purpose, to what extent, and with which mindset? I think you'll be hard pressed to find dev organizations today that don't at all use AI tools to some degree. There's a difference between pushing vibecoded slop that no one understands (including the developer that prompted it), and using LLMs as productivity tools in a responsible way, with sufficient oversight.
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.
They knew it was a nazi symbol and intentionally didn't send it to German users where it could get them into legal trouble. They said as much in their """apology""".
Sorry, but you can't say "it was an accident, I didn't know" if I catch you sneaking around trying to avoid being caught doing something.
At the very least more than one person knew what was happening, including, apparently, the person in charge of that PR message.
Given that, and the fact that no one was fired for this, it seems a lot like like they're infested with nazis to me. Hell of a lot of smoke for there not to be a fire.
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".
Sounds like they should apologize for the obvious use of Nazi symbols and state they fired the intern responsible, not apologize for an "unfortunate visual association".
They don't get to say "sorry it was an accident" when they specifically didn't send the message to German users (which could get them into legal trouble).
They also don't get to say "it was one Nazi intern acting on their own" when no one was fired for it.
And by the way, the "it was one rogue intern" narrative is not something they ever claimed or implied in any of their PR messages. They would look a hell of a lot better if that's what happened, but that's not the case.
You don't know whether or not someone was fired for it or not. They aren't obligated to do everything in their power to appease people like you who jump to wild conclusions based on a single piece of flimsy evidence because chances are you would still go on trying to sustain this weird narrative anyway.
This isn't 2016 anymore. Nazis and white supremacists don't operate in hiding. They're in seats of major power. Believing they're secretly in control of a niche gaming market based on an email and a nonchalant response is just cringe behavior from people who need to touch grass.
Daniel Berntsson is the co-founder of Mullvad, a highly regarded Swedish VPN service. That reputation is likely about to take a hit, though, since we've just learned that the guy donated 5 million kronor (around €450,000) to the Swedish far-right party Örebropartiet.
And don't go thinking this is just a rumor - Berntsson confirmed it himself by email to the journal Flamman, which broke the story: "it's a personal donation from me."
Those 5 million kronor represent roughly 72% of everything the party took in during 2025, and it's also the largest private donation made to any Swedish political party that year. That's not nothing. And Ă–rebropartiet's obsession is "re-emigration" - i.e., sending all immigrants out of the country - which their leader Markus Allard describes as getting rid of "parasites."
It wasn't that long ago we learned that the Mullvad cofounder was using his money to fund a far right party trying to kick out all immigrants. We can absolutely still learn new things about people, even if there are a lot of Nazis running around out in the open.
Is there literally even one other time in the entire history of their company that they've shown anything that suggests sympathy towards white supremacy? Hanlan's razor applies until there's at least one other use of a questionable emoji
308 Comments
napoleonsdumbcousin@feddit.org · 210 pts · 19d
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.
https://digital-archivist.com/how-long-do-dvds-last-and-cds
FishFace@piefed.social · 157 pts · 19d
That's why I print out all my downloaded games
NoForwadSlashS@piefed.social · 67 pts · 19d
I hope you also laminate them for longevity.
Aceofspades@lemmy.ca · 27 pts · 19d
I laminate my punch cards for longevity. Wouldn't want them breaking down.
brown567@sh.itjust.works · 15 pts · 19d
I prefer to cut archival cards from 0.7mm 316 stainless steel sheet đź‘Ť
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz · 13 pts · 19d
Clay tablets have been demonstrated to last much longer than paper or metal
brown567@sh.itjust.works · 6 pts · 19d
I suspect corrosion-resistant steel alloys haven't been around long enough to prove themselves in that regard XD
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz · 6 pts · 19d
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
HerbGrower@slrpnk.net · 4 pts · 18d
I can already see them rusting down by the harbour. Meanwhile people still find bits of ceramics left from ages last on the beaches.
So if you bury your clay tablets in a treasure chest it should be good.
SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social · 4 pts · 19d
Nonsense. I got some high quality copper from a merchant I fully trust and I bet this will last forever.
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz · 1 pts · 19d
Was his name Ea? His name isn't known today for being engraved in copper...
Janx@piefed.social · 8 pts · 19d
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!
Xey@sh.itjust.works · 5 pts · 18d
Hope you keep your brain safe. Even then illness can easily rob you of those memories.
ChexMax@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 18d
Fully agree. This is why I've made multiple children. Then I train them on the binary digits the way other parents teach shapes, numbers, and the ABCs. Can't be too careful, it's best to have multiple backups
TachyonTele_Esq@piefed.social · 4 pts · 18d
The trick is to name your children after the save file
FishFace@piefed.social · 3 pts · 19d
The special ones, yes
Zorque@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 19d
I eat those to gain their power.
BlackVenom@lemmy.world · 16 pts · 19d
You should really move to microfilm. It saves so much space!
FishFace@piefed.social · 18 pts · 19d
It just doesn't smell the same
GreyEyedGhost@piefed.ca · 6 pts · 19d
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.)
thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works · 4 pts · 19d
Can confirm, clay tablets can last thousands of years to archive your
grievancesdata.https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/complaint-tablet-to-ea-nasir
FishFace@piefed.social · 1 pts · 19d
Unfortunately I'm allergic to clay
Blackmist@feddit.uk · 3 pts · 18d
Typing them back in after the apocalypse will take a while, but you'll be able to impress all the other wasteland mutants with a working copy of Half Life Alyx.
Onyxonblack@piefed.social · 25 pts · 19d
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.
nuko147@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 19d
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.
Onyxonblack@piefed.social · 4 pts · 19d
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!
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 19d
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.
protogen420@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 4 pts · 19d
blu ray in this economy?
wylinka@szmer.info · 3 pts · 19d
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 ÂŁ30. I've only started burning them a year or two ago so time will tell if I lose my data :x.
mesamunefire@piefed.social · 3 pts · 19d
Are tape drives still a thing?
Eat_Your_Paisley@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 19d
Yup
mesamunefire@piefed.social · 3 pts · 19d
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.
testaccount789@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 19d
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.
kilgore_trout@feddit.it · 1 pts · 18d
You need an M-DISC BluRay drive.
SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de · 16 pts · 19d
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
testaccount789@sh.itjust.works · 10 pts · 19d
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 01RG40
napoleonsdumbcousin@feddit.org · 6 pts · 19d
The 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.
locahosr443@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 19d
In your acid draw?
ruuster13@lemmy.zip · 8 pts · 19d
Big Disc propaganda
cdf12345@lemmy.zip · 6 pts · 19d
Big Disc Energy
rozodru@piefed.world · 5 pts · 19d
yup. God knows how many Dreamcast games I've had to toss and reburn over the years.
Blackmist@feddit.uk · 5 pts · 18d
Note: Don't use SSDs for this either. They can easily corrupt and lose information if not powered on for as little as a year, in some cases.
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 19d
Try M-Disc, it's supposed to be as good as microfilm for archival.
ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net · 4 pts · 19d
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.
napoleonsdumbcousin@feddit.org · 3 pts · 18d
Apparently blu-rays are even worse than other discs. This is from the abstract of an accelerated ageing study (sadly I don't have access to the whole paper):
https://www.degruyterbrill.com/de/document/doi/10.1515/res-2017-0016/html
michaelalf@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 18d
Yep! Quote from digitalfaq
And another quote from the same source
napoleonsdumbcousin@feddit.org · 2 pts · 18d
Your source is just a forum quoting manufacturer marketing texts.
In an accelerated ageing study blu-ray performed worse than other discs:
https://www.degruyterbrill.com/de/document/doi/10.1515/res-2017-0016/html
HerbGrower@slrpnk.net · 1 pts · 18d
Plus you can store more games on each one. Don't they cost quite a bit per disc though?
michaelalf@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 18d
You can get a 50 pack of Verbatim's standard BD-R for ~$40 AUD, or their premium Datalifeplus discs for ~$100 AUD. I've used both of these discs, and I've run burn quality tests and they're both great. This is just talking about single layer discs, so 25GB per disc. 50GB discs are reasonably priced, 100GB and 128GB start getting a bit rich.
HerbGrower@slrpnk.net · 2 pts · 18d
Oh yeah, its the very long life ones I was thinking of that cost a lot. If there are more regular ones at lower prices with still a moderate lifespan then that probably makes more sense.
MangoPenguin@piefed.social · 3 pts · 18d
Yeah a HDD with another for periodic backups would be a lot more reliable.
chunes@lemmy.world · 108 pts · 19d
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.
deft@lemmy.wtf · 29 pts · 19d
Agreed. Someone complained Firefox moved to updates every few days or something.
They had no clue Firefox updates like all the time.
Goodeye8@piefed.social · 8 pts · 19d
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.
vandsjov@feddit.dk · 3 pts · 18d
Ran into someone complaining about the same with Edge and updates going to every 4 weeks. Showed them the release log where they have been releasing one to two times a week - minor updates but still updates that require the browser to be restarted but that the person never noticed.
mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works · -4 pts · 19d
ripcord@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 19d
Also it means every 2 weeks. Which is the case here.
Semi-weekly however ONLY means twice per week.
mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works · -17 pts · 19d
Only for people that can't speak English
ripcord@lemmy.world · 17 pts · 19d
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.
vandsjov@feddit.dk · 6 pts · 18d
Every fortnight
mortemtyrannis@lemmy.ml · 14 pts · 18d
Mozilla is the best browser to ever exist and I will die on this hill.
grrgyle@slrpnk.net · 7 pts · 18d
You mean Firefox? Or is Mozilla the actual core or something? I thought they were just a company or a foundation or whatever
Doc_Crankenstein@slrpnk.net · 3 pts · 18d
Yea, they mean Firefox. Mozilla is the non-profit foundation, along with its subsidiary company by the same name, that makes it along with other open-source software.
flying_sheep@lemmy.ml · 12 pts · 18d
The Nazi thing is nota nitpick though. They need to address that properly instead of the “sorry we got caught” response they gave.
ericwdhs@discuss.online · 9 pts · 18d
GOG's founder did eventually give a better reply here (scroll to Mikee's comment): https://www.gog.com/forum/general/nazi_symbols_in_an_email_and_bs_excuse/page18
I'm not convinced GOG owes us any explanation beyond that. Even in the worst case where the accusers are right and it was an intentional dog-whistle, the marketing guy who did it probably gave his superiors the same explanation we got, in which case GOG management genuinely believes they already 100% told us what happened.
Also, the argument that GOG not sending the email to Germany proves they knew that it was bad ahead of time on an organizational level is common enough to be worth addressing here. It ignores how localization is often done, one person writing a template that then goes to others to localize and send out individually. I assume adding some review time between localization and send out is among the process changes they mentioned.
flying_sheep@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 17d
Thanks, I wasn't aware of that. The first half of mikee’s comment is exactly what I was missing from the official “apology”.
Syrc@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 18d
Is this about the Gog Newsletter thing? I’m not 100% informed, but didn’t they pretty much admit that they weren’t aware that ᛋ displayed as ϟ in some devices?
It’s not even a “sorry we got caught” thing, they had nothing to gain by sending a Nazi symbol in their newsletter. What more are they supposed to say?
Jako302@feddit.org · 0 pts · 18d
They specifically didn't send it to German accounts cause they knew it could be shown as Nazi symbolism.
This isn't a "sorry we fucked up" this is a "we knew it could go wrong but didn't care enough to do anything about it".
Personally I don't really care that much. These promotional emails aren't reviewed by every company member, so even if it was deliberately used Nazi symbolism, its at most someone in the advertising department. But I also understand why people are really upset about this.
Doc_Crankenstein@slrpnk.net · 6 pts · 18d
An explanation for them not sending it to Germany could be that the localization team for the German region, probably being more aware of such nuances, spotted it and removed it whereas those who did the localization for other regions just didn't spot it, so it slipped through.
There could be arguments about communication between teams but, honestly, localization teams don't really need to communicate with one another so it isn't surprising that they didn't.
Most likely it actually is a "oops we fucked up" situation.
starman2112@sh.itjust.works · 6 pts · 18d
It's not a nitpick, but also that newsletter is not indicative of GOG being a Nazi organization. The idea that they specifically decided to advertise a new game based on Slavic mythology specifically so that they could send a mass advertisement to half their user base intentionally using Nazi symbolism is wild. It is much more likely that some marketing dimwit Googled "Slavic runes," and copied some random ones from the first site they found.
Screenshot of the first result for "slavic emoji" on google
It's one data point, not a pattern. Definitely something to watch out for, but there's literally nothing else in the history of the company to suggest that they have any white supremacist tendencies
Eh_I@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 18d
Almost like "slavic emoji" means something... Why does my dog keep crying?
starman2112@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 18d
Given it was an advertisement for a game inspired by Slavic mythology, "Slavic emoji" means "advertisement for a game inspired by Slavic mythology" in this case. Do you think the developers of The End Of The Sun are nazis?
Eh_I@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 18d
The Slav's use the same emoji's as the rest of the world.
I think some idiot was trying to be edgy (đź‘€) and GOG's PR dept obviously sucks, they put the shit out to begin.
btw, that's not a special slavic emoji
starman2112@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 18d
starman2112@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 18d
It's literally the first result when searching the phrase "Slavic emoji" on google. Hanlon's razor applies. Most normal people are not aware of any nazi symbols other than the swastika
Eh_I@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 18d
That's why I'm trying to be patient.
Why do suppose that would rank so highly in a search result?
flying_sheep@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 18d
Yeah I agree with most of what you said. It's concerning though, they could have easily responded with a responding “Nazi shit has no place here, super sorry we let that slip through”
That's the part I find doubtful, this sequence can only be found on a site by or about Nazis. I feel like even the dumbest idiot would clock that, but I've underestimated idiots before
starman2112@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 18d
I mean, that exact sequence is in the header of the first result for an ostensibly innocent google search. Spend some time where normal people hang out, and you'll find that a lot of them can't clock Nazi dogwhistles. I've personally had to explain the significance of "14/88" to people who thought I was nuts for calling the My Pillow guy a nazi
flying_sheep@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 17d
Oof, yeah that'll do it. Seems like emojidb needs a report button.
grrgyle@slrpnk.net · 6 pts · 18d
Yeah that is not hard to do at all. This is not an unreasonable standard.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 4 pts · 18d
I've been a gamer for almost 4 decades, so I have quite a lot of experience wanting to run games that I remember were a lot of fun and it turns out they are so old they won't run anymore.
Typically it's one of 3 things:
There are often ways around the first two - for the hardware sometimes you can get modern versions of older hardware (for example you can actually get an external USB Floppy Disk Drive) and if it's old enough there will be emulators, whilst for the OS it's either emulators or adaptor layers.
Only way around the third is either a game crack or the game having no DRM to begin with.
Now, outside the transition of hardware architectures (say, from Amiga to PC) this used to apply maybe after a game was out 10 - 20 years. In the Phone-home DRM generation this seems to apply much faster - the game maker just turns off their servers 5 - 10 years after the game is out and now you can't legally play that game anymore.
All this to say that GOG and Pirates are the only ones fighting the good fight on making sure we won't suffer this shit some years from now, which is even more important now that we're in the Phone-home DRM age.
Doug@piefed.social · 65 pts · 19d
GOG trying to drum up positive pr after that Nazi symbol newsletter.
HK65@sopuli.xyz · 29 pts · 19d
Yeah, that was a major WTF moment
deft@lemmy.wtf · 11 pts · 19d
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.
Doug@piefed.social · 11 pts · 19d
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.
deft@lemmy.wtf · 28 pts · 19d
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.
hzl@piefed.blahaj.zone · 9 pts · 19d
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.
deft@lemmy.wtf · 2 pts · 19d
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.
hzl@piefed.blahaj.zone · 2 pts · 18d
Amazing bad faith response. Bravo.
Doug@piefed.social · 0 pts · 18d
no goal beyond having a laugh at triggering people with nazi symbols; same as NYT did with their Nazi symbol crossword.
The fact the apology didn’t make an effort to say something like “those responsible have been sacked” and instead said something like “nazis shouldn’t have all the Nordic symbols” told me all I needed to know about their workplace environment and the types that work there. no bueno for me.
Not saying I’m boycotting them, because ethical consumerism is near impossible, but I’m not going to rally behind them or applaud them for anything like they’re to be championed sans asterisk.
deft@lemmy.wtf · 1 pts · 18d
I really doubt that's even what happened here. I don't think the people who run the company, any member of the marketing team or even anyone important sat down in a meeting to decide this for a fuckin laugh.
It's probably some dumb AI, some intern or some individual fuck or just a genuine mistake. The character doesn't even render the same on every platform. Maybe if there was more than this one event I'd be more interested but I really think this is goofy.
Especially because I know most people crying about it have definitely owned something Microsoft or IBM related and don't even consider it.
Most people only care cause they read an article about it and are genuinely looking for any excuse to hop on their high horse and act high and mighty.
It's silly. I bet you can get most Wolfenstein games on GOG. We gonna be mad now because that game has Nazi symbolism in it? C'mon.
flying_sheep@lemmy.ml · 6 pts · 18d
No matter who flags “you platformed Nazi shit”, you immediately escalate this, halt all outgoing communication until you got a lid on this and fix whatever led to that happening.
deft@lemmy.wtf · -1 pts · 18d
Maybe if it was more severe. But like I said in another comment, what did they accomplish here? Is there some huge master plan? Did they all sit down and come up with a plot to transform us all into nazis? What's the end game here?
Hanlon's Razor dude, likely it was something stupid that happened.
There is no benefit for them doing this. And doing what you suggested would be some serious pandering for a bunch of unserious pearl clutchers who likely own hanes clothing, buy coke products and drive fords without a second thought of how it has affected the planet and other humans. The only reason most people care about this is because the news told them to or they read it on reddit. Unserious people.
flying_sheep@lemmy.ml · 3 pts · 18d
Are you kidding me? They sent Nazi symbols to users.
Not just “nordic symbols that happen to be used in Nazi symbology” but an unmistakable sequence of symbols only used by Nazis (and people teaching others about Nazis).
Also how are you supposed to learn about anything if not the news lol? What weird argument is that supposed to be?
deft@lemmy.wtf · -3 pts · 18d
And now we're all nazis for it, they sure got us 🙄
Have you never heard the revolution will not be televised? The government will not educate you about their own wrongdoings? I'm pretty sure most of us here treat all news with a little skepticism which is why most are here and stopped using reddit.
Sorry someone sending an email with some symbols as the tagline isn't enough for me to get out the noose and piss my pants.
Impractical_Island@lemmy.world · -11 pts · 19d
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.
deft@lemmy.wtf · 1 pts · 19d
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.
Impractical_Island@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 18d
Hey brother, I know you think you are helping the world, but you're telling off a cop.
https://youtu.be/Os-iZh4w1xg?is=inF9DtrSJ3Ld7BBh
Eh_I@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 19d
Not really
Eh_I@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 19d
No, it was the lightning SS symbols.
flying_sheep@lemmy.ml · 5 pts · 18d
Combined with a kolovrat.
There's no clearer way to say “we are Nazis” other than saying “we are Nazis”.
floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 0 pts · 18d
Depending on how your client rendered them.
binux@sh.itjust.works · 6 pts · 19d
Hey, watch you don’t criticize gamers’ favourite Nazi bar.
takeda@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 6 pts · 19d
You could do this before that incident as well.
M137@lemmy.today · 6 pts · 19d
No shit, you somehow didn't understand their comment.
ColdWater@lemmy.ca · -3 pts · 18d
I bet you will be forgotten about it in 2 days if it was Steam who send it
Doug@piefed.social · 3 pts · 18d
nah valve can eat shit too. look at that I can hate two things at once. dab on it.
bridgeburner@lemmy.world · -4 pts · 19d
You guys really trying to make an elephant out of a gnat.
Doug@piefed.social · 14 pts · 19d
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.
flying_sheep@lemmy.ml · 3 pts · 18d
“SS” runes and a kolovrat is completely impossible to be interpreted as anything else but “we are immense fucking Nazis”
The only way you could be clearer is by writing “we are Nazis”.
These symbols appearing together means that someone put them there who is a Nazi or wants to teach others about Nazi symbols.
Last time I checked, platforming Nazis is very much an elephant kind of thing.
onnekas@sopuli.xyz · 34 pts · 19d
Huh?
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 14 pts · 18d
It's exactly GOG's thing that games sold there can't have any DRM, so this scenario is out. (Also, no disk with GOG games ;))
Probably why you won't find things like Red Dead Redeption II (PC) in GOG, since Rockstar wants to force you to register in their systems to get your sweet, sweet private info. (Curiously, the pirated version has no such anti-consumer crap)
In my experience as a gamer for almost 4 decades, the most likely scenario with a really old game is that it simply won't install or run in the OS version or even hardware that you have now, though give it enough time and somebody out there will have created an emulator or adaptor layer for it (like DOSBox).
But yeah, any game from the Phone-home DRM generation which isn't bought from a seller which has No DRM policy (which only GOG has, as far as I know - even itch.io doesn't have a No DRM policy) will almost certainly have an artificially created end-of-life that has nothing to do with the OS or hardware you have being too new for the game.
doctor0710@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 18d
They sometimes also provide alternative versions of games. I was very happy to buy Kane and Lynch (1 and 2), but the co-op feature is missing (both local and online). I guess that part was licensed differently or something
Doc_Crankenstein@slrpnk.net · 0 pts · 18d
Did you just miss the context of the post about burning the installers onto a disc so it's yours forever?
Sorry, I know this is nitpicking but that line just bugged me.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 17d
I did indeed miss that part.
Thanks for pointing it out.
HerbGrower@slrpnk.net · 8 pts · 18d
I don't think GOG allow games like that on their platform.
cardfire@sh.itjust.works · 31 pts · 19d
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 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. 🤣
AstralPath@lemmy.ca · 8 pts · 19d
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.
Tattorack@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 19d
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.
stuner@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 19d
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.
Tattorack@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 19d
But I want my game library to survive the sun's expansion!
cardfire@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 18d
Let's play a game, of how much this would cost today.
book@lemmy.zip · 4 pts · 19d
Archive multiple copies with something that has error-correcting codes. Use btrfs, zfs, par2, rar, raid-5, DVDs etc
regdog@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 17d
🥹
cardfire@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 17d
I'm not fixing it. 🤣🤣
dreamkeeper@literature.cafe · 1 pts · 18d
GOG also has a 30 day refund policy which blows everyone else out of the water, and they've honored it the few times I used it
cardfire@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 18d
Yes! GOG is absolutely excellent! For what it's worth, Steam Support from Valve can absolutely issue refunds past the two weeks window, and I've done it for me in the past if the request was justified. The inside two weeks window that everyone knows is just for a no-questions-asked refund as long as the hours count is below two played.
I'm glad to hear GOG has an even better method of handling.
Axolotl_cpp@feddit.it · 27 pts · 19d
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)
doublah@sopuli.xyz · 0 pts · 18d
The Nazi rune company hangs out at the Nazi bar? I'm shocked.
mesamunefire@piefed.social · 27 pts · 19d
I should get more things on gog.
Steam just makes things work on linux without issue so thats why we still get steam games.
marxismtomorrow@lemmy.today · 25 pts · 19d
You can add any gog game to steam and run it through whatever proton compatibility layer you would like. The Heroic launcher and Lutris both also allow this.
scutiger@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 19d
Heroic launcher pretty much does the same for GOG games. Sad that it needs a third-party launcher, but it works quite well.
Goodeye8@piefed.social · 1 pts · 19d
I guess I have to give Heroic a try. I've been using lutris but the auto-generated install scripts are kind of a hit and miss due to gog changing their naming convention on some games.
scutiger@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 19d
Heroic lets you log in on your GOG, Epic, and Amazon accounts and then can install your games directly from your library and sets up Proton like on Steam. It's not 100% as user-friendly, but it's pretty effective.
Goodeye8@piefed.social · 1 pts · 19d
Lutris does the same. I don't know if it has Amazon integration but it has itch integration which is more relevant to me. It also used to have pretty good gog integration where you just log in with your gog account, pick a game, click install and play. It would even find all the DLCs you have for the game and offer easy installation of those as well.
But recently gog has started changing the names of their install executables so the installation scripts lutris autogenerates fail due to not finding the correct installer. It's not every game as some games still use the old naming convention but some games require manual installation and if those games have DLCs then those become an extra annoyance due to how gog handles the installation of DLC.
That's why I'm interested in Heroic because if it's still as convenient as Lutris used to be then I'm willing to sacrifice itch for better integration with gog because my gog library is much bigger than my itch library. But if it's having the same issues as Lutris I don't see a reason to pick Heroic over Lutris because Lutris has more relevant (to me) integrations and I'm pretty familiar with how to use it as a tool to get troublesome games running. I just don't the benefit of learning a different software if it's not going to give me any benefits over what I already use.
scutiger@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 19d
I've never had any luck with Lutris, it was always troublesome to get things working for me, but tbf I haven't used it in a while,
If itch is something you care about, you may want to stick with what you're used to, as Heroic doesn't do itch natively.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world · 26 pts · 19d
Sadly, based on market share, people seem to be picking Steam over GoG.
They almost always pick what’s most convenient/familiar over what’s principled and better in the long term.
Leafimo@feddit.org · 19 pts · 19d
Until gog finally gets a good first(!) party linux client buying games there is not really worth it yet.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 19d
Yeah.
I know it must seem like a small market to them, but Linux should really be higher on their priority list. As it’s growing at Windows' expense.
pressanykeynow@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 19d
Why do you need a first party client when third party client works fine?
doublah@sopuli.xyz · 7 pts · 18d
Because the third party client based on reverse-engineering and undocumented APIs could break at any time.
pressanykeynow@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 18d
Fair point but it's also true that first party client can break at any time just as well.
alexquiniou@lemmy.zip · 15 pts · 19d
I'm in the opposite team ! I always buy in gog store first then steam. But yeah, steam is here.
starman2112@sh.itjust.works · 5 pts · 19d
I don't even buy on Steam anymore. I'm tired of my shit being stored on other people's computers. If I won't own the game I buy, then I don't buy the game.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 19d
Same.
So many games aren’t there, though. And Steams pricing policy means they can’t be cheaper on GoG, anyway, otherwise Valve would delist them.
GreyCat@piefed.social · 0 pts · 14d
Steam does not have such a pricing policy though. You can sell your game for cheaper on other stores just fine as long as it's not a Steam key generated on steam that you are selling.
locahosr443@lemmy.world · 13 pts · 19d
I buy on steam mostly cos it has a Linux client and Proton is built in. I still go to gog for some 90s stuff cos they fix them up a bit.
When gog release a Linux client, it'll get the same consideration as steam, that's all they've gotta do, I'm not even asking for any packaged compatibility like proton
ripcord@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 19d
Heroic = no?
locahosr443@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 17d
Why would I bother to take the extra steps when they can't even be arsed to release a client for my os?
ripcord@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 17d
Because you're not a jackass?
neon_nova@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 12 pts · 19d
They don’t have regional pricing, so games there are typically a lot more expensive.
Elshender@sh.itjust.works · 9 pts · 19d
GoG is doing well in the convenience category too though. Their GoG launcher is amazing and syncs with all your online libraries (steam, ea, epic, etc).
But yeah, I think until Steam screws up or goes public or something, and gives people a reason to switch, there's not gonna be a ton of people jumping ship.
takeda@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 6 pts · 19d
I'm doing my part. With exception of portal 1 and 2 GOG is the only store I am purchasing games from.
doublah@sopuli.xyz · 6 pts · 18d
GOG pride themselves on being a "curated" store that rejects a lot of indie games, and Indies are what's driving Steam's growth right now.
Hawk@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 4 pts · 19d
Are they competitors even? I thought GoG whole schtick was selling retro games, hence their name.
I know they sell some newer games, but not really sure how it compares to a platform like Steam.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 19d
Nah, they sell tons of big budget and new indie games.
But this is their biggest problem. Most don't even know they exist, and sell modern games.
rants_unnecessarily@piefed.social · 4 pts · 19d
Can I play my gog games on my Steam Deck?
uninvitedguest@piefed.ca · 9 pts · 19d
Yes.
0ops@piefed.zip · 2 pts · 19d
Heroic is so awesome
ObsidianZed@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 19d
I pick whichever is cheaper with a heavy preference towards GOG. I am also a patient gamer, so I'll watch and wait for deals so I can get it on GOG but that doesn't always happen. Also Steam bundles can skew price deals for me making it more attractive.
WereHacker@lemmy.ml · 26 pts · 19d
To preserve "pagan" games or are we talking about another GOG?
NotSteve_@lemmy.ca · 53 pts · 19d
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/
SatyrSack@quokk.au · -6 pts · 19d
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.
chortle_tortle@mander.xyz · 32 pts · 19d
From their reddit post in trying to cover up:
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.
NotSteve_@lemmy.ca · 21 pts · 19d
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
dreamkeeper@literature.cafe · 2 pts · 18d
Does anyone else offer DRM free games? This blows
Zombie@feddit.uk · 9 pts · 19d
It always amazes me when people from anarchist servers bend over backwards to make excuses for for-profit private companies.
VeganCheesecake@lemmy.blahaj.zone · -3 pts · 19d
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.
VitoRobles@lemmy.today · 8 pts · 19d
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?
VeganCheesecake@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 1 pts · 19d
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.
SatyrSack@quokk.au · -1 pts · 19d
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.
deft@lemmy.wtf · 1 pts · 18d
Roll my fuckin eyes.
dsilverz@catodon.rocks · 1 pts · 18d
Hey, as a "pagan" (practitioner of a Left-Hand Path centered on Lilith) myself, I'd warn you not to commit to religious intolerance conflating paganism, which includes Rodnovery, a Slavic Native Faith likely the one depicted in the The End of the Sun game, with the shitty nazi dog whistle done at the sole discretion of GOG. The devs of the game made it clear that they had absolutely nothing to do with the infamous GOG newsletter and its nazi dog whistle. We pagans have nothing to do with shitty far-right bigotry.
!pcgaming@lemmy.ca
WereHacker@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 18d
Sorry I should have written "pagan". I know nazis will do anything to legitimize themselves. I just dont want to white wash GOG.
Fredselfish@lemmy.world · 21 pts · 19d
Does GOG support Linux?
FauxLiving@lemmy.world · 44 pts · 19d
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.
radiouser@crazypeople.online · 14 pts · 19d
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.
mirshafie@europe.pub · 8 pts · 19d
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.
radiouser@crazypeople.online · 8 pts · 19d
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.
mirshafie@europe.pub · 5 pts · 19d
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.
not@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 18d
That's an excellent idea!
C8r9VwDUTeY3ZufQRYvq@sopuli.xyz · 4 pts · 19d
Use heroic? It allows GOG login (amongst others), and does all that.
doublah@sopuli.xyz · 1 pts · 18d
There's this revolutionary new technology I guess the start menu gamers haven't caught onto yet known as "cloud saves" which make it a lot easier to continue playing games on different devices and through uninstalls.
mirshafie@europe.pub · 1 pts · 18d
I bring my home directory with me across installs, but I never felt the need to continue on a year-old save. Across devices I can maybe see, if you have both a gaming PC and a Steam Deck, but I think that's a fraction of players and I don't think I'll join that group any time soon.
SatyrSack@quokk.au · 13 pts · 19d
GOG is just a storefront. The specific titles you purchase on that storefront may or may not offer Linux files.
NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip · 18 pts · 19d
But gog makes a launcher and library tool. But not for Linux.
SatyrSack@quokk.au · 3 pts · 19d
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.
NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip · 4 pts · 19d
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.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 18d
Have you ever even tried Heroic or Lutris as launchers rather than the store-specific launchers?!
They integrate with pretty much all big stores so you can see your entire games collection (not just the subset for a single store). Also they're way (WAY) more customisable and flexible in how you run you game, so for example most of my games running in Lutris run behind a proper sandbox (firejail) with networking disabled (something that the No DRM of GOG games also helps make possible, as to be sold via GOG games can't require a network connection to run).
Furter, the Open Source launchers don't care how you sourced some of your games - if you have it you can add it there and launch it, even if it's an old game with a CD installer or something you got from sailing the high seas.
I have both the Steam Store App and Lutris and whilst Steam has a slicker UI and deeper integration with many games from that Store (for stuff like Achievements), using Lutris is IMHO a better experience, especially when it comes to supporting my entire games collection, what I have access from the UI to tweak to get the more stubborn Windows games to run in Linux (you can easilly change actual launchers - including but no limited to Proton - as well as seriously customise how the game is run), overall privacy protection and digital safety (the whole sandboxing with networking disable thing) and, curiously, even because games in Lutris launch way faster since unlike Steam when I launch a game in Lutris I'm not constantly forced to wait for the store app to update before the actual game starts.
Things like Lutris and Heroic are done following an Open Source ethos (highly customizable, which also means you can get overwhelmed with options if you try and change anything from the defaults) and no trying to serve objectives which are store-specific (i.e. they're not at all trying to do what's good for that store, such as shoving adverts in front of you to buy more games or supporting high integration of specific games and a specific store).
Whilst in Windows I actually tended to avoid launchers (literally installed GOG Galaxy once, checked it out and then uninstalled it), after switching to Linux I have come around to really appreciate Lutris. I haven't got around to appreciate Steam all that much - it constantly gets in my way when all I want is to enjoy the game (generally because I often start the game from a desktop shortcut and have to wait for Steam to update before the game starts) and it's a bigger hassle to try and tweak stubborn Windows games to run in Linux via Steam than via Lutris and, of course, there's the whole "can't cut networking for it" thing.
Absolutelly, GOG's lack of support for Linux beyond just having Linux versions of some games available (which sometimes don't even work well) and the open REST API so that open launchers like Heroic and Lutris can talk to the store and fetch and install games directly, is a negative.
At the same time, the Steam app is also an inferior game launcher versus Lutris and Heroic, and I suspect so are all game store specific game launchers since they're designed first and foremost to benefit the store, whilst Open Source game launchers are designed to benefit the user.
NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 18d
Again, has nothing to do with GOG. I have no idea why you are bringing up other launchers. Maybe to be helpful I guess? But its really off topic. Point is gog kept telling me they would do something for LInux, yet never did. My only OS has been Linux since about 2002. I have been a member of GOG's since 2010, so its not like I am against them.
But what the heck I have some time:
Steam doesnt care either. Although Steam also makes "sailing the high seas" pointless (as does gog frankly) as they are so cheap on sale.
I suppose you haven't used Lutris long enough to remember how bad it was. Started out great, then It became nearly unmaintained, scripts were breaking, there were regressions. I quit using it a long time ago. Now people are questioning the devs use of Claude AI, so I think I will pass.
Heroic on the other hand is pretty good, I have it on my steam deck. I don't use it much though.
I disagree with you on Steam though. It is the easiest and simplest tool of them all. Remember when you could link your gog games to steam, so that was all taken care of?
Really I don't want to launch from GOG galaxy, I just want to be able to log in, browse my library and download on any device. Like steam does.
Yikes! I hate desktop shortcuts. So much so that I have my desktop set to not allow items in the desktop folder. In any case how long does it take steam to update? 10 seconds maybe? Its never frequent.
Worth mentioning that Valve contributes greatly to Wine and Proton obviously (as does Codeweavers), and none of this would be as good as it is without them.
GOG offering the API is a good step in the right direction of course. Their mission is even better, so don't think I am against them.
Tattorack@lemmy.world · 13 pts · 19d
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.
SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de · 11 pts · 19d
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
testaccount789@sh.itjust.works · 4 pts · 19d
What does the "Linux" filter refer to then?
https://www.gog.com/en/games/new?systems=linux
Edit: I tried with a random free game. Provided was a shell script with binary data appended to it.
SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de · 5 pts · 19d
Native supported Linux games. Why?
SatyrSack@quokk.au · 5 pts · 19d
So Linux users can install the game without having to use some translation software like Proton.
SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de · 4 pts · 19d
Depends on the game. A giant part of their library is, well, good old games, that only run on Windows natively
testaccount789@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 19d
Yeah, I thought that was the question. I never considered downloader/launcher, or whatever their software does.
cloudskater@piefed.blahaj.zone · 3 pts · 19d
I'd recommend Bottles over Lutris due to the latter's unfortunate use of LLMs/AI.
codexarcanum@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 11 pts · 19d
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.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 18d
I did not at all like using launchers back when I gamed in Windows, but I really got around to liking Lutris now that I game in Linux - it integrates with my entire games collection (including older titles from physical media), is not trying at all to push me to buy, buy, buy and it doesn't get in my way when all I want is to start a game and have fun (i.e. no waiting for store app or game updates).
Also I figured out how to configure it to run my games sandboxed with networking disabled, so that's my default game launch config now. Can't do that at all with Steam.
Finally, it's way more flexible when it comes to force the more stubborn Windows games to run in Linux (including the funny and more extreme case of a certain game that wouldn't run in Steam no matter what I did, but the pirated version wasn't that hard to get to run fine in Lutris).
TheGreenWizard@lemmy.zip · 4 pts · 18d
No, but they support MAC now. I had a little reactionary chuckle reading that. I know the Apple arm chipsets have been really good, and most games from gog are not very demanding, its just funny to me that historically Mac has not been known for gaming and they get support before Linux. Shout out to the Heroic Launcher Team.
FatherPeanut@pawb.social · 2 pts · 18d
I just made my first purchases from GOG a few weeks ago, and did it from a Linux machine. I believe it auto-detected I'm on Linux and said "Hey, this game does not natively support Linux" right at the top of the game's page, and even said "Hey, X games in your library dont natively support Linux" when I was at the checkout. As for the ones that did, it changed to saying "This game does support Linux" on the game's store page.
Honestly, feels good to see this sorta stuff, but this is just each game on an individual basis, independent of GOG's launcher.
Edit: Thankfully, throw in a smidgen of wine or proton, and it's likely all the incompatibilities are compatible.
Maultasche@lemmy.world · 16 pts · 19d
I'm already designing covers and checking what disc type is needed for some of my favourite games
Dookieman12@piefed.social · 18 pts · 19d
Optical media will eventually suffer bit rot and be useless. Save them to an old HDD, SD card, or USB drive, they'll last longer.
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip · 6 pts · 19d
I've been wondering if my 3.25" floppies copy of Doom from the 90s still works but I haven't gotten around to buying a usb adapter drive to try them.
Maultasche@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 19d
I already have the installers on an HDD, I just like keeping games on my shelf
John_CalebBradberton@lemmy.world · 15 pts · 18d
Love to see it from GOG. Now if only they had a Linux launcher akin to Steam Big Picture Mode.
They would be the dream imo
creamfresh@lemmy.world · 15 pts · 19d
this won't buy anyone a yacht, though
Kolanaki@pawb.social · 11 pts · 19d
What if I build my own yacht out of the CDs I burned my GOG installers to?
NoForwadSlashS@piefed.social · 7 pts · 19d
Sounds holey
0ops@piefed.zip · 1 pts · 19d
Lean into it. Hovercraft yacht
frunch@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 19d
Somehow they'll get sued over this for making the other companies look like crooks and thieves
ripcord@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 19d
Yes, yes, we get it. Everyone and everything everywhere is bad.
Honytawk@discuss.tchncs.de · 11 pts · 18d
I'm here wondering if this quote is going to age like milk or not.
Saledovil@sh.itjust.works · 17 pts · 18d
Well, if you download an installer from gog and save it to a disk, it's yours forever, regardless of what gog does. Of course, the window to do so might close with very short notice.
ArmchairAce1944@lemmy.ca · 8 pts · 19d
Going forward any gaming purchase I make will be from GOG.
Prathas@lemmy.zip · 8 pts · 19d
Or itch.io!
Kaligalis@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 18d
You don't need to back up games yourself. Piracy exists. If a storefront disappears, or otherwise you lose access to a game you licensed, you can always just fish it back from the high seas. Just only buy games without DRM or which's DRM has been cracked already.
DebatableRaccoon@lemmy.ca · 6 pts · 19d
At least someone's taking the easy opportunity Sony is handing out. cough Hint hint, Xbox cough
deft@lemmy.wtf · 5 pts · 18d
Anyone ITT saying GOG is run by Nazis because some AI or intern or something used slavic symbols on an email newsletter better not use any of the following brands:
Volkswagen, Porsche, BMW, Bayer, IBM, J.P. Morgan Chase, Ford, General Motors, Chanel, Fanta, Shein, Temu, Zara, H&M, Nike, Adidas, Puma, Gucci, Prada, Dior, Armani, Versace, Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, Louis Vuitton, L'Oréal, Estée Lauder, McDonald’s, KFC, Tyson Foods.
If you've ever bought any of these brands or even used one of their products once you're also a Nazi, you exploit humans and animals and should be blacklisted from all jobs probably even killed or something idk.
There's probably more brands. Comment them as you see fit!
/s
purplemonkeymad@programming.dev · 4 pts · 18d
Only 3, but I don't know some of the brands so not sure if they own other stuff I do. Probably safer to assume all brands are unless proven otherwise.
deft@lemmy.wtf · 2 pts · 18d
Straight to the gulag for you!
Eh_I@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 18d
datavoid@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 18d
Oh my GOD, they got KFC!?
Caption@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 18d
I love GOG. I miss having a computer.
Polisheocket@lemmy.zip · 5 pts · 18d
I’m not understand. I’ve had an Xbox for many years. Have many games and have no physical discs. All games still work
kamen@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 18d
With how it's going with modern games (and current prices of hardware), you'll run out of storage pretty quickly.
Sasquatch@lemmy.ml · 4 pts · 18d
GOG seems to cap installer downloads to 4mbps. Cyberpunk's installer has 28 parts. Huge bummer
hakunawazo@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 18d
(carribean proverb: maybe less to download if properly compressed)
BigPotato@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 18d
If only some girl could help things... Fit better...
michaelalf@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 18d
Try using IDM or Jdownloader, IDM worked well for me.
CriticalMiss@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 18d
Could be something wrong with CDNs in your area. I personally downloaded Witcher 3 offline version 2 days ago and I got the full 600mbps my ISP provides.
58008@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 19d
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.
ripcord@lemmy.world · 25 pts · 19d
Oh shit they're not 100% perfect
robear@lemmy.zip · 13 pts · 19d
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.
omarfw@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 19d
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.
doublah@sopuli.xyz · 1 pts · 18d
Well there's the Nazi emails and gen AI sale art if you want something more recent.
yardratianSoma@lemmy.ca · 1 pts · 1h
Always confuses me how the one outlier thing always catches flack for not being PERFECT, like fuck, do you want DRM-free games or nah? What other legal sources are there????
clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 19d
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?
book@lemmy.zip · 28 pts · 19d
They work offline. If you're on Linux you can automate the archiving with https://github.com/Sude-/lgogdownloader
clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 18d
That looks cool; I'll try that.
LodeMike@lemmy.today · 8 pts · 19d
The offline installers are offline. They even contain offline promotions AND require admin to install.
clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 18d
Got it, thank you.
kilgore_trout@feddit.it · 5 pts · 18d
All installers from GOG.com already contain the entirety of the game's data.
clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 18d
That's excellent, I was suspicious.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 18d
You raise a good point: with all online game stores, including GOG, if you don't have the game installer in your system you risk losing it because of some licensing reasons.
So to fully protect yourself from that risk with GOG you have to download the game offline installers.
The difference in this between GOG and other stores is that:
For all their games GOG makes available the tools for you to protect yourself from losing games due to the store having to pull them door or going bankrupt, plus makes sure they won't stop working (at least for single player mode) at some point due to some 3rd party switching their servers off, but you still have to do your part.
The other stores don't even give you that option or protection. I mean, sometimes for some games you can make it happen (for example some game installers can be copied from the Steam cache and later used and the game run without Steam), just not reliably, not seamlessly and you're not told upfront for which ones that works, so you don't get to make an informed purchasing decision if you care about still being able to play a game a decade from now.
Unlike the others GOG give you the option and the guarantee that it works, the rest if up to you.
clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 18d
I appreciate the write up!
Dookieman12@piefed.social · 0 pts · 19d
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.
Edit: Glazing GOG for this while insisting "sTeAm iS dIfFeReNt" is like buying the cereal box that says "Asbestos Free!" on it.
Ever since that Sony tweet, all these kids are, overnight, developing all these strong opinions about shit they never cared about before, based on nothing but hype, memes, and regurgitated streamer slop.
Physical media has licenses too. GOG purchases come with licenses too. Optical media rots. And Steam isn't secretly Sony (yet. They probably will be after Gabe dies).
Downvote me all you want, it doesn't change the truth and reveals much more about you than me.
bluelander@lemmy.ml · 11 pts · 19d
"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
Dookieman12@piefed.social · -11 pts · 19d
If the game itself has DRM, then it has DRM on GOG too.
Did you read what I wrote?
industrialdeerfluff@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 17 pts · 19d
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.
Dookieman12@piefed.social · -7 pts · 18d
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.
dewritoninja@pawb.social · 9 pts · 18d
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
Sergius@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 18d
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/drm_on_gog_list_of_singleplayer_games_with_drm/page1
industrialdeerfluff@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 6 pts · 18d
While thats a list of plenty of unfortunate things, it's not exactly what people mean by drm, and in some cases kind of absurd for them to conflate.
DRM is generally refering to restrictions on your ability to install, share, and use a game.
Games having extra content thats connected to an online server or the creation of an account is unfortunate but not drm, theres also out dated ones in that list like the twitch drops in cyberpunk just being in the game now.
Online games having anti cheats and dependencies, or wanting you to have an account is also unfortunate especially if invasive but not a restriction on your ability to install or share a game.
In that list im only seeing DEFCON and Multiwinia having a key verification server which is supposed to be disabled in the offline installers. other games mention having verifications removed some seemingly unsuccessfully at the time of that post.
Alot of these things are issues with games preservation in general, something that GOG actually does alot to help with, theres plenty of old games that come with fixes, patches, and dlls that make them run on modern hardware that other online stores that still sell the games don't provide.
The thing about it not being drm is you can backup the installers, you can just give them to a friend, it doesnt phone home and check if this computer has some license, it doesn't try and match hardware, or limit you to a certain number of installs.
Dookieman12@piefed.social · 0 pts · 18d
So, Steam respects their customers enough to offer them a choice while GOG doesn't; good to know.
Ok, and? I can do all that on Steam too. I can even launch the game directly without involving Steam at all.
Yeah, and all that is a huge pain in the ass. Having it to do myself isn't a positive.
dewritoninja@pawb.social · 1 pts · 18d
Do you ever see a specialty store and think "at least Walmart respects their customers enough to offer them a choice".
Also you really need to work on your reading comprehension skills
bluelander@lemmy.ml · 0 pts · 19d
Yes.
Quokka@quokk.au · 0 pts · 19d
I'm done with GOG after the NeoNazi shit.
WeebLife@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 19d
Can you provide further information so more people can decide to boycott them too?
ltxrtquq@lemmy.ml · 13 pts · 19d
GOG apologizes for emailing Nazi runes to its followers
Eh_I@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 19d
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
WeebLife@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 18d
We can't have anything anymore huh...
NikkiDimes@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 19d
What's this now?
Quokka@quokk.au · 5 pts · 19d
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.
NikkiDimes@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 18d
Oh boy, that's fun :(
IEatDaFeesh@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 19d
SleepyPie@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 19d
I can’t believe you got downvoted for pointing out their nazi comms lmao
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works · 0 pts · 19d
How do you load it on your gaming system without a drive?
GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 19d
You buy some random external drive for 20 bucks (or use a USB medium)
Einhornyordle@feddit.org · -1 pts · 18d
I'm amazed that noone here is complaining about the fact that the offline installer for the product you paid for contains ads. Yes, offline ads that do not track you and only for other games on their plattform, but still ads. Not the worst thing in the world, I know, but still annoying.
Mwa@thelemmy.club · -3 pts · 18d
I still don't like their AI stance.
Logical@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 18d
Their AI stance? What is that about?
Mwa@thelemmy.club · 1 pts · 18d
i heard that for the GOG Galaxy client they want the devs to use AI
Logical@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 18d
Use AI for what purpose, to what extent, and with which mindset? I think you'll be hard pressed to find dev organizations today that don't at all use AI tools to some degree. There's a difference between pushing vibecoded slop that no one understands (including the developer that prompted it), and using LLMs as productivity tools in a responsible way, with sufficient oversight.
Mwa@thelemmy.club · 1 pts · 18d
I think vibe coding IDK
Angular@crazypeople.online · -16 pts · 19d
Are we just forgetting that Gog is ran by nazis?
Blah463@thelemmy.club · 5 pts · 19d
Wait really? Not disbelieving you. Just genuinely didn't know.
Angular@crazypeople.online · -1 pts · 19d
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/gog-apologizes-for-emailing-nazi-runes-to-its-followers/
omarfw@lemmy.world · 18 pts · 19d
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.
robear@lemmy.zip · 8 pts · 18d
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.
drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2 pts · 18d
They knew it was a nazi symbol and intentionally didn't send it to German users where it could get them into legal trouble. They said as much in their """apology""".
Sorry, but you can't say "it was an accident, I didn't know" if I catch you sneaking around trying to avoid being caught doing something.
At the very least more than one person knew what was happening, including, apparently, the person in charge of that PR message.
Given that, and the fact that no one was fired for this, it seems a lot like like they're infested with nazis to me. Hell of a lot of smoke for there not to be a fire.
Psythik@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 19d
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".
doublah@sopuli.xyz · 4 pts · 18d
Sounds like they should apologize for the obvious use of Nazi symbols and state they fired the intern responsible, not apologize for an "unfortunate visual association".
drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2 pts · 18d
They don't get to say "sorry it was an accident" when they specifically didn't send the message to German users (which could get them into legal trouble).
They also don't get to say "it was one Nazi intern acting on their own" when no one was fired for it.
And by the way, the "it was one rogue intern" narrative is not something they ever claimed or implied in any of their PR messages. They would look a hell of a lot better if that's what happened, but that's not the case.
omarfw@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 18d
You don't know whether or not someone was fired for it or not. They aren't obligated to do everything in their power to appease people like you who jump to wild conclusions based on a single piece of flimsy evidence because chances are you would still go on trying to sustain this weird narrative anyway.
This isn't 2016 anymore. Nazis and white supremacists don't operate in hiding. They're in seats of major power. Believing they're secretly in control of a niche gaming market based on an email and a nonchalant response is just cringe behavior from people who need to touch grass.
drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2 pts · 18d
Morons like you that bend over backwards to pretend nazis don't exist and racism is over is why 2016 happened.
omarfw@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 18d
and there's the unhinged strawman argument right on time that tells me everything I need to know about your opinions. have a good one đź‘Ť
ltxrtquq@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 18d
https://korben.info/en/mullvad-cofounder-funding-far-right.html
It wasn't that long ago we learned that the Mullvad cofounder was using his money to fund a far right party trying to kick out all immigrants. We can absolutely still learn new things about people, even if there are a lot of Nazis running around out in the open.
starman2112@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 18d
Is there literally even one other time in the entire history of their company that they've shown anything that suggests sympathy towards white supremacy? Hanlan's razor applies until there's at least one other use of a questionable emoji
Blah463@thelemmy.club · 2 pts · 18d
Thank you for the info đź’•
Angular@crazypeople.online · 2 pts · 18d
Of course! ❤️
Angular@crazypeople.online · -2 pts · 19d
https://www.theverge.com/games/945088/gog-apologizes-email-nazi-symbols-the-end-of-the-sun
nevyn@slrpnk.net · 5 pts · 19d
Angular@crazypeople.online · 2 pts · 19d
I posted another link as well.
nevyn@slrpnk.net · 2 pts · 19d
nevyn@slrpnk.net · 6 pts · 19d
starman2112@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 18d
This is what you get when you google "Slavic emoji" BTW
Oh hey look all of those emoji from the email are on there
nevyn@slrpnk.net · 3 pts · 18d
Mwa@thelemmy.club · 1 pts · 18d