
Gog.com Soon On More Platforms - galapago
http://www.gog.com/news/gogcom_soon_on_more_platforms
======
ama729
GOG is run by pretty amazing people , for example, they recently announced
that they were interested by regional pricing[1] when people made it clear
they were not pleased by this change, they changed their mind[2]. Impressive.

Also, it'll be interesting to see if it's a plan to bring more
indie/kickstarter, since most of them have linux version planned, so GOG was
not ideal.

[1] You can read all their reasons here:
[http://www.gog.com/forum/general/letter_from_the_md_about_re...](http://www.gog.com/forum/general/letter_from_the_md_about_regional_pricing/page1/?staff=yes)
Yep, that's 5 pages of answer from staff members.

[2]
[http://www.gog.com/news/getting_back_to_our_roots](http://www.gog.com/news/getting_back_to_our_roots)

~~~
ekianjo
Sounds like The Witcher for Linux may just happen after all (the same folks
are behind GOG).

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mxfh
If they add a native version of Alpha Centauri im sold.

Loki's Alpha Centauri port was the game that didn't make me miss Windows
anymore.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loki_Software#Games_published](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loki_Software#Games_published)

That list is pretty much all I'll ever need.

~~~
toast0
This might be tougher than it seems. Several years ago, I tried to run the
Alpha Centauri demo on a recent Fedora system (I think probably 6 or 7), and
it wasn't able to start; it did run fine on FreeBSD in linux emulation though.
(sorry no details)

~~~
mapleoin
I wouldn't call Fedora 7 recent. It was released 7 years ago.

~~~
toast0
It was recent at the time when I tried (several years ago). I imagine it would
fare worse now. How many sound apis have we gone through, etc

~~~
Zancarius
Somewhat OT, but I've actually had really fantastic luck running older Windows
titles under Wine, even when those same titles won't work under Windows Vista
or later. I've actually found it substantially more work to get the Linux port
of Tribes 2 (from Loki) working under a modern distro than to simply run the
Windows version under Wine. Gosh I wish the Tribes franchise got more
attention in those days, but I think the learning curve didn't exactly help.

I really like what Loki did. It's a shame they were _too early_ to market.

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misterdai
It'd be nice to have improved support from GOG for linux. The PlayOnLinux
project has a decent list of Gog.com games that it'll help install and run on
Linux platforms. But I'd buy a lot more games from them if I didn't have to
rely on that or manually trying to get games to work.

Only problem will be having more games to distract me, I went with Linux to
avoid needing the willpower to not play games and get on with learning /
working ;-)

~~~
smithzvk
I know that many "Linux gamers" scoff at the prospect of official support for
running games under Wine... I don't. I think GOG in particular should jump at
the chance to partner with the PlayOnLinux project and some the numerous other
projects that allow older games (and some new games) to run via some emulation
layer, engine rewrite, or reimplementation of Windows library/runtime support.
Judging from what I have seen Wine do these days (which is by far the most
fickle of methods above), I would not be surprised if a year of work or so
could get %90+ of the GOG library running with near perfect quality on
GNU/Linux systems. As a point of reference, running the recent Valve ports for
GNU/Linux are consistently less stable than running under Wine (which works
nearly perfectly) and that is without any kind of PlayOnLinux configuration
script magic.

Note that there is no reason that I can see that this wouldn't simultaneously
make the same software available for OS X and any other system that can run
Wine.

> I went with Linux to avoid needing the willpower to not play games and get
> on with learning / working ;-)

heh

~~~
okasaki
>I know that many "Linux gamers" scoff at the prospect of official support for
running games under Wine

I think that's mostly aimed at ames that are currently in development.

I prefer running games in WINE anyway. It provides a bit of extra security and
it can run fullscreen-only games in a window.

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onli
This is seriously great.

GOG is a good platform. They don't always have the cheapest offer (not even
for "their" games, Witcher 1 und 2), but they have a good mission, being DRM
free. And it was about time there was a good place for buying the classics,
computer games are old enough for that now (so older games are not
automatically too old to enjoy if you didn't grow up with them).

And think about the perspective. 2 years ago, there was nothing if you wanted
to reliably play games on linux, apart from the few old games released for
that OS and the few good FOSS-indie games. Wine is nice, but not reliable. Now
there is the humble bundle, there is Steam, and there is also GOG - three good
options, two of them without DRM, all of them not expensive.

It starts to become viable to get rid of Windows even if you are a gamer (I'll
probably wait for League of Legends and Planetside 2 though, but only because
I have Windows 7 already installed. If that breaks, why bother?).

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snake_plissken
If only they could get access to the Lucas Arts collections.... I've run Tie
Fighter in DOSBox but there can be joystick and sound issues.

~~~
celerity
Well, running the old LucasArts adventures would be easy with ScummVM
integrated, but I wonder if they can secure the rights. A promising sign is
that Tim Schafer (made a lot of the early adventures) recently went to
LucasArts on a mysterious mission (perhaps just a tour!).

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eddiedunn
Finally! While I like GOG, other distributors like Steam, humble bundle and
desura have Linux support, so I've bought games from them instead. I'm glad
GOG decided they want my business again.

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citizenk
The interesting tidbit being: "We're initially going to be launching our Linux
support on GOG.com with the full GOG.com treatment for Ubuntu and Mint."

~~~
jsnell
That's the insignificant part. There are already a bunch of places to buy
Linux games, what's one more? Here's the interesting bit:

> This is, of course, going to include games that we sell which already have
> Linux clients, but we'll also be bringing Linux gamers a variety of classics
> that are, for the first time, officially supported and maintained by a
> storefront like ours.

Even if this is via e.g. dosemu, it'd still be offering something new compared
to storefronts that already have Linux support.

~~~
sentenza
There's a whole load of games from GOG that you can already play on linux, be
it throuhg the PlayOnLinux project or by using Dosbox.

However, there are a lot of games where it feels like they should work on
linux, but they just don't. For instance, Interstate76 runs fine in
PlayOnLinux, but Interstate82 doesn't. There are probably a bunch of those
games where the GOG team is in a position to make it work under linux whereas
we users alone can't.

I'm excited. Even if they'll just push the games that already run through
PlayOnLinux, official support and the publicity are both worth it.

~~~
nolok
> There's a whole load of games from GOG that you can already play on linux,
> be it throuhg the PlayOnLinux project or by using Dosbox.

Yeah but for those that have no native linux clients that's not an officially
supported way to play them, neither from GOG nor from other retailers.

The reason it matters is not for people like the typical HN user but for, say,
my dad which is now using a linux laptop and plays some GOG games on it from
"his past" but isn't technical enough to know how to fix it when there is a
slight unimportant mis-configuration. If I wasn't there, he wouldn't be able
to.

~~~
sentenza
I'd still recommend PlayOnLinux for him (or rather for you to install on his
laptop), since POL takes care of a lot of things for you, among which there
are the different versions of Wine.

Game only works on a particular version of Wine? No problem, POL will install
that specific Wine version for this game without any adverse effect on the
other games.

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guard-of-terra
Most of their games already work with either dosbox or wine. If they would
provide hints and/or shellscripts this would be even nicer.

~~~
valarauca1
Or if they could make a wine wrapper, to make the games execution in WINE
transparent to the end user.

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gioele
Did they start selling the raw ISO/floppy images?

I do not understand why they keep (kept?) bundling the games' datafiles with
the emulators/runtimes.

~~~
mstromb
So that customers who don't want to have to mess with emulators can just buy a
game and play it?

That's one of the primary reasons to use GOG - even the ancient games they
sell (in my experience) Just Work. They would be far, far less successful if
every customer had to become an expert in DOSBOX in order to play an impulse
buy of a game from their youth.

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pretz
Sounds like GOG wants to make sure they can have a presence on Steam Boxes.
Good call.

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shmerl
At last GOG decided to do it. Great development!

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Yuioup
Yes!! Been waiting for this for quite some time.

