I don't think anyone will really disagree, but GOG needs devs more than devs need GOG. Maybe GOG should be more honest about game sales figures and just prepare to shut down due to devs and pubs pulling out (depending on how they'd react), but you probably shouldn't want that to happen if you care about DRM-free games. (GOG barely makes a profit.)

I discourage people from buying new games here, but GOG is stuck between a rock and a hard place. There's no easy answer if you want GOG to stay alive.

The idea of ​​the program is good but the most important thing that GOG needs to do is fix the launcher which has been in beta for years. That's why most people still use Steam as their main store and even if the game is on GOG they choose to buy it from Steam because it works with one click even if it has DRM. We saw it with the games that were exclusively available on Epic Games, users waited years to come to Steam to buy it.

Some features that are still missing from GOG launcher are better controller support, control mapping, big picture mode and the main thing is that the launcher still needs to be ported to Linux, community solutions are good but an official solution needs to be found.

Question about this program, will the money also go towards features like the ones I wrote above or will it be general preservation of games?

Will we be able to see the next goals of the program?

Will we be able to vote for the next goals?

Everyone wants something different from GOG.

Hi, Linux User. What are you on about, this alleged launcher?

https://www.gog.com/galaxy
is the launcher i believe they are talking about.

When they release a Linux Galaxy with wine support, i'll gladly pay the Patron sub. FIrst the tips now this, GOG sometimes looks like a NGO.

Yeah, Galaxy is good but Steam, as a piece of software and experience, is miles ahead. Galaxy needs more love. Like you said, it's been in beta for so many years. It needs to be faster and more reliable. It needs more community features. Like, on the GOG website profiles and activity feed are more detailed, with better visuals and all. Same with profiles. They should work on making something similar in the client. There is a disconnect between how the website looks and how Galaxy looks. They need to me merged in terms of looks and usability.

Εxactly someone understands it, we saw it happen the same with epic games uplay ea play, no one wants to use these stores for the same reason, in the case of gog " "exclusive" old drm free games" this alone is not enough there are still comments that say " i'm waiting for them to come to steam to buy them"

No one knows where this money is going and even if they told us, I'm not sure I'd believe them.

Galaxy is awfully slow if you have a large library. It is always "importing" something. Steam launches instantly post-login, regardless of library size.

No, that's just a pile of rubbish electron code; a browser in a box. I was thinking something more like Lutris, where it just sits there and loads games nicely when I ask.

I’m sad each time I see people writing about store launchers as if there were bad ones and good ones, and we should want (or even need) to use one…

These are just DRM with a mask, all of them, they never have been needed for anything but vendor lock-in. Even open-source ones like Lutris or Heroic are part of the problem, by catering to the pretence that there can be no video game without some kind of store client.

We should not be asking for Galaxy to come to Linux, we should be asking for it to be dropped even for Windows and MacOS. Even Linux users would benefit from that, as the existence of Galaxy for Windows is often used as an excuse not to provide native Linux build of games through GOG.

Heroic and Lutris are completely differently to things like Steam and Galaxy.

The main point of them is to make managing playing Windows games through Wine simpler and easier. Using straight Wine with Windows applications is a bit of a nightmare if you don't know what you're doing, and even if you do, using Lutris or Heroic is still miles easier and better anyway, since it does a lot of annoying admin for you (such as splitting prefixes, making sure DXVK or WineD3D is running and installed, etc).

There's nothing wrong with having an application that makes it simpler and easier to play your games, especially as most people nowadays are not actually tech literate - they don't know how to use a computer with installers and directories and all that.

The most important thing is that you don't have to use it if you don't want to.

A lot of that is "No Steam no buy" / "all my games in one place" tribalism rather than how the client looks, ie, GOG could spend billions on Galaxy and there will still be people always finding some other excuse for wanting everything on Steam. In fact half the same people who claim they "couldn't possibly use x store because it lacks features a, b & c" had no problem whatsoever using Steam during the years they also lacked same features (let's not forget Steam only introduced user reviews in 2013, refunds in 2015, etc, after approx 10 years of lacking them). Same with Epic Store "I'm not buying the Epic version because it lacks x"... Epic then introduce x feature, and the same "No Steam, No Buy" crowd just move the 'goalposts' again...

This is exactly the pretence of Steam and Galaxy: « Running games by yourself is too hard, you should let us handle all that for you. »

That you seem to believe this assertion is a good illustration of the point I was making, so thank you for that.

It's not that simple anymore, games need constant updates and bug fixes. As a paying user, I want these to happen automatically, I can't spend so much time updating each game myself. The launcher has to do it and do it well.