Hmm, but 90% of these games look like Humble Bundle games, that were on Linux already anyway.
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Originally posted by garegin View Postubuntu is much buggier than osx
I think people forget that the only reason Apple "leads" anything is because they're targeting the dumbest dumbass that ever lived with their HIG, and there's a lot of people on this planet that are in the running for that title.
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Yeah, and it's a good thing most of them run OK in Wine (PlayOnLinux has a bunch of scripts that will install them in a few clicks as well).
The biggest issue I see with GoG is that the games they sell are so old that unless the company has open sourced the game engine (like what happened with eduke32, which will load the Duke Nukem assets that come with GoG's version), that's the only way you'll ever play them without an actual copy of *barf* Windows. And it's not a given that Windows will always run them. Vista7 already has confirmed issues running Beyond Good and Evil, for example, because the game dates back to when they could make assumptions that would not hold true today. (Like how the audio doesn't sync properly on fast processors or how there are cutscene playback glitches on SMP systems).
So, the further out you get from the version of Windows that was current when the game was released, the less likely Windows is to run it, but Wine probably still will because backwards compatibility with ancient Windows (especially Windows 9x) is more important to them.
It's a problem caused by the fact that not even GoG has access to the source, so they can't fix and recompile those games. They just get a copy of the last binary version that the publisher shipped out.
Thankfully, they do get rid of the original malware that came with the games such as MacroVision Safedisc and Sony SecuROM, which probably would have given Wine users problems because of the invasive and nasty, almost rootkit-like functionality tests and probes they perform on the Windows kernel.
(You can have the same version of Wine fail or succeed on those tests sometimes just by using a different GCC to compile Wine.)Last edited by DaemonFC; 15 October 2012, 04:02 AM.
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Originally posted by DaemonFC View PostBut now you can have them *WITH* DRM too. B-)
But sadly I still did not get used to digital restriction management, so I still do not miss it.
I guess you can play them in STEAM's offline mode but still need this ridiculous STEAM runtime environment.
Yes, Windows games were especially a pest with horrible copy protection / play protection. This is an old story and we all know the comparison meme between original and unlicensed copies of a game. Unlicensed is already through the game while original is still having to fiddle with the installation and activation.
When I bought a game to play my first way was gcw and make it usable. But then I totally got out of modern games and clinged to my old stuff and the DooM PWADs. Worked also on older hardware, was fun and all without hassle.
Modern games nearly all had DRM, lousy gameplay, tasted like tea brewed from the same stuff the 4th time, were full of bugs and usable maybe after 1 year of patching (Bethesda... Betha Thesda -> Beta Tester!) and then people got even more crazy with Games for Windows and ~ live.
I guess my first purchases after a long time were some DSA (TDE) games (RPG in Germany which very populare here as pen & paper) because it was DSA and a friend of mine worked at the game company. But here in the late process management decided yes for DRM. And it sucked. I played it but it could have been a much better experience.
Next one were iirc. DAO (which had "just" a CD/DVD check?) and was a good game and Witcher 1 and 2 (I think they normally don't use DRM at all which encouraged me to buy a license, besides they're good games). Well, and then the free as in freedom games came, they started indie games and then there were these Humble Bundle people.
GOG games on the other hand are normally DRM free and most of them are so old they work nicely with DOSBOX. (God bless DOSBOX and its developers!) I am not sure if they sometimes have access to the source or if they are allowed to use decompilers. At least they probably need to get rid of the elderly manual queries (type in word 8 in line 3 on page 4) and this is normally part of the main game binary. I mean, somehow they must be able to change something in the final binary, don't they?Stop TCPA, stupid software patents and corrupt politicians!
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Well i dont think steam is a very hard drm, it should be possible to sell/give away games however that you don't like to play anymore - that's a feature that i miss. Some things like archivements are really nice to have - also the cloud storage (sadly not used for every game). Steam can check if the system changed (but this can be disabled), otherwise it just runs on every box, just not on 2 boxes the same time. For most games (primary single player ones) i would say this is fair, maybe a bit bad when you want to run a lan party and try a game that not everybody has bought yet.
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Looks like the Steam client for Linux is up to 28 games.
It was at 27 games yesterday.
Here's a link that automatically updates with the Steam games database:
Also, the external testing has not yet started. Valve will post a sign-up page for that later.
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