Some interesting industry news for you here. Epic Games have announced a change to the revenue model of the Epic Games Store, as they try to pull in more developers and more gamers to actually purchase things.
I mean, they don’t need to support Linux, you can get an offline installer right from their web app. Even if Heroic didn’t solve that problem entirely (which it kinda does) you could still work around it.
And I hear this “DRM on Steam is optional” a lot, but it’s… kinda not? Even Valve admits their Steamworks integration is a soft form of DRM. Plus the point of GoG is not that you can have games with no DRM in it, it’s that you have to. You buy a game, it’s yours to keep.
That’s a massive paradigm shift. Steam exists specifically to avoid that.
Yeah, well, I’ve had better luck with Heroic than Steam proper, even if Heroic is using Proton and Gamescope as well.
I guess that’s the nature of Linux gaming (still) despite what people like to say.
As for the practical difference, it boils down to my GoG library being safely backed up in storage media and preserved safely. If that doesn’t matter to you… well, I can’t help you, but you’re wrong. Either way, if the market broke a different way and GoG had a bigger share (or if Steam matched its policies) that library would not be impacted nearly as much.
Dude, I absolutely have. I was on Manjaro and had some mishaps with the runtime vs native versions of Steam accidentally being installed at once and with trying to use NTFS as a shared drive (since it was a dual boot) that did permanent damage. To this day Proton Experimental shows up on my Windows install of Steam and won’t uninstall, and I had to wipe all variants of Steam manually twice and start over to get it to sort of work. It was a mess.
Heroic was supposed to struggle with Gamescope, but on my KDE Plasma/Wayland install it picked everything up first time.
I by no means say that’s the norm, but “it works on my computer” is never a valid answer, particularly with Linux. Steam has a LOT of remaining quirks despite official support.
And no, you can’t do the same with DRM-free Steam games. You can copy the installation folder, you don’t get a per-policy DRM-free install package you can preserve and install stand-alone for every game.
I like GoG but they don’t support Linux, they don’t take a smaller cut, and developers are free to submit their games to Steam without DRM.
I mean, they don’t need to support Linux, you can get an offline installer right from their web app. Even if Heroic didn’t solve that problem entirely (which it kinda does) you could still work around it.
And I hear this “DRM on Steam is optional” a lot, but it’s… kinda not? Even Valve admits their Steamworks integration is a soft form of DRM. Plus the point of GoG is not that you can have games with no DRM in it, it’s that you have to. You buy a game, it’s yours to keep.
That’s a massive paradigm shift. Steam exists specifically to avoid that.
It actually doesn’t. Half the games I install through Heroic don’t work. Meanwhile Steam games work 100% of the time. That’s the problem.
Don’t really see the practical difference except that it has like 1% of Steam’s library for that reason.
Yeah, well, I’ve had better luck with Heroic than Steam proper, even if Heroic is using Proton and Gamescope as well.
I guess that’s the nature of Linux gaming (still) despite what people like to say.
As for the practical difference, it boils down to my GoG library being safely backed up in storage media and preserved safely. If that doesn’t matter to you… well, I can’t help you, but you’re wrong. Either way, if the market broke a different way and GoG had a bigger share (or if Steam matched its policies) that library would not be impacted nearly as much.
I don’t believe you.
You can do the same with DRM-free Steam games. If you don’t understand that, I can’t help you but you’re wrong.
Dude, I absolutely have. I was on Manjaro and had some mishaps with the runtime vs native versions of Steam accidentally being installed at once and with trying to use NTFS as a shared drive (since it was a dual boot) that did permanent damage. To this day Proton Experimental shows up on my Windows install of Steam and won’t uninstall, and I had to wipe all variants of Steam manually twice and start over to get it to sort of work. It was a mess.
Heroic was supposed to struggle with Gamescope, but on my KDE Plasma/Wayland install it picked everything up first time.
I by no means say that’s the norm, but “it works on my computer” is never a valid answer, particularly with Linux. Steam has a LOT of remaining quirks despite official support.
And no, you can’t do the same with DRM-free Steam games. You can copy the installation folder, you don’t get a per-policy DRM-free install package you can preserve and install stand-alone for every game.