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by enedil 198 days ago
Don't forget GoG which is an alternative game store with a strong anti-DRM stance (all the games there are DRM free).
2 comments

GOG has a strong anti-DRM stance, but unfortunately not all of the games GOG sells are truly DRM-free if you consider things like online services and online service requirements and live patching/live service. Often considered the worst offender is Sony published games with some of the worst root kit anti-cheat installs still bundled in the GOG edition, with mandatory online "data collection" for the game to run, even for single player games.

GOG will still give you an offline capable installer file for that game, and hasn't entirely compromised its values on that aspect of DRM-free, but the game won't boot up offline and/or without agreeing to the data collection terms and installing the rootkit.

I like GOG and the criticisms here are only because I'd love to see GOG do better, but I also know GOG alone can't fight "the cloud" and even single player games from major publishers having "required" online services. It's a DRM of a different sort (and remains a long term archival issue, because few of the companies like Sony will ever unlock the game or open source the service at the end of the games' commercial lives and would seem to prefer to just leave those games unplayable).

Steam makes installing windows games easy. With GoG i would need to setup wine myself.
^ The essence of why we're doomed.
Because Steam gives customers useful features that are good? GoG should also directly support Linux.
> GoG should also directly support Linux.

GOG is an online shop. It shouldn't support anything but browsers, bank cards and download managers.

The charitable interpretation here is that GOG should ship linux binaries, whether native or wine-wrapped installers.

This would be a perfectly reasonable ask despite GOG being a webshop that only supports browsers.

Wine wrapped installers for ... which distro? They ship a shell script that extracts the linux game binaries to user's home dir. Works on all linuxes.

GOG ships what's available. If game devs never made any linux binaries, then there won't be any linux binaries. What? You expected GOG to make a linux port of the game?

Games with wine don't require any special installers. Just open the wine desktop and install the windows game from there, like any other windows program you use in Linux. If you think that's too hard, then get a PS/Xbox and see my original reply, the one with the "we're doomed".

BTW, you can set up your linux to directly execute Windows binaries using binfmt_misc, but that may also be too hard for some...

> Because Steam gives customers useful features that are good?

No, because users are lazy enough to not support the better option.