Games

they need to use super generic popular idioms in order to be search engine optimized. technology killed journalism

The hell do you mean "barely did anything for the Linux gaming scene"? Listen, I'm up to my neck with Linux gamer crybabies always bitching about how someone doesn't throw them a bone, for years. Valve is doing Linux gamers a great service and since Linux was all about free-this and open source that, DRM-free is at least a thing. Fucking can't please whiny Linux gamers.

That's... Largely a financials problem.

Steam: $8-10 billion/y

GOG: $80-120 million/y

Steam can throw 10 GOGs worth of resources at a problem and barely break a sweat. Yeah, of course they are making huge strides, that's how consolidation of wealth works when that wealth is actually reinvested.

It's pretty hard for GOG. Many of the things people don't like about GOG are not really GOG's fault, they are just a result of small market share. Steam is the bigger platform, and so naturally it gets priority for basically everything.

You game doesn't work on Steam? Then you'd better fix it immediately, because that's where the bulk of players are. But if your game doesn't work on GOG... well.. maybe fix it when you get some spare time. (Or maybe don't have a GOG version, because you don't want to have to keep multiple platforms up-to-date.)

So publishers and developers are generally less cooperative with GOG. And GOG themselves obviously have much more limited resources to do stuff themselves.

Steam's recent work with Linux has been great. And I do wish GOG would have something like that. But again, Valve has vast resources for that kind of thing - and they've been working on it ever since the Windows 8 appstore threatened to wipe them out. (That threat fizzled out; but nevertheless, that was what got the Linux ball rolling for Valve.) I'm in two minds about whether GOG should try to boost their Linux support. On the one hand, GOG is all about preservation and compatibility... and so it makes sense to have better Linux compatibility. On the other hand, it would be leaning further into a niche; and working on a problem that is kind of solved already. i.e. We can already run GOG games on Linux with or without a native linux version... it just could be nicer... Maybe it's not a good use of GOG's resources to go for that.

(That said, when I look at their linux start.sh scripts and see cd "${CURRENT_DIR}/game" chmod +x * it makes me think they could probably put at least a bit more effort into their linux support.)

Selling old games and new games isn't mutually exclusive, and more money tends to be spent on new games than old ones. It's not unreasonable to expect that selling new games too could subsidise the work to make old games run on modern platforms.

You have it backwards.

If GOG goes down, you actually lose what you own.

If Steam goes down, you lose your privileges.

Gabe Newell has promised that if Steam goes down you won't lose your library, but we only have his word as assurance.

What exactly is the distinction between acting tactically and strategically? This doesnt even make sense.

GOG is a side project of CD Project, the makers of The Witcher and Cyberpunk. They are massively wealthy. If GOG goes down, it's because CD Project lets it happen, not because there is no other way.

If I could just download right from the Website

You can.

I don't use their launcher at all.

It's kind of a convoluted process but you can definitely download every game you own through gog without it.