With the use of Heroic game launcher, I’m wondering if you all preferred to play your GOG version of games over the Steam version. I can go either way but sometimes I pause and think, having two copies of the same game, one on steam and one on GOG, which one would give me a better gaming experience. For example, I may choose the GOG version because I don’t have to deal with pre-shader work being downloaded every so often. I can just into my games. Yet, Steam achievements and seeing the game’s metadata is always life: seeing the game info, store page, community stuff about the game, and more all there. So what do you chose? GOG game or the Steam game.
I tend to prefer the Steam version if I have both, mainly as you say for acbievments and keeping my playtime all in one place. But also the community forums and guides are nice sometimes, and easily accessible with the steam ui.
GoG I’ll pick (and mainly purchase towards) older games and nostalgic favorites where lack of drm feels more important to me. Those often don’t have achievements and such anyway.
Funny enough, I get pretty annoyed about that playtime tracking thing. I wish there was like a last.fm scrobbler but for games. Before my SteamDeck, I rebought several games on Switch because I liked the portability. So now my playtime on those is split across multiple devices. Ah well, truly first world problems.
That’s a freaking interesting idea, about the scrobbler.
Yeah, I said it and then got to thinking about it and I’m not sure it’d be that difficult. For PC games anyway, consoles (especially Nintendo) would probably require self reporting.
But Discord seems to be aware of what I’m playing (steam integration?) so theoretically a “game scrobbler” could work through that too? I think if such a service was created, it could also be neat to add community-driven achievements and stats tracking.
Ah, maybe a fun side project to dig into sometime…
That actually reminds me of RetroAchievements. Some modern emulators have an integration with it and they track play time and achievements. I am not sure if it works for any game but in theory a standalone scrobbler could be written.
I would personally love to use GOG for their buy-to-own model, but I’m incredibly tied into the Steam ecosystem. I just can’t live without Remote Play Together for playing with distant friends, the Workshop is incredibly convenient for modding, and free no-setup cloud sync of all my saves is a no-brainer. Gabe Newell was right when he talked about piracy being a service issue. If you provide the best service, people will keep coming back.
In that same vein, I’ll never buy another Ubisoft title as long as I live. Their crappy launcher makes it impossible to play their games on Linux.
How does remote play work?
Not OP but look for games that say remote play together on Steam. As long as you own the game you can invite your steam friends to play with you and they join your host game without needing to purchase. An example I’m familiar with that works good is human fall flat.
Edit: start the game, open friends menu, open chat with friend, invite to play together or whatever it says on the banner
I do kind of wish that there was a Steam Input equivalent that wasn’t tied to Steam. Linux has the technical underpinnings to be capable of creating virtual controllers from other controllers, have per-app settings, but the actual implementations out there are kind of lacking.
For me it’s GOG first. Using lgogdownloader and wine directly (in a custom apparmor profile). No DRM, no forced updates, no annoying client that takes forever to start. Games are also dramatically much easier to isolate and sandbox this way.
If the game is not there, then yes, Steam (as a separate unix user).
This. I always check the GOG store first for new games before I go to Steam.
While I’d generally rather have Steam’s no-opt-out automatic updates rather than GOG’s manual updates, Skyrim’s update a while back breaking modded play for months was definitely a counterexample.
Steam. Valve pumps money into Linux gaming, and it shows by games running really well with almost no effort on my part. I’ve also had issues running controllers on GOG through Heroic (maybe fixed?), whereas it’s flawless and incredibly configurable on Steam.
If GOG starts to give Linux actual attention, I’ll prefer them for their DRM-free stance. But my gaming experience is just so much better on Steam that I don’t bother with GOG most of the time.
Removed by mod
I mean very rarely the editions of the game itself is different (I’m thinking of the windows epic and steam fallout new vegas versions) and one doesn’t mod properly, but failing something like that I go with whatever has the less obtrusive DRM. So lately I’ve been getting whatever I can on gog.
I tend to play the pirated version so let’s call that Gog, on lutris along with some legit steam games
How do you manage save states and moving those games to other consoles/pcs?
@Lipriv30 @WeLoveCastingSpellz syncthing
Saves are either stored in wineprefix/user/documents user/Appdata/local user/Appdata Roaming I juat go around copying those and games that I own legit steam stores the saves
