How is GOG Galaxy Still Not On Linux?

It doesn't make sense, no matter how you look at it.

Steam is without a doubt the king of PC gaming, to the point that some may argue the platform has become a monopoly. While other companies (like Epic Games) have tried to compete, none of them have really managed to take a dent in Valve’s complete dominance. It’s long been at the point where “PC gamer” and “Steam user” are synonymous.

Oddly enough, Steam is surprisingly more consumer-friendly than what you’d expect from a company with such an iron-grip on the market. The seasonal sales continue to provide meaningful discounts on games, the client is continuously adding new, useful features such as Steam Remote Play, and the return policies are generous. In addition, Valve’s earned a ton of goodwill with its continued support of open platforms and technologies. This is really seen in the Linux gaming scene, where their contributions (via Proton) are genuinely unparalleled.

But even among these Linux enthusiasts, there’s one thing that stops some of them from fully jumping on board, and that’s DRM. Incase you didn’t know, you don't actually own any of the Steam games you buy, you only purchase a license to use them. If you read the Terms and Conditions, you’ll see that this license can be revoked for any reason, and if Steam as a service ever went down or you get banned, your games would vanish too. This gets enforced on a technical level via DRM, which typically runs checks to see if you have a valid license before running the game’s executable. These implementations can range from incredibly obtrusive to trivial, but in either case you can’t necessarily take your ability to keep and own your own games for granted. If you want to have peace of mind, you should be on the lookout to buy games that are DRM-free.

To meet this demand, CD Projekt Red started their own PC game storefront known as Good Old Games (or GOG). GOG is a storefront for specifically DRM-free games. You buy the game, you download the installer, and then the files are on your own computer, no client needed. If you do want that integrated all-in-one experience of a client, GOG does have its own client known as GOG Galaxy you can download to manage your games. And over the years, its picked up a decent selection of games.

There’s just one problem though, one problem that gives a lot of otherwise-interested Linux users some hesitation in fully switching over to buying their games on GOG. Try to see if you can spot it in this picture:

That’s right, GOG Galaxy doesn’t support Linux. That picture is a screenshot taken from the site’s official forum for user suggestions and consistently — nearly for the past decade — Linux support has ranked on the top of what users want. Yet the company has shown no signs of working towards this or even considering it.

It’s even doubly baffling when you consider that the client underwent a massive rewrite and re-launch with the 2.0 version that brought support to Mac of all platforms, but still no word of Linux.

Now if your first thought is “plenty of apps don’t have Linux ports because porting is expensive and there are many more Mac owners out there than Linux users”, this would be correct… if we were talking about literally any other market.

Take a look at this:

This is the Steam Hardware Survey, it shows the breakdown of what operating systems and hardware Steam users are most likely to run. Obviously Windows is dominant, but what’s really telling is how there’s a larger share of Linux users than Mac users. Outside of a couple specific titles, gaming is not typically done on Macs. And on top of that, PC gaming handhelds such as the Steam Deck often times are running Linux operating systems.

And keep in mind this is Steam, which has a mainstream appeal in the users its looking to target. GOG very much sells itself on a specific niche, that of people who care enough about user-respecting technologies to seek out DRM-free games. The people who care about owning their games are also often times the people who care about owning the very operating system their computer is running on. The concerns that drive people away from Steam are the same concerns that drive people away from Windows and Apple. This isn’t even speculation either, just take a look at that aforementioned suggestion board and see how much genuine enthusiasm there is for this from the community.

So, clearly market share is not the problem. If it was, it wouldn’t have made sense to go ahead and make a Mac port when that would’ve likely shown even worse returns on investment.

So, maybe it’s a packaging issue? Linux has long been notorious for not having a consistent or uniform way to package and deliver software. This was much harder problem to avoid ten years ago, back when most apps were delivered either via direct install script or via package managers. Because of the wide array of possible configurations across Linux installs, both of these approaches were highly inconsistent and subject to bugs. Linux ports back in the early 2010s either required a lot of muscle or could often be messes.

But recently, we’ve seen much more of a shift towards containerized solutions such as Flatpak and AppImage which seek to be distro-agnostic. These have been a massive improvement over the way things used to be, providing much-needed consistency to what was previously a complete free-for-all in terms of standards. Some people may have their complaints here and there, but the amount of legwork these solutions have done to make software distribution far less daunting can’t be understated.

And while you could argue Linux users do have other community-made clients available to them such as Lutris (which do support GOG games), these aren’t a full replacement. Galaxy being an official client gives it the ability to take advantage of GOG’s online features such as cloud saving and a friends system. You know, the kinds of features you find in many modern game clients, such as Steam.

From every single angle I’ve heard and can think of, it just genuinely does not make sense to me for GOG to not proceed with creating a Linux port of the Galaxy client. It might be a relatively petty problem in the end, but really its just one that just genuinely baffles me. The arguments I’ve heard against it just do not make sense, but if there’s something else I’m missing, feel free to let me know in the comments.