GOG has reportedly cut dozens of jobs recently. Here are new details about the situation at CD Projekt’s subsidiary and the shortcomings of its business strategy.
That's too bad. No doubt I appreciate it Steam for what it is, even knowing that I don't actually own any of the software I buy from them. That being said, I try to support GOG where/when I can.
Is there any "easy" way to get GOG games running on a Steam Deck? It's been awhile since I last tried to look into it, but back then it seemed like a lot of steps and a lot of places to potentially mess up the process. I believe I kind of got something working at one point, but I'd honestly have to go back and double check.
Download Heroic Launcher from the Discover app in Desktop mode and add it as a non-Steam game. You can log into your GOG account there. In a best-case scenario, which is more often than not, you just hit download, and you can play the game on Steam Deck.
But sometimes it doesn't work like that. Steam will often bundle dependencies with your download, like DirectX versions or Visual Studio runtimes. To get these working, you'll need to run "winetricks", which can be done on a game-by-game basis from within Heroic, and then install the dependencies you need. To find out which dependencies you need, if you had trouble launching the game in the first place, you can check SteamDB and see what other "depots" the game has. This resolves the problem about 99% of the time, if there's a problem at all. In one case, Phantom Fury, I was unable to get the same compatibility with the GOG version that I was with the Steam version, and I don't know why. Also, at this point in time, I don't think you can rely on cloud saves working, and you might need to rely on a solution like SyncThing, but it looks like cloud saves working reliably via Heroic is imminent, if it isn't already since the last time I checked.
Gracias. I will give that a try. Still sounds a bit complicated, but for sure that sounds better than opening up a terminal and copy/pasting commands, some of which I'm not super knowledgeable about.
It is for sure more complicated, but you have to weigh that against actually owning the thing you buy. Also, I forgot a step in setting up Heroic launcher. You need to also go to the Wine Manager section and download the latest stable version of Wine-GE. It's pretty straight-forward, but you'll need a version of Wine to play Windows games.
I'll give that a try. I don't game much, so that launcher was not necessarily on my radar. Is that something you always have to switch over to desktop mode in order to use it?
I switch over to desktop to install new games, but that isn't strictly necessary - you could run Heroic in game mode and install from there.
Once a game is installed through Heroic it will automatically add a shortcut (I.e. Non-Steam game) to Steam. For the shortcut to be visible, however, the Steam client needs to be restarted. This is why I switch to desktop for all my installing needs then reboot in to game mode. When playing, I never need to leave game mode.