GOG Has Had to Hire Private Investigators to Track Down IP Rights Holders

Re:GOG Has Had to Hire Private Investigators to Track Down I... by ntoskrnl_exe on Friday October 17, 2025 @04:55PM (#45621952)

I'm a Linux user who buys a lot of games on GOG and I've never had a problem running them using Wine stable, with the only exception being games that supposedly don't even work on Proton yet.

Majority of the games there don't even come in a native Linux form, and those that do can be a hit or miss when it comes to compatibility - at least one game I tried needed a dependency from a no longer available package. Alternatively a few titles come shipped with some kind of wrapper that's really just an outdated version of Wine surrounding a win32 EXE.

Also, isn't the point of buying something DRM free that you don't have to use a client or any other online feature? The offline installer has always been GOG's killer feature in my book, that's how you make sure the game gets truly preserved.

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Re:GOG Has Had to Hire Private Investigators to Track Down I... by klingon6786 on Friday October 17, 2025 @10:39PM (#45624445)

> Also, isn't the point of buying something DRM free that you don't have to use a client or any other online feature?

Agreed. I thought this was the whole point of GOG.

The problem with buying movies from streaming providers, games from Epic and Steam, etc. is that you don’t own them. They say you do, but even something like Movies Anywhere isn’t guaranteed for life. Downloading digital content is the surest way to ensure that in-theory you could against use it someday. Anything else is a false promise of forever.

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Re:GOG Has Had to Hire Private Investigators to Track Down I... by ensignavenger on Friday October 17, 2025 @11:24PM (#45624654)

How do you download the games? I tried logging in to download cyberpunk which I purchased on gog, and they wanted me to download tons of files individually! I couldn't even just click a "download all" button.

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Re:GOG Has Had to Hire Private Investigators to Track Down I... by hexnuts on Saturday October 18, 2025 @12:11AM (#45624827)

You could always use something like Heroic Launcher. https://heroicgameslauncher.com/ It can connect to GOG and other services.

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Re:GOG Has Had to Hire Private Investigators to Track Down I... by ksynwa on Saturday October 18, 2025 @04:07AM (#45625734)

Also https://github.com/arelate/vangogh

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Re:GOG Has Had to Hire Private Investigators to Track Down I... by ntoskrnl_exe on Saturday October 18, 2025 @02:17AM (#45625339)

Every installer there comes with an executable and those files you mentioned, for some reason they are always split into 4GB chunks, that’s why there’s so many.

AFAIK download all is not available, you will have to get them one by one. But after that they’re yours to keep forever.

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Re:GOG Has Had to Hire Private Investigators to Track Down I... by selfhoster11 on Saturday October 18, 2025 @04:45AM (#45625917)

There is a third-party downloader that uses an API to grab binaries for all games in your library. I just download the individual files one by one, though.

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Re:GOG Has Had to Hire Private Investigators to Track Down I... by M95D on Saturday October 18, 2025 @04:05PM (#45630013)

I have Aria2 download manager installed on my router (OpenWrt) and Aria2 Integration plugin in the browser with "Capture downloads" option. I click on each file and it gets sent to the router which downloads them one at a time over night.

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Re:GOG Has Had to Hire Private Investigators to Track Down I... by whatevaa on Sunday October 19, 2025 @08:53AM (#45633778)

Silksong was downloaded by downloading a 2GB shell script. Basically a self-extracting archive in shell script form.

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