If you want the game to last forever, it assumes you’ve already got it sourced from somewhere DRM-free, where you can continually copy it to other healthy media. Nothing lasts forever, but this is meant to replicate a lot of the strengths of old consoles, fortunately without some of their own pitfalls like save batteries.
Our own friendly neighborhood Perfect Dark did a write-up on a project called Kazeta a while back that seemed pretty cool.
Hoping to get what I paid for it now that hardware prices are through the roof.
I’ve got a number of friends that have even made a profit off of their used systems. Not because it was their first choice to do so, but because that’s what the market rate is now.
From Mat PIscatella of Circana (tracking US sales data, Piscatella specializes in video games) on Bluesky:
Through May 2026, over 25% of PS5 hardware units sold in the US life-to-date are digital systems.
The life-to-date US attach rate of the add-on Disc Drive to those digital systems is over 5%.
Old data points keep getting thrown around, unfortunately.
Is what it is. Both the pro disc and pro digital camps on this are using whatever numbers best fit the arguments, as one would expect.
Can you take the financial reporting 85%ish digital split as the true split for games with both physical and digital editions? No.
But are the splits better reflected from 5 year old numbers obtained from a leak? Also, no.
Anyways, the numbers aren’t even the point at the moment, are they.
Again, the path of least resistance is to just use Proton, so I’m fine sitting tight for a while. And I remember seeing a post a while back about GOG looking to fill Linux dev positions. If this is something you think you could contribute, feel free to tell them on their career page. I don’t see an active listing there, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen.
I don’t think it’s a Wayland bug, because I’m on X11 (Kubuntu 24.04; plus I just checked). The game I ran into it one of those issues was, if I’m not mistaken, the first Pillars of Eternity game. I do always run in borderless fullscreen when it’s an option. In any case, if it’s so labor-intensive of a project that you’re not willing to do it, I think you found your answer for why it isn’t done.
You outlined a lot of very good reasons as to why this hasn’t happened already. Is this something you could build as an automated tool to pay it forward, particularly for outside of Steam?
Also, your posts seemed to point mostly to games that won’t launch. I haven’t had that problem. What I have had are issues where the game window behaves in strange ways such that it breaks Alt+Tab; or that it reads my mouse coordinates in incorrect locations in a multi-monitor setup; things like that. Do you expect the updated libraries to solve issues like those as well? Or, in your personal experience, have they?
We can actually put a number on the value of GOG since its recent acquisition, and it’s about $25 million, not billion, which is a pretty stark difference. I get where you’re coming from, but this is something I would have had no idea how to do, and how frequently should those libraries be checked? They probably don’t become outdated all at once. Even with you spelling it out for me, I’m still more likely to just use Proton.
I’ve been daily driving Linux for 9 years, and I didn’t know any of this either. I wouldn’t recommend yelling at developers to update old games, because basically none of them ever have it in their development budget to go back and do so, if the studio even survived to this day. If this is something that routinely happens with old Linux native games, then we need a better solution. I’ve run into misbehaving old Linux native games and also just defaulted to using Proton instead. That’s way easier than diagnosing which libraries I need, which I never thought to do and still don’t know how.
Because money is complicated, and it’s priced where they expect that (copies sold) * (unit price) will result in the highest number for each region.
I built a desktop five years ago, and when I asked the Micro Center employee where the Blu Ray drives were, he looked at me like I had two heads, then pointed me to a sad little bin with loose drives with no boxes. People haven’t had disc drives for a long time. Games are also getting so big that you’d either need to require UHD discs (even I don’t have a drive for that) or multiple discs, and even back in the day, I hated multi disc installs.
SteamDB says an account value of $4017 and $6438 USD in today’s prices, over the course of 21.4 years. I’ve transitioned my new purchases to GOG when possible.
Fortunately, someone linked an article in here saying that Blu Ray sales are up a lot in the past few years, which is a metric I’ve been contributing to personally.
Nice! If you got used to your ability to “use X on Y” to solve problems creatively, that’s Larian’s special sauce, so unfortunately, you’re unlikely to find that kind of depth in any other video game besides those last two Divinity: Original Sin games. As far as the combat and skill dice rolls go though, there are definitely plenty more of those.
DRM-free works for that use case when sales go deep enough. Then, if you decide it’s not something you want to keep forever, you’re not out of any more money than that 15% you got back. I thought I wanted to keep Uncharted 4 for a while, and then it got a PC version. By the time I wanted to get rid of it a handful of years ago, it was worth a few dollars at most, and I got no bites for it. These things lose their value quite quickly. As far as ownership goes, DRM-free works better when you don’t plan on selling, because you can freely copy it and back it up long after the degradation of the medium it’s stored on.
Consoles are the cheapest way to play games until one line crosses another line. They have subscription fees for online; they have less competition so the sales aren’t as good; they have smaller libraries; their convenience has diminished and their entry prices have risen; there are mandatory costs on things like peripherals and getting higher frame rates on your back catalogue; etc. In general, the more games you play, the less likely it is you’re saving money on consoles. I feel for you having lost your use case, but there’s a reason I’m personally okay with losing physical, and it’s not because I’m okay with losing ownership.
Blu Rays are a pain on Linux, but MakeMKV rips these discs pretty universally. It sucks that it has to be done this way, but I still get my videos in full quality, well above what streaming services send me, and they can’t take it from me. In my experience, though I don’t pirate much anymore, seeders don’t have much desire to seed the full uncompressed video, let alone the special features. And you’re correct; CDs didn’t have DRM, because the invention of the format predated their desire to make DRM. DVDs had very basic DRM, but it’s now been thoroughly broken wide open.
Nobody bought my old copy of Uncharted 4 either. I had to give it away for free.
There are still DRM-free games. Call it just buying a license if you want, but they can’t be taken away from you.
There is no GOG or Steam for movies. “Digital copies” are just extended rentals for TV and movies, so anyone revolting against streaming price increases are either pirating or moving to physical, because it’s all that’s left. It pushed me back to physical, for sure, so there’s still money to be made there.
Not for this project, you don’t.