GOG.com porting classic Linux games

GOG.com, the world's second largest independent digital gaming distribution platform, has decided to add Linux to the list of supported operating systems, along with PC and Mac. By the fall, the distributor is going to release more than 100 games under the free OS ! And this is only the beginning, in the future they promise to replenish the catalog.

GOG.com specializes in classics. Now there are 715 games in the catalog, more than half were released before 2006, including 109 games - until 1995. It is likely that there will be many classic titles among the “ports”.

The company has already begun testing games in various configurations of Ubuntu and Mint and teaching Linux terminology for technical support staff.

The company made such a decision based on the results of voting on the forumfor the most sought after feature. A proposal to release a Linux-version of the games was signed by 15 thousand people, and the discussion of this topic is approaching the mark of 1,500 comments. People complain that they are forced to run Windows on virtual machines for those games that do not have a Linux version and that are buggy in Wine.

GOG does not say what specific games it will offer players through the Linux-loader, but the aforementioned hundred will include all those games that can now work under Linux. Since there are 40 native clients in the catalog , it turns out that GOG is going to port another 60 by the fall.



GOG.com is a structural unit of the Polish developer and publisher CD Projekt SA, creator of the game The Witcher (The Witcher). By the way, “The Witcher 2” takes first place in the list of best sellersin Russian .

The solution of the GOG distributor is in the spirit of the latest news about the support of the Linux ecosystem by various companies. A year ago, Valve released a Steam client for Linux with 50 games, in September it introduced the SteamOS operating system based on Linux, then helped in the production of game consoles for SteamOS and uploaded the source code for the translator from Direct3D 9.0c to OpenGL and the OpenGL debugger. Even Nvidia recently pleased the developers of free Nouveau drivers by publishing documentation on the GPU and sending patches to Nouveau. Today at the conference, Crytek also showed the latest version of the CryEngine game engine running under Linux .