According to Supraland developer, GOG apparently is not showing sales per OS to developers for their titles, so he can't know percentage of Linux users on GOG that bought his game. I suppose that also includes downloads statistics, not just purchases: Can anyone from GOG please explain, why this info is not available? I see this easily being the reason, why the likes of Feral and Virtual Programming don't release their Linux versions here. Since they are supposed to be paid as a split per amount of Linux sales/downloads, while the rest goes to the primary publisher. But they can't calculate that, if GOG doesn't even provide such info.

If this is correct, it's a major blocker for potentially a lot of such games ported by them to come out on GOG. Can anything be done to fix it?

Submitted support request with the above issue, let's see what they'll say.

Response from GOG: It doesn't sound like GOG care to fix this issue.

I'd be OK if this was just an inconvenience, but this is actually blocking a number of Linux games from being released on GOG. Some comment from GOG Linux team on this would be appreciated. How are you addressing this problem?

Probably the GOG way, i.e. not at all.

maybe in this case we can try to obtain %% by ourselves? what if we create open poll with one question "What is your main OS" ? sure it won't give precise numbers because will represent only fraction of gog customers but still it's better than nothing. it should be some free poll platform (without requirement to create account just to vote, people might be reluctant to create new accounts for such minor thing). can we do that?

Since this is a matter of compensation for developers, it requires more precision than polls. It's something GOG seriously need to fix.

At least I do not want the dark old times back when we had to choose whether we wanted the MacOS, Linux or Windows version and also in which language and had to rebuy if we wanted to change OS or language.

I just started using Zorin OS, a variant of Linux.

It took me a while to work out how to install a game from GOG, since there wasn't a single guide that I found that seemed to cover all the steps. In Win7 I just download the exe to desktop and double click. So I did this in Zorin:

"Right-click on the game's .sh file, go to "Properties" then go to the "Permissions" tab and check the box where it says "Allow executing as program"
Now that you have the proper permissions on the .sh file, go to the directory where it is located, rename it as something typable, open up a terminal in that directory, and type the following in terminal:
./namechosen.sh
and hit Enter. "

I tried this with three games. Kingdom Rush, Kingdom Rush Frontiers, and The Aquatic Adventure of the Last Human (just a random pick).

All three install and give me a desktop icon - then I double click it and choose to trust it. However, only Kingdom Rush Frontiers loads - the other two do nothing when I double click the icons. I note that the KR Frontiers icon is different and has a grey box area, which may be a clue. But I can't get the others to run. I am so new to this that I don't know if it is a problem with the Linux versions of the GOG games, or something else?

[PS Although Kingdom Rush Frontiers runs correctly full screen, the taskbar and title bar are visible at the top and bottom, which would stop me playing it like that - I like proper full screen. Not sure if that is a Linux thing.]

Because it seems to be more hassle installing these games on GOG I also tried some games via Steam. They installed and played with no issues through the Steam client. So, again, it suggests it is either my process, or the Linux versions of some GOG games don't work properly.

Any help is appreciated.

Cheers.

I wrote a beginner's guide for Linux Mint that covers this and more (and I also recommend Mint for new users). It should be of some help, although not everything will apply to Zorin.

There's no need to do this - the terminal supports autocomplete. When entering commands at the terminal you can start typing the beginning and then press tab to complete it.

You're most likely missing some dependencies. You'll need to try running the games from the terminal & seeing which error message pops up, or finding the game's executable and running ldd <executable> on it to see which libraries are missing.

Zorin is based on Ubuntu so the package names should be the same as for Mint. I recommend using Synaptic Package Manager to find and install them, although I'm not sure if Zorin has that installed by default or not.

Steam includes something called the "Steam Runtime" (which is basically a set of commonly used libraries from Ubuntu) and it usually runs games through that.

Many thanks for the suggestions, I'll have a look at your guide! The extra complexities regarding dependencies is a bit beyond what I'll want to do to play games in Linux - if it happens too much I'll probably just go back to playing them in Win7, and only use Steam for Linux (which is a shame since I dislike using clients, but doable).

Again, this is really useful, best wishes.

You have dependencies in Windows too and often when you read about how someone cannot get a game to run on Windows, it is due to lacking something like a DirectX version or something.

Well it's not really as complicated as it sounds - also, the additional dependencies required (for Ubuntu and Ubuntu-derived distros - it may differ when using other distros) are listed on the games' store pages. And as Themken pointed out, the same kind of issue occurs with Windows too, it's just the process around resolving it is slightly different.

I recommend considering Linux Mint - on Mint simply installing my common dependencies meta-package on a fresh install (after updating the system & installing/updating any graphics drivers as required) is enough for most games to work.

Dependencies may sound scary at first, one thing to keep in mind is that most games use more or less the same libraries and this is especially true when games are using the same engine (such as Unity). Eventually your system will become "game ready" and most games will run without any additional work.

Linux can be a bit of a challenge at the start when transitioning from Windows and I think many of us have been there, so don't give up ;)

Strange, I've never encountered that - GOG downloads, and Steam, seem to install whatever extra is needed with the game so they just run. I don't think I've ever had to manually install any extra stuff (or identify what was needed) with GOG or Steam on Windows. Whereas with the first three Linux games I tried, only one of them worked (and there were no errors or messages given for the other two). I guess that's what I mean by it seeming to be more work! But I understand that it may get simpler over time.
Ah, I see the difference between https://www.gog.com/game/kingdom_rush and https://www.gog.com/game/kingdom_rush_origins in the Linux specs section. One has a scary list of files (the one that didn't work). It's a shame it is only on the store page - I don't see that when I go to purchased games and download an executable. Some of my games don't even have store pages any more, e.g. when a GOG game stops being sold, or gets a change of distributor, meaning that info might disappear.

I'm still not sure why - if the files are needed - they're not just added to the download, as happens with Windows games?

Mint was one of the three Linux versions I considered trying, but I got put off by the three versions. I couldn't find lists of which were best on what specs, and what the real differences were. I wanted to install Linux on more than one machine so just went for Zorin in the end because it looked most similar to Windows 7 and I could just get one install file on a bootable USB, rather than needing different ones for different computers.