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General discussionMac support is barely existent on GOG(42 posts)(42 posts)
(42 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted December 18, 2022
1) The installers are still unsigned, years after Apple started requiring that - you need to go through hoops to actually run them. GOG can't be bothered to update their ancient installers
2) There's no info whether game is Apple Silicon native or Intel only (and maybe playable through Rosetta)
3) Games that are Apple Silicon native on other platforms, here are often Intel only for unknown reason - example: Disco Elysium.
4) No proper hardware requirements listed

It took GOG veeeeeery long time to at least point out 32bit applications which are unplayable on any modern Macs.

It's a very unpleasant experience if you want to occasionally play some games from GOG on your Mac.
Posted December 18, 2022
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mariuszenc: 1) The installers are still unsigned, years after Apple started requiring that - you need to go through hoops to actually run them. GOG can't be bothered to update their ancient installers
2) There's no info whether game is Apple Silicon native or Intel only (and maybe playable through Rosetta)
3) Games that are Apple Silicon native on other platforms, here are often Intel only for unknown reason - example: Disco Elysium.
4) No proper hardware requirements listed

It took GOG veeeeeery long time to at least point out 32bit applications which are unplayable on any modern Macs.

It's a very unpleasant experience if you want to occasionally play some games from GOG on your Mac.
OK. Maybe don't use a Mac?
Posted December 18, 2022
Maybe don't comment if you don't have anything at least half-clever to say.
Posted December 18, 2022
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mariuszenc: It's a very unpleasant experience if you want to occasionally play some games from GOG on your Mac.
To be honest, I'm not sure what's worse on GOG: the support they offer for Mac or the support they offer for Linux. Both are very much an afterthought. Apple's switch to ARM hardware probably hasn't helped the situation at all, and GOG sometimes has problems keeping up with updates to Windows & Windows drivers, so yeah...
Posted December 18, 2022
1) The installers are signed. You can verify that with pkgutil --check-signature. Probably the issue is that downloading the installers via a web browser adds some unnecessary metadata (which you can remove) whereas downloading the same installers via Galaxy does not.

2-4) Those are supplied by the developer/publisher, not GOG. Some of them list Intel/AS and proper hardware requirements, some don't. Some don't list proper hardware requirements for Windows either.
It took GOG veeeeeery long time to at least point out 32bit applications which are unplayable on any modern Macs.
They don't list 32-bit Mac games as being Mac-compatible at all. The only way you'd know is if you stumble across a game which has a 32-bit Mac version and look at the Windows system requirements.
Posted December 18, 2022
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EverNightX: OK. Maybe don't use a Mac?
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mariuszenc: Maybe don't comment if you don't have anything at least half-clever to say.
That's not actually a bad advice.
If your main reason for owning a computer is games, then Mac is the worst option there.

It doesn't have the endless library of games like Windows, and it doesn't offer the complete openness like Linux.

(Having said that, I recently learned about an interesting game that is Mac-only, but those are rare exceptions.)



Of course if you have other uses for Mac, and want to play games too, then it would be nice to have some support there, so you don't need to buy a separate computer for gaming.

Although having dedicated computers for different things is not a bad idea.
I have one older laptop that I use only for downloading games from Steam, which I then transfer to my actual gaming computer.
Posted December 18, 2022
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mariuszenc: Maybe don't comment if you don't have anything at least half-clever to say.
It's not clever, just reality. Apple is like King of the walled gardens. If you don't stay within their ecosystem it's going to be rough. It's not an ideal game platform and never has been. Mac is like Linux if it had zero freedom and run by your Grandmother.
Post edited December 18, 2022 by EverNightX
Posted December 18, 2022
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mariuszenc: Mac support is barely existent on GOG
I guess, some here would argue that Windows support is also barely existent.

If we take that to be true, and we take the market shares into account (Win 76.3% - Mac 14.6% worldwide), too...well, your preferred OS is only a fifth of Windows, so of course support for it is also only a fifth, duh. ;)
Posted December 18, 2022
When you buy a game at GOG, you are purely buying the Windows version. Any other OS versions available are purely a bonus, and therefor not really supported by GOG.
Posted December 18, 2022
Fellow mac user here... and even if GOG's mac support is pretty bad, Linux is as bad or worse. And even Steam can't get their client to run acceptably on Apple Silicon, so what can we expect from such an underdog?

What I do since I don't play many games (specially new ones) is look for source ports, get the files I need and play them that way (and buy the games here since you can extract the files you need from the installers and support the developers for listing their games here). Mac Source Ports is an amazing site.

For instance, the classic Doom games are Windows only here (the "Enhanced" versions too), that didn't stop me from buying them, extracting the files I wanted, and using GZDoom. Other games, like Tomb Raider don't have proper source ports yet (only for the first one and is kind hit or miss) so I just play with PS1 emulation (having the original games on my library, of course).

Since we're mac users, we end up jumping a lot of hoops to get our gaming "fix", but since our only/main computers are macs, we're not exactly hardcore gamers, and therefore we fall on a niche category which gets basically no support anywhere... and of course, as seen in this thread, we can't escape the "use Windows" comments.
Posted December 18, 2022
My only beef as a current mac user is with DOS games that i've been able to run with DOSBOX, yet are only available on GOG for Windows as an installer.
I need me a good old archive to fiddle with on my own terms, dang it!
Posted December 18, 2022
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jonridan: Other games, like Tomb Raider don't have proper source ports yet (only for the first one and is kind hit or miss) so I just play with PS1 emulation (having the original games on my library, of course).
The best way to play the original Tomb Raider is to use the widescreen fix patch.

https://community.pcgamingwiki.com/files/file/883-tomb-raider-retail-fix/

I would guess that it works in Mac through Wine.
Posted December 18, 2022
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honglath: My only beef as a current mac user is with DOS games that i've been able to run with DOSBOX, yet are only available on GOG for Windows as an installer.
I need me a good old archive to fiddle with on my own terms, dang it!
Behold the extractor for the installers. Like I said, Mac Source Ports rules.

https://macsourceports.com/utilities
Posted December 18, 2022
I used to game on Mac for quite a good while, but I ended up throwing in the towel. While gaming can be done there, I always found it to be a bit of a pain. With Apple being so haphazard on how they view gaming as a whole - more often than not it is met with mere indifference - the way they continually kill backwards compatibility, lack of many ports, frequent Mac tax, etc...

It just wasn't worth the hassle to me anymore. I still like MacOS over Windows from a user experience perspective, but since gaming is my primary use of computers, using Windows just makes sense because most everything is relatively painless and just works. If it doesn't there's also usually easy workarounds.

It's no wonder then that Mac support on storefronts is subpar. *shrug*
Posted December 19, 2022
If we can address the actual topic, what exactly do you expect GOG to do that they aren't doing already? They have Mac versions, they sell them, they provide a Mac version of Galaxy (which they don't do for Linux). The offline installers are indeed signed as I mentioned before, but if you want the simplest point and click experience, you can always use Galaxy. It's impossible for stores to set system requirements themselves; the developers need to supply them. You can plainly see that the system info is copypasted from Steam, so any deficiencies there are 1) on developers and 2) not unique to GOG. Sometimes Mac versions exist elsewhere and not here, but again GOG doesn't have anything to do with that. GOG doesn't go through all Windows games to see how they run on Windows 11, they certainly aren't going to do anything similar for Macs. So...what then?
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General discussionMac support is barely existent on GOG(42 posts)(42 posts)
(42 posts)