Official client and support for my platform of choice is a big plus only Steam bothers to have.
I have recently realized that I could claim tons of games from amazon with prime subscription that are claimed in GOG. And it seems GOG has some games available for Linux. There usually are couple of download links for different OSes
Steam doesn't enforce the use of its DRM (which is super easy to bypass anyway but that's a side note).
Steam lets you publish your game on their platform and hand out as many keys as you like to resell on other platforms (at no cost) while still doing all the heavy lifting of hosting and distributing.
Steam doesn't decide what kinds of titles get published on their platform any more than GoG does, so the bit about remasters, etc. is a bit weird. Besides you the user should get to decide what you want to buy and play.
I love GoG, but I love Steam as well. They're not mutually exclusive and you can have both.
Yeah, its like a lot of people don't know you can just... move files out of Steam's directory, and 95% of the time, game still runs, just, not through Steam.
What even is a Steam rip, anyway?
The problem is that with Steam you only know if that works after you bought the game and only know if that works across machines if you upfront have two machines to test it in.
I mean, if you know upfront that it matters to you (which you might not until, say, your machine breaks and you happen to have no access to the Internet or Steam in your new machine yet, at with point you'll be thinking "I wish I checked") you can go through all the hassle of always thoroughly testing it within the refund period of that game, but at that point piracy is less of a hassle.
Meanwhile some of my GOG offline installers are so old that they have been used on 3 different machines (well, one was the same machine under Windows and under Linux) already.
Don't get me wrong - I use both Steam and GOG, my point is that saying that "Steam has DRM free games" is even worse than a half-truth and about as bollocks as saying that a shop selling TVs is selling "Quake game machines" - sure, people with the right skills can get Quake to run in some Smart TVs, but that's not how the store is selling them as, that's definitelly not supported by them and they won't refund you a Smart TV purchase as "not suitable for purpose" if that device fails to runs Quake.
Wouldn't Steam, with TF2, be the most costumer oriented?
On being customer oriented on the other hand, Steam could use some improvement.
All those Counter Strike skins, too...
Akcthually you can publish drm free games on steam, it's just that you cannot download an installer. But for some games you can just copy the folder and it's going to work even without steam. Also GOG enforces drm free games
But this does nothing to address my need for towering pillars of hats, masks, and outfits!
It's ironic that a platform hell bent on providing DMR-free games and preserving them doesn't seem interested in supporting the one OS in-line with their views.
I lament it, but I understand it. Last year's reports showed that GoG was barely staying afloat. Their rival shows Linux is only 3% of current market, so GoG probably doesn't want to spread themselves any thinner until they get some surplus cash to test the waters with.
Thank goodness for Heroic launcher.
Call me when GOG Galaxy supports Gnu/Linux.
Unofficial:
Minigalaxy and Heroic are both clients which support GoG
i mean you dont really need the launcher
And when GoG does regional pricing.
So much more expensive if you don't live in the US/Western Europe.
Meh, Proton alone makes me like Steam a bit more than GOG. Itch.io is also nice, but for some shitty reasons, they have some problems with my debit card. While it is nice to support small devs, I hate to support Peter Thiel the absolute piece of human garbage with my payment.
It's not official, but I'm liking Heroic Launcher. Really, GoG should just support them(or Lutris) and link to them directly for linux support.
Corporations aren't your friend.
Gog doesn't have lower prices for poorer regions. Paying 20-50% more for noDRM is no-no for me.
I love the idea of GoG, but itโs also the only client that forces me to pay in local currency with local taxes when I travel too. Have to use a VPN and change my time zone in settings to get it to let me pay in USD. Steam does it based on billing address and card.
I'm not trying to defend anyone here, though it might seem like that, but I'm not sure why valve is lumped in with this, especially since that's the steam logo.
Steam, as a platform, hasn't released much of anything, ever. Valve has been sitting mostly on the sidelines since half-life 2 episode 2 and HL:Alyx.
Steam itself is just a marketplace.
I get that a lot of publishers on steam will fall into the categories of games that are the subject of the meme, but I have a hard time piling steam with the games that are published on it.
And yes, corporations are not our friends, and all billionaires are bad billionaires, eat the rich and all that.... I'm just saying. There's a lot of bigger, much worse, fish to fry than gaben, valve, and steam in this discussion. That could have been EA's logo, or the Xbox logo (or ms game studios or whatever) or any number of massive publishers that are relevant here. Using the steam logo is lazy at best.
Costumer oriented
Opposite problem:
I feel like GOG would be more popular if their client were better. Maybe more usable with a controller too?
And something that would help competition in the game launcher space in particular would be if OSes had great built-in controller support (and controller OS navigation) so we wouldn't have to rely on Steam for it.
Reject consumerism, embrace FOSS.
Or piracy>:)
I'd love to play DRM games but I also love DRM free operating systems and apparently both at once is too much for the transphobes at CDPR to handle
What's the blue middle one? Don't recognize the icon.
Blizz's battle.net or whatever it's called nowadays.
Sadly I don't wear costumes, so I don't think GOG is for me.
/j
Old? I got Silksong from them on release day.
Their acronym is "Good Old Games", so I suspect it's a play on that.
They were Good Old Games for about 4 years until 2012, when they started selling modern games and rebranded to just GOG, dropping the whole "old games" moniker.
(Yeah, I'm also old. I was there when they rebranded, but I thought it was recently, around 2020!)
An under-discussed topic is what will happen to Steam after Gaben crosses the rainbow bridge. It's practically begging to be enshittified.
With games I own, I never have to worry about this.
You do you but I don't reject any platform or publisher and treat each game/sale on a case by case basis as it suits me. If the product is good enough I will put up with additional installations.
My own negative experiences with Steam vs GOG were:
Beyond that with Steam you have the risk that Steam takes away one or more of your game for some reason (say, licensing problems or just Payment Processors pressuring them to do it), you lose access to your account and can't recover it (unusual, but possible), your account is forcibly closed for an arbitrary reason with no appeal (not happened yet with Steam but did happen with others such as Google), the store goes bankrupt and closes (not happened yet with steam but has happened with sellers of music with DRM if I remember it correctly), games without DRM or with Steam's light DRM (the one simply using steam_api.dll, for which there are implementations which just emulate the API without phoning home) get forcibly updated to hard DRM so whilst before you could run it offline, now you can't.
(Mind you, you get some of these problems - such as risking the loss of your entire game collection if the store goes belly up - with GOG if you just use GOG Galaxy and don't download the offline installers for all your games, but at least there it's entirely down to you as the store does nothing to make it harder for you to eliminate those risks)
Steam makes a lot of effort to keep itself inside the loop of gamers playing the games, not forcibly so (as somebody pointed out, they don't force developers to use DRM) but more with a soft sales push (they offer it for free to developers and publishers and purposefully a bunch of "easy to implement" online features such as Achievements to using the "phone home" Steam DRM to induce developers to use it). They also do not at all indicate before a purchase on the Steam store if a game has Steam DRM or not, so that consumers have to go out of their way to make an informed buying decision, if at all possible. Even for the games on Steam without any DRM one has to actually use an unsupported process to keep a copy of that game after installed from Steam (a simple copy & paste which those who know what a filesystem is can do, though maybe not the less tech literate, though gamers tend to be more tech literate), so people tend not to do it. The result is that most Steam games have DRM and most game playing done on games from Steam involves the phone-home check of the Steam DRM.
Meanwhile in GOG it's the exact opposite - people have to really go crazily out of their way to run a game from GOG with DRM (apparently there are one or two which slipped the net, and for others I guess you could implement your own DRM around it by encrypting the binary or something ๐)
Ultimately it boils down to weather one is comfortable or not with having for their games collection the risks I listed above.
Personally, with my almost 4 decades experience as a gamer (and almost that much as a Techie), I'm not at all comfortable with that since over the years I've seen multiple instances of people getting fucked by their software or even hardware being unnecessarily tied to a vendor for their normal usage loop.
That said, people going into this aware of the risks and still cool with them, then, hey, ๐, you're an adult, making a well informed decision and will only affect yourself it the risks do materialized into a problem, so you'll get no criticism from me.
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