On the one hand I like GOG because it has no DRM and has better prices (in my country) than Steam and I have the feeling that on the one hand it follows more the open source philosophy than Steam itself, but Steam has helped enormously to play Windows games on Linux, so I haven’t really made up my mind.
On the one hand I want to buy on Steam for the convenience, but on the other hand I prefer GOG because (in my country) is cheaper. Which platform do you prefer and why?
To give an example, The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth is currently $15 on Steam with regional pricing, but on GOG it’s worth just $6.
A long time ago I finally pulled down my Jolly Rogers and stored my eye patch, due to GoG, since one of the biggest gripes I had with games (all the way back to the 90s) was the DRM in the official bought versions and all hassle and problems it caused (but not in the pirated ones, which made them a superior product) and GoG’s principle since the very beginning was “No DRM” and they never wavered on that.
I also have the practice of downloading the installers for my games and keeping local copies - which GoG lets you easily do but Steam does not - since a long time ago and due to professional experience I became aware that if you don’t have it in your hands you risk losing it for some stupid reason and now the problem is yours (are you really willing pay what it takes to take it to Court?) whilst if you do have it and they want to take it from you, it’s up to them to justify it in a Court of Law (and, lo-and-behold, when they have to prove it rather than just update a row in a database to say you don’t own it, suddenly it’s not worth it for them anymore). I would say the various instances of shops closing and taking the user’s entire (supposedly bought) collection or even just shops outright taking eBooks and films from the collections users had hosted with them and totally getting away with it have more than proven my caution on that.
I did eventually also got Steam and bought some games from them up until the point when a game I bought would not work and they refused to refund it (because I only got around to try it out more than a month after I bought it), at which point I stopped buying games from Steam (curiously, when I moved to Linux I tried that game out again and under Linux it works). Even without that, with Steam I’m always wary because they have more restrictions than GoG and possession of my games in Steam is theirs, not mine.
Anyways, my GoG collection is many times the size of my Steam collection, I’ll always favor buying a game from GoG over Steam if available in both (even if I pay a bit more for it in GoG, as the way I see it a game for which I can download the installer and keep it forever is a higher value product than one were I have to trust Steam for ever and ever to exist, have a client for my OS and not do any shennenigans) and a game only being available in Steam makes it far, far less likely that I’ll buy it.
I’m only commenting on the Steam refund part. That’s crazy to me, of all places to return games. The most relaxed has been Steam and never had any issues with them. Even if waiting a month, they normally only care how long you played it, which I think is supposed to be less than 2 hours. For comparison, I tried returning a PS5 game and was immediately denied because they claim as soon as the game is launched once they will not accept it back, which is awful.
That sucks they denied you. It really sounds like they should have let you return it.
I bought god of war on sale. Never played it. And couldn’t get a refund because I was outside the window. Shame on me for having adult responsibilities and not knowing that nvidia were going to remove it from GeForce now. :(
I played all of 7 minutes, which was all took to go all the way to starting a game and the game getting stuck in some kind of freeze loop, and then doing it all over again twice to make sure.
People have lives and sometimes they buy games on impulse and only get around to have time for them later, and Steam does have a record of when players actually got around to download the game and even when and for how long they ran it, so the refund clock should start when people actually tried the game or at least when they downloaded it. That refunds rules don’t actually follow logic but instead something else, probably means that such refunds don’t actually exist driven by genuine will for good customer experience but, more likely, because in some countries there is legislation for online purchases that forces refund windows linked to purchasing time.
I had gotten that game very cheaply and only asked for the refund as a matter of principle, and following this I totally stopped buying games from Steam, so funnily enough even with me favoring GoG over Steam for games available in both, at their 30% revenue cut from sales Steam quickly lost in sales many times that refund amount.
Steam does have a record of when players actually got around to download the game and even when and for how long they ran it, so the refund clock should start when people actually tried the game or at least when they downloaded it. That refunds rules don’t actually follow logic but instead something else, probably means that such refunds don’t actually exist driven by genuine will for good customer experience but, more likely, because in some countries there is legislation for online purchases that forces refund windows linked to purchasing time.
You need to consider that Steam needs to pay the publishers at some point, if they followed that rule that you suggested they would need to sometimes wait years to pay a publisher, which makes it bad for publishers. I believe that 14 days is way too short, and they could easily do 30 days, but at some point they need to send that money to the publisher and at that point refunds are dangerous things. For example, imagine they allowed this and one company released a game which was very cheap with lots of promises, so lots of people buy it, eventually they abandon development so lots of people refund it, and no new sales will come for it, so any refund is a loss for Valve. Also credit cards also have some similar rules and problems, what if the card you bought the game is no longer valid?. This is why Valve needs some rules on time limit to protect themselves from those situations.
All of that being said, the time should be longer, and if it’s an active game that will give them more sells in the future that they can take the money from they should (and usually do) allow refunds over that time limit. It’s strange that yours was denied, I’ve refunded games over a month after purchasing for similar reasons, they did let me know of the policy but proceeded with the refund regardless.
I can get faulty physical goods fixed/refunded by the store up to 2 years after purchase (EU). It’s the store’s problem to get a refund from the manufacturer. The same should be true in case of Valve and a publisher.
Agree, I’m just explaining the reasoning behind it, that’s part of the risks of running a store. That being said even here in the EU you can’t get a full refund months after the purchase for a working product, which is what we’re talking about here so your example is not oranges to oranges.
There are differences of course. Still, Steam’s policy, which is often internationally praised as consumer friendly, is very restrictive from a European perspective.
In the EU you’re definitelly entitled to a full refund if a product does not work as advertised - in English the magic words are “not suitable for purposed” - or if it doesn’t work at all, and there are no or very extended time limits on that (if I’m not mistaken for the “not fit for purpose” cases there are no time limits at all, whilst as pointed out by a previous poster it’s 2 years for non-working products)
However there are carveouts specifically for “digital goods” in those regulations in the EU thanks to lots of lobbying ($$$) by industries in Copyright-heavy areas. No idea if Valve or Steam were amongst the ones participating in that lobbying effort or not.
So if you buy an egg-beater online and it doesn’t actually work as an egg-beater, you’re entitled to a refund with no matter when you find out it doesn’t actually do what it says on the box, but if you buy a game and it doesn’t actually work as a game, you’re shit out of luck.
GoG’s principle since the very beginning was “No DRM” and they never wavered on that.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but they did, most of the claims there are petty but the fact that GoG allows games that use EAC anti-cheat for single player is damning evidence that they are not “DRM free” like they claim.
In almost all of those 25 cases the main single player game is available directly without the need to be online or have Galaxy and the “online” requirement is an incentive to register with them or use Galaxy - not nice and probably very frustrating for gamers with an Achiever or Completionist mindset, but those games will still work 2 decades from now when those servers are long gone, even if missing access to some cosmetic items.
Mind you, your point is well taken and that is worrisome.
It’s still nothing compared to Steam’s requirement of being online to at the very least install and first start of the game (so in 2 decades time when the Steam client doesn’t support any version of the OS supported by those games, they will be unplayable) and how due to Steam themselves having heavilly promoted amongst developers the tight integration of game features with Steam cloud, a dependency on Steam servers is very common even for Indie games, whilst almost all of the AAA stuff comes with their own additional (i.e. on top of Steam itself) sign-in to accounts on the maker’s own servers in order to play the game.
The whole industry has been enshittifying and Steam has actually promoted that kind of shit amongst Indie game makers.
But yeah, GoG letting some of those through is not good and them actually having pushed for Galaxy-only content in some games is pretty bad.
I agree that most of those are non-issue, which is why I specifically pointed at the EAC one.
It’s still nothing compared to Steam’s requirement of being online to at the very least install
This is a requirement everywhere, you need to be online to download the installer from GoG. And before you say you can backup the installer you can also backup the installed game on steam so they’re equivalent.
and first start of the game
Nope you don’t. This is game dependent, and many games don’t require it. I have several games that I backed up the folder and run them, some of which I’ve even copied to computers without steam to play in multiplayer lan mode with the games on Steam.
(so in 2 decades time when the Steam client doesn’t support any version of the OS supported by those games, they will be unplayable)
As long as Steam still supports Linux, and because of the strong backwards compatibility there (especially on wine) you will still be able to play them. If Windows breaks backwards compatibility with current GoG installers you’ll lose your GoG collection just as much.
and how due to Steam themselves having heavilly promoted amongst developers the tight integration of game features with Steam cloud, a dependency on Steam servers is very common even for Indie games, whilst almost all of the AAA stuff comes with their own additional (i.e. on top of Steam itself) sign-in to accounts on the maker’s own servers in order to play the game.
Here’s the thing, they don’t need to promote it, those features are good enough that developers want to integrate them. But lazy developers rely on them which is bad. Some game developers don’t though, it’s not Valve’s fault that a game doesn’t launch without steam, if I submit a game that requires GoG galaxy for offline play It would also not be on GoG’s hands, if it weren’t for the fact that they claim 100% DRM free.
Backing up a previously installed game isn’t even in the same universe as having right there in the main UI of your store the links to download an offline installer: claiming that one is equivalent to the other is just ridiculous.
I can seen you’re a commited fan of Steam and have a tight emotional bond to it, which is fine, just not conducive to having a fair and honest pros-and-cons take about one’s beloved game store in conversation with others.
I’m not really going to dive into a fanboy discussion with you - I’ve made it very clear the one quality of GoG which makes me favour it because I value it more than other things (such as supporting Linux with proprietary solutions) and am not going to, like an idiot, side with a bloody online store as they’re not my family, they’re not my friends and they don’t care about me any more than they care about any other source of money for them.
My point is made, your clarification that it’s less perfect that I thought is also made, the rest is just bollocks.
Why do you think backing up an installer is anything different from backing up a folder? What do you think an installer does that’s so special?
You claim I’m emotionally attached to Steam and claim you use GoG because it’s DRM free, and yet I show you GoG is not DRM free and that Steam has DRM-free games and your answer is that “but that doesn’t count because the folder is not inside an installer”.
It’s okay that you prefer GoG, but it’s not because of them being DRM free because they’re not. It might be because you prefer your hames backed up in installer format, or you might have developed an emotional bond over the DRM free claim. You’re the one making an argument from emotion, because you feel that different methods of backup are better or worse, and stick to GoG despite the reason you claimed being false.
Mostly Steam, but if I get a hankering for an old DOS game I’ll check for it on GOG before taking a boat out. Because GOG has it preconfigured in DOSBox when you buy it.
First of all there’s one huge misunderstanding I see lots of people making, Steam does not enforce DRM, some games on Steam are also DRM free and you can just copy the installed folder to another computer without steam and play them, in fact games that have DRM announce it in their page.
But also some games on GoG have DRM. So long story short, both Steam and GoG sell games with and without DRM, but only one of them tries to bullshit you about it.
I buy from Steam 100% of the time (except for games I get f on Humble Bundles or stuff like that), my reasoning is that the money I give to Valve is being invested in making games run better on Linux, and since I use Linux I have a vested interest in seeing Valve improve that. That being said, if I was in your shoes and games were half the price on GoG I might buy them from GoG, but the lack of an official Linux launcher and no cloud saves is still annoying so some games I might still get from Steam.
Steam has its own DRM, try turning off your networking load up steam and try to play a single player game. Unless you put steam in offline mode prior you can’t play steam games offline
You can still launch the executable from the folder where it’s installed without using steam at all like you would do with DRM-dree games (assuming the game is DRM-free)
And you can also put steam in offline mode afterwards and keep using it, many times my internet went off and steam offered me to go to offline mode, so it doesn’t need to be prior to the PC disconnecting. So even if you were to consider this DRM it’s a DRM with a button to bypass it, which doesn’t sound like DRM at all.
But in fact going into offline mode is not even needed, for example on my Steam Deck when I wanted to play a game without people knowing I would just turn off the wireless in the configs since that was faster than putting it into offline mode and just play the game, doing exactly what you’re claiming is impossible.
Edit: Just to confirm I tried exactly that just now, installed a game, when it finished installing I unplugged the network cable and clicked play, steam said “Couldn’t sync cloud saves” I clicked in “Play anyways” and the game launched. No fuss, no needing to switch to offline mode, nothing of what you claim happened. How about you try it before asking others to do it?
Well I’ll be damned, steam used to put a DRM wrapper on their games. Guess Gabe finally made good on his word if steam goes down you can still play your games.
At one point the only way to play steam games was to use offline mode as I’ve previously stated
Again even if that was the case the fact that you have a button you can click to go into offline mode to play completely negates that this is a form of DRM. How is it the “play anyways” button different from the “go into offline mode” one?
No you previously had to be online and put it into offline mode if you tried to sign in and play in online mode without an internet connection you would be fkd.
Steam has an offline mode ?
Not sure if sarcasm, but in case it isn’t yes they have an offline mode so you can play games and still get achievements, cloud saves, etc while offline and then when you go back to being online it syncs those up.
Not sure why they needed an actual offline mode instead of just trying stuff and caching it for later if it fails (which I think it’s what they do now), but it’s there.
I didn’t know about it. I just play my games offline as if I were online, no need to turn on anything.
I strongly prefer GOG to the point where I often don’t buy games that are not on GOG.
That being said, one reason to buy from Steam is steam workshop. So if I want a lot of mods, I may buy from Steam even when available on GOG.
I prefer Steam because of cheaper games in my country and because of service. All those reviews, tutorials and mods matter.
GOG, because I don’t care about badges and achievements and other trinkets, but I do care about DRM
Steam, I can install the Steam client without any problems on moat distros, also Valve has done a lot of things to make the Linux gaming better.
Gog doesn’t have a desktop app for Linux, they’re focused totally Windows so I don’t care about it.
If I want “DRM free” games, then I pay for the original version with DRM and then pirate it to play whenever I want.
I buy keepers on GOG and then place them on separate drives. On Steam i buy stuff I’m ok with losing. It’s one Gabe away from exploitation shenanigans.
GOG is usually my first choice, mainly because its a european company and because of DRM. But I also try to not buy all of my games only on one store. You never know when it suddenly goes to shit and then all your games are trapped in that store.
I was all in on GOG 10-12 years ago when they said they were working on Linux support “soon”
After so many years of promises and no action, while Valve pays developers to improve Linux gaming, I’d rather buy from Steam
Prices tend to be similar between the platforms here, though
I buy games on Steam for the achievements. Honestly, if it wasn’t for Steam achievements, I’d have never made the switch from pirated games to buying them.
GoG Galaxy does achievements too!
And do games use it? Epic Store does achievements too, but very few games actually integrate with it.
Why pirate games at all? I never understood that.
If games (or movies) are too expensive or not good enough to buy, why download them at all?
I havent paid to watch films or TV shows in decades. No subscriptions, no buying or “digital renting”. No massive amount of DVDs to keep around No risk of some company removing the licensing from the provider which subsequently means I cant watch it.
Ill never stop sailing the pirate seas
If you don’t understand why some folks pirate by this time, you never will. There are plenty of valid–and not-so-valid–reasons to pirate. If you actually care, just type the question into a search engine, there’s a plethora of well written articles on the subject.
99% of people who pirate don’t want to pay for their entertainment. They’ll come up with any excuse as to why they think it’s justified to make them feel better. “F corporations and their drm, this will teach them.”
The other 1% is for when it’s not available by legitimate means or if by chance something they did pay for and was then taken away or something wasn’t working through legitimate ways, then I get it… but again, that’s for 1%.
Another option is to not download at all.
Eww… Bootlickers 🤢
Defending multi-billion dollar corporations in this day and age is absolutely bizarre. And for the record, I rarely pirate these days. And even then, it’s for digital copies of physical content I already own. But I really don’t give a shit what others do, especially if they’re not hurting common folk. And if you truly think it’s okay not to fully own the digital licenses your purchase, then good for you for keeping those billionaire’s boots clean.
You do realize there are thousands of people who try to earn a living making the content people consume. The majority are not billionaires, they are not millionaires. Many are trying to get by… the “common folk” you speak of.
And how much of those profits go to those workers? Let’s take a well known Marvel movie, the Avengers Endgame. It cost roughly $220 million to make. The total global box office for that movie is estimated around $2.8 billion. That’s ~$2.6 billion in profit. Please tell me how much of that went to the film crews and various film departments? Hell, a huge chunk of the budget cost probably went to the actors to begin with.
Anyway, my original point wasn’t even entirely around sticking it to the billionaires. Until laws are made to protect our ownership of digital licenses, I have zero problems with people pirating. Additionally, the majority of folks are going to be paying, so a minority of people–who typically have lower disposable income–pirating content are not destroying regular peoples’ livelihood, this has been proven for over two decades now.
Bottom line: Come down from your ivory tower and just let it rest. Regardless of what either of us says or believes, pirating will continue with or without us. You can disagree with it, which is fine, or you can justify it, which is also fine. It won’t change reality either way.
Because free is good? What a stupid question lol
There’s no need for the insult. Just because there’s no lower age limit on the internet doesn’t mean we can’t all be adults.
As an adult, I’m saying that it is a stupid question
Clearly you aren’t.
Whatever you say neckbeard
Steam. Works on Linux.
Hm, do I prefer renting games, or owning them for the same price…?
You don’t own games “bought” from GOG either. This is explicitly mentioned in their ToS.
You technically do if you download the offline installers
Same as DRM-free games on Steam. And no you don’t, the games are still licensed to you. They simply can’t remove them from your drive, just like physical media.
The inability to remove files from your drive is quite a lot.
And DRM-free games on steam are not that many, most have at least something that closes the game if you don’t have steam running and I’m a bit sick of having to use goldberg every time I want to use a game without starting steam.
Of course GoG has a lot of (pretty bad) issues, but it’s like comparing a cold to a cancer, it’s absurd. Steam is actively destroying both game ownership (by allowing more and more DRM methods, now with games telling you to accept 5 different terms of use all indicating that you are heavily tracked while using the game for example) and game quality by encouraging the shittiest game, with a main page being completely unusable if you don’t filter out keywords such as nudity, nsfw, mmorpg, etc. GoG isn’t to that extent. Other things exist and if for example Itch had a better interface and search system it would unequivocally be the best game platform I am aware of as of now, sure. But trying to say that GoG and steam are the same (or that GoG is worse) is really not possible to do unless you actually don’t give a shit about games.
Sure, they could try, but they would have to physically enter my house since I have drives that are not connected to the internet
When its cheap, I sometimes buy on GOG, but its almost always more expensive than Steam in my region, even before accounting for bundles, which is how I buy the majority of my games. It also doesn’t help that most of the games I play aren’t on even GOG, when I do go to look, discoverability isn’t great, and I’ve had some issues with GOG’s support in the past (nothing major, just a pain compared to Steam).
I do like the Idea of GOG, but with developers/publishers generally being uncooperative with publishing off-Steam, and GOG just missing too many features anyway, I can rarely justify it.
Basically in the same as you, but Steam is cheaper in my country, and I have a larger library of modern games there thanks to Humble Bundle and friends gifting me games there
