If the same game is available and on sale on GOG and Steam, on which platform you rather buy it?
I’ve had this question looking at the Quake con sale, and Call of Cthulhu Dark Corners of the Earth is for sale on both platforms. I ended up buying it on GOG. What is your opinion?
I would 100% be buying things on GOG whenever possible – if they had a Linux client.
Because they don’t, the convenience of Steam and Proton integration generally offsets concerns I have about losing access to things if Steam ever goes under. It’s a tradeoff.
Assuming the price is exactly the same on both platforms (or even within like $10 if I’m not getting a Steam key from the GOG purchase), I’m buying from Steam every time. Mainly for the convenience of having it in my Steam library, so I can’t just flat out forget that I own the game already when I finally get around to playing whatever it was, because god knows I don’t immediately play straight through the vast majority of games I buy.
At the moment I pretty much only buy games on Steam. GoG has been pretty hostile to Linux over the years, whereas Valve is the only gaming focused company that robustly supports Linux on both a hardware and software level. The money I give to their platform directly supports Linux gaming and everyone directly benefits from this.
Valve is also an exceptionally rare example of a privately owned, not publicly traded company of their size. Gabe Newell himself owns a majority stake and has shown that he is more interested in running a company that can make effective long term decisions than a company that desperately suckles at the teats of short term profits and corporatocracy. As long as this stays true, Valve is in a vastly better position to resist enshittification than most big tech companies out there. Valve doesn’t need to pull a Red Hat unless fundamental things change, and Gabe seems pretty happy to be in a position where he doesn’t need another layer of corporate overlords.
I’d definitely prefer to have DRM free stuff, but Steam is a pretty good compromise at the moment. If Valve ever goes to shit, I’ll just take steps to access the games I own in a way that is independently well supported on Linux. I suspect there will be multiple ways to do so if it ever comes to this. Proton being open source counts for a lot.
Considering pretty much all the legally obtained digital download games I have on PC come from Steam, I think it’s safe to assume I’ll just get the game I want from Steam.
I’ve got to say, Steam’s native Wine/Proton implementation works decently well, and really entices me to buy games without native Linux support on Steam.
I usually go with Steam because it has all the other tertiary features that may or may not be there for GOG titles. I usually only use GOG if it’s the only way to get a good old game or if that’s the only version that will possibly work on a modern PC. I do not even consider them for brand new games, unless I want to pirate them to demo before buying.
In your case, you just so happened to choose right. Dark Corners of the Earth on Steam has hella issues and the game may not even run. But the GOG version is just fine. I also bought that a while back after watching a review of it and getting nostalgic (since I played it on Xbox back when it was new), and thankfully he had mentioned this or I might have been screwed.
Depends on thw game and what sort of mod support it has. Obviously on Steam if it has Steam workshop support. DRM free on GOG is good but at the same time Steam has been doing quite of lot of good things related to gaming on Linux and I would like them to continue doing it.
The fact that when you purchase a game on Steam and it gets aasociated to your account is a form of Digital Rights Mamagement. Not as bad compared to Denuvo (depending on who you ask), but it’s still technically DRM, just not as intrusive.
Game purchases on GOG on the other hand, while the purchase is associated to your account, the game can be installed on all “your” computers and can be run simultaneously.
Gog, drm free, just works, and devs get more money.
On the other hand, death to valve and steam. The launcher itself is dogshit bloatware and I do not have a single recent memory of it being remotely pleasant to use. The download and verification speeds are absolutely awful compared to Gog and, in my limited experience, Epic. valve was definitely a pioneer in microtransactions with tf2 and csgo. Locking mods to their storefront is fucking disgusting, as was their attempt to monetize them. There is also negative quality control when it comes to what’s allowed to be sold on steam.
I buy it on steam, because downloading the individual game installer files is annoying, and GOG Galaxy never worked right for me on windows.
On Linux, however, Lutris has good GOG integration, so I can just log into my GOG account via Lutris and install literally every game I own (which I have like 100 on gog) without much issue now.
It’s a lot of extra steps, though, and for me I’ve got two separate Linux systems I’m generally running things on.
I don’t disagree with the logic, I just wish GOG had a Linux client. It’s not just about Steam Deck (even though that’s driven a lot of recent Proton development) – there are serious issues with continued reliance on Microsoft, and FOSS solutions offer gamers a way to maintain a freedom they are otherwise likely to lose. It seems like GOG would want to support that effort.
I use Steam mainly because I haven’t found any major issues with how Valve does things overall. It’s been a fairly good experience for many years. Plus, with the steam deck it’s much more convenient to have on Steam.
Now, I’m thinking if the price goes low enough, I’d pick it off GoG to download the installer and store someone just in case. I like the idea of having a backup just in case.
I actually use steam to install the GoG game installers and completely bypass the heroic launcher.
In short, I hope for the best, prepare for the worst.
Yeah, not a bad idea to hedge your bets. With all luck, it’s not for another long while. I know for myself, I’ll buy mostly on Steam, but if I got a game I really really like and want to preserve, I’ll get it on GoG then stash it on an external SSD. So if shit hits the fan and Valve grows devil horns overnight, I’ll at least have my favorite games sans DRM.
GOG, because if you don’t use GOG Galaxy (and you can as is not at all required and ALL games have offline installers) you never fire up a game and have to wait for Steam to update or are on vacations running it on a notebook with mobile paid data, forget to disable “cloud saves” or some stupid shit like that and run out of data.
Also GOG is 100% DRM free.
Oh, and did you know that Steam is about to switch off Windows 7 support?!
Why should games that work perfectly in older computers with Windows 7, bought and paid for because of supporting it, stop working because Valve wants to keep on controlling your usage of games you bought but doesn’t want to spend money for even a basic launch clienf supporting that OS?
There is no such problem with GOG and there will never be if you download the offline installers for your games - as long as the machine works, the games will work, period.
Oh, and GOG goes out of their way yo support old games: it’s in their name Good Old Games.
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