Comment on steam vs gog, which game store to buy from?
Redkey@programming.dev 3 days ago
I don’t buy AAA games, so YMMV, but I buy my games almost exclusively from GOG and Itch these days. I have loads of games on Steam, but now the DRM-free aspect is most important to me. If something is only on Steam, I may still buy it if I can confirm that it’s “DRM-free” (e.g. bypassable Steam check) there, or if it’s so cheap that I won’t mind losing it. As honest as GabeN and the Steam team seem to be, I’ve been shafted enough times already.
The one drawback I see for buying on GOG vs buying on Steam (which can also be kind of an advantage depending on your perspective) is updates. Steam seems to let publishers push updates out whenever they want. While a few publishers do actually seem to forget about GOG, I have read comments from a few different developers (in response to complaints from customers) that they had sent their updates to GOG but were stuck in an approval process. It appears that the GOG team manually tests every update before putting it up for customers, and there’s a large backlog for a small team, so it can be several months before a patch gets through.
In my experience this is the biggest knock against it, and it can be fatal for multiplayer games. I had to wait several days for a patch to get pushed to continue my Baldur’s Gate 3 campaign with a friend because she’d picked it up on Steam. We eventually had her keep Steam offline.
Considering the condition games can be released in lately, it can really suck to wait in general, too.
Pazintach@discuss.tchncs.de 3 days ago
I’m grateful for GoG’s manual testing process. But the forums often full of users blaming GoG for treating them as second class citizens for always late at push out updates, without seeing their efforts. Sometimes it’s indeed several months later than Steam, like Manor Lords. Sometimes developers do seems to abandon their GoG version altogether, like Hellish Quart. It sometimes feels like a vicious cycle to push users away.