I pay for software on Steam, too -- but it makes me incredibly nervous consolidating lots of purchased goods with a single walled-garden vendor who holds the keys ; and they never really earned my trust, they're just the only game in town for most titles now.
The internet is filled with stories about locked accounts, lost libraries, games being pulled out of the library due to 'low quality of gameplay' while people are actively playing them on Steam, DLC and in-game currency sold that can never be redeemed or used in the game it's bought for (see: 'Wizardry Online' debacle, Steam/Valve continued selling in-game currency far beyond the point that it was being discussed to remove the game from the library all together.. then removed access from the game for Steam users after making a tidy profit. This was a current/active/new game with a bad launch, not an old title.)
So just to re-state: Valve never won my trust with their behavior with Steam and associated acts. There is just no one else; let's call this phenomenon 'Walmart Syndrome', perhaps?
If you're concerned about losing your games, you can easily do backups from the Steam application, copying game folders, or using something like SLSK https://github.com/skyformat99/SLSK
Bypassing Steamworks basic DRM is easy. Other DRMs obviously require special workarounds.
> Valve are a lot more serious about Linux support though, going as far as employing graphics driver developers.
> GOG (and CDPR) on the other hand can't even be bothered to port their own client and games.
To be fair, I'm pretty sure GOG has a hell of a lot less money than Valve. They don't benefit from any of the gambling-mechanics or multiplayer game "bling" sales that bring in so much of Valve's money, aside from having a much smaller share of PC game sales than Valve does. Valve's got to be way more profitable plus have much higher income, so have the margin to play with stuff like this—which is in their interest, because the weaker alternative operating systems are, the more Valve operates only at the pleasure of Microsoft.
> Also, GOG is not 100% DRM-free anymore, even if they want to advertise themselves that way. [0]
I'm not happy about these features requiring an internet connection, but they seem pretty minor. The alternative would probably have been that those features were left out of the GOG versions completely.
I've bought many many games on GOG for years because of this. Lately, GOG games come in installers made out of 20 or so parts which take ages to download manually. The only real way to download their games is by using their GOG Galaxy Client. Not that much better than Steam, which on the other hand has fantastic Linux support, while GOG can't be bothered to port their GOG Galaxy client to Linux.
Luckily Lutris allows me to somehow compensate for GOG's lack of interest in Linux, but still, I feel they really do not care about the DRM thing.
I only have 12Mbps DSL and an offline game system that I use a FAT formatted microSD card to transfer to so I appreciate the split files, even though it does get annoying with the huge games.
I agree that GOG's Linux support is minimal; often they don't even provide Linux versions that are available on other stores :(.
Two of the isses on the list account42 links to are more serious, although most are fairly minor (there are also a few issues not on the list). Not to excuse those exceptions, however I don't know of any other store that is anywhere close. I have no inside info but my my suspicion is that many CD Projekt investors resent the DRM-free aspect of GOG and would like it to change, while the people running GOG realize it is the major unique aspect of GOG and trying to change it could sink the business. OTOH, I suspect the CD Projekt investors mostly see GOG as a way to get a better deal from Steam for CDPR games. Hard to say what will happen in the future.
Out of curiosity, which Linux games on GOG are so difficult to install? I have bought many games on GOG and refuse to install galaxy and so far experienced no problems.
I haven't used Galaxy but I'm almost certain the answer is yes since Galaxy doesn't have DRM like other store clients and you see Galaxy related dlls in the standalone installers as well so I'm guessing the integration is the same either way and doesn't cause trouble without Galaxy present. As of semi-recently you can buy games on Epic via Galaxy but if they are DRMed you still need the Epic launcher to play them since GOG won't add DRM to Galaxy.
Which I've always thought was weird since I'd expect a store with their stance on DRM would be one of the first in line to at least have a linux client.
Yeah, they definitely don't have my trust at all. I have something like 600 games on my account, but unfortunately I'll never play any of those on my "old" Mac anymore because it runs OS X 10.10 ("Yosemite"), and Steam no longer supports that version. If I even launch Steam, the application will auto-update to a version that doesn't run anymore. Of course most of the _games_ run on versions of OS X as far back as like 10.2, but no, because Valve decided to lock me out, I can just never play Steam games on that Mac again. Cool, right? Of course everyone's response to this is "update the OS, it's free!", but I have software I need that doesn't run on newer versions of OSX.
I mean, all they had to do is let users disable automatic updates and keep running the old version of the client "without any guarantees" -- if the Steam APIs end up changing enough that I can't log in anymore, well, so be it. But to permanently lock users out simply because of a forced update… seriously uncool.
The internet is filled with stories about locked accounts, lost libraries, games being pulled out of the library due to 'low quality of gameplay' while people are actively playing them on Steam, DLC and in-game currency sold that can never be redeemed or used in the game it's bought for (see: 'Wizardry Online' debacle, Steam/Valve continued selling in-game currency far beyond the point that it was being discussed to remove the game from the library all together.. then removed access from the game for Steam users after making a tidy profit. This was a current/active/new game with a bad launch, not an old title.)
So just to re-state: Valve never won my trust with their behavior with Steam and associated acts. There is just no one else; let's call this phenomenon 'Walmart Syndrome', perhaps?