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?
Steam, because I would want to support the company that respects linux users.
GOG also offers Linux versions of any games that have such a version.
You’re right, but I think OP meant almost all the games that are developed by Valve have a Linux version, meanwhile non of the games developed by CDPR has it.
Used to be GOG for DRM free games, now it’s Steam because of Linux support and the Steam Deck
Lutris makes installing GOG games with proton pretty easy. Haven’t had issues on my end
Ditto
Steam, but only because 95% of my library is on there. However, I think often GOG is probably the better choice.
This. I love GoG for what they do and their whole ethos, but I have damn near my entire collection already on Steam and like to condense as much as I can as hard as that may be. Steam is still by and far the best launcher, but every year GoG Galaxy gets a little bit closer to being an actual contender; literally all the rest are absolutely terrible dumpster fires.
Why is that by the way? On my PC I have Amazon, Battle.net, EA, Epic, GoG Galaxy 2.0, Itchio, Rockstar, and Uplay clients (along with some individual game launchers) and not a single one comes close to being as feature rich, streamlined, and just clearly built for the customer/player as Steam is. I know Valve has a lot more experience under their belt but it feels like the others aren’t even trying. Most of them are just in your face about their store fronts and barely function as a library after the fact.
Steam as it’s more straightforward to running it on Linux.
I bought cyberpunk on gog and it’s just a bit more work to get it installed and running.
If possible, I’d exchange it for a steam copy.
Steam for a few reasons:
- Ease of use with the Steam deck
- Prices are often cheaper, albeit often through sites like Fanatical/ Humble
- Synergizes with my only subscription, Humble Choice
- There is a lot of content missing from games on GOG compared to Steam. Most of it is trivial, but sometimes it is substantial. It has created a rhetoric about GOG customers being treated as second class citizens. Google Sheets
I used to try to buy my games at GOG where there wasn’t a significant financial difference. I liked what they were doing, especially with GOG Galaxy at the time. The pendulum swung back to Steam over time, and now I’m just not buying games any more.
GoG if possible. I’m very slowly trying to buh more from GoG as insurance from the eventual enshitification that I sadly know Steam will fall prey to.
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.
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.
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.
Used to be GoG but now Steam. I run Linux so it’s nice to have a client that makes that easy rather than having to rely on a 3rd party one.
Check out Heroic Game Launcher. It works with GoG, handles GoG Galaxy Cloud Save support, and works with Proton (similar to Steam). A very good client.
As someone also using Linux, Steam has an official client, the workshop and is continuously advancing gaming on Linux. While GOG promised a native client years ago they haven’t delivered and Heroic has much fewer features than Steam.
Yeah, heroic is amazing and I really appreciate the amount of work that’s gone into it. It’s still much more convenient to buy direct from Steam and it rewards the company for the efforts to push gaming on Linux forward.
I’ve been trying to get Heroic working with my Epic account to no success.
Generally, that has been my experience with most open source solutions to closed source app gardens.
I’m on Linux, so if I buy from GOG, I don’t get cloud saves or automatic updates. If we had Galaxy on Linux, it would be my default store. But it’s not on Linux, so I shop on Steam.
Heroic launcher handles cloud saves for GOG. You can also have automatic updates.
Neither are guaranteed by the seller though. They could change their API tomorrow and break compatibility. Unlikely though that is, if they want my sale, they can do the work themselves rather than relying on an unofficial project with hooks into their store.
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.
GOG is freedom, Steam is a golden chain.
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.
@root @vis4valentine is the game not DRM free on steam, too?
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.
If GOG develops their own Linux client I might swap. Until then I’ll be on 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.
If the price are equal then GOG, but it doesn’t has local price and tend to be significantly more expensive than games on Steam.
When I used Windows I mainly bought on Gog for the DRM-free aspect. Now that I’ve switched to Linux almost completely, I find Steam’s software for running Windows games on Linux to be just about the most seamless and easy to use, compared to other stuff I’ve tried like Lutris and Heroic Games Launcher.
Same story here. I thought Linux support would be right in line with GoG’s philosophy but their stance has been understandable but a bit disappointing. Valve makes it easy for me so they get my money.
They did actually promise a native Linux client years ago. Seems they stopped caring at some point though.
