Yeah, they're more focused on screwing the content creators rather than the consumers.

Steam is the only place I ever actually pay for software. They earned my trust where so many others have lost it.

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.

Or you can buy games on GOG instead and support DRM-free (I think they are unfortunately the only fully DRM-free store at this point).

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.

Also, GOG is not 100% DRM-free anymore, even if they want to advertise themselves that way. [0]

[0] https://www.gog.com/forum/general/drm_on_gog_list_of_singlep...

> 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.

That doesn't make it OK to lie.

It's not quite a lie, though. The games are 100% playable offline; some optional features are not.

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've found that Minigalaxy is an excellent GoG application on linux

https://sharkwouter.github.io/minigalaxy/

It deals with both downloading and installing as well as integrating Wine.

It's only as good as long as someone keeps developing it. I'd prefer first party support any day.

While I haven't used it, there is the open source lgogdownloader:

https://github.com/Sude-/lgogdownloader

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.

If you download with Galaxy, can you remove the game from Galaxy and play it without Galaxy/DRM?

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.

GOG has zero Linux support (or close to none) so they don't get my money at all.

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. It never made sense to me either.

What do you mean? I bought plenty of Linux games on GOG (or games bundled to run on Linux).

where is the Galaxy Linux client?

I don't need it. I install games by clicking on the provided .sh installer, then click on their desktop icon to start them (or find the app using shortcuts) and all of this is seamless on Ubuntu.

This is also how we used to install and play games on Windows, before the Steam era.

Why do I need Galaxy?

If a company pretends to support Linux, they should have a Linux client, whether I need it or not. They basically offer no Linux support, and all the Linux clients that come on their store pages come from developers' willingness, not GOG's.

Itch.io has a Linux client, by the way.

They sell games that work in Linux, what is there to "pretend"?

I disagree that they "should" have a Linux client, for the reasons I explained. I don't have a use for such a client, and as such, I'm happy to ignore it (and love that it isn't mandatory, unlike Steam).

I've never received support from Steam for any technical issue. I'm resourceful and if there's a way, I'll make it work; but almost every help I needed with Steam games was taken from user's forums, within and outside Steam.

Case in point: I learned browsing Steam's forums that the Linux version of The Eternal Castle is glitchy and in many cases the keyboard input doesn't work at all; one user helpfully suggested just using the Windows version using Wine or Proton; this suggestion worked.

> Itch.io has a Linux client, by the way

Good for them! I hope it's optional, since I've no use for it.

What I love about Humble Bundle and GOG is that their games (mostly) don't try to take over your games collection, unlike Steam. I do use Steam and support Valve, but I'd prefer Steam was optional.

Well, automatic updates is a nice feature on the Itch client.

Also I'm pretty sure steam has a clause in its TOS that will open the DRM on all your steam games if steam shuts down

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.

We can just call them a monopoly!

And thanks to the availability of differential pricing, Publishers can ensure many around the world can get a chance to enjoy their work.

In what way, if I may ask? I am not aware of any controversy surrounding the steam store with that regard.

Now that the store had that facelift the only issue I am aware of is the honestly pretty lacklustre curation... Which is an extremely hard issue so pretty forgiveable

Some people are deeply upset that a gigantic storefront and distribution network [0] would dare take a 30% cut, despite that being well below brick and mortar rate and also pretty standard for a digital storefront.

But hey, you can instead distribute with Epic, a storefront so advanced it doesn't even have a shopping cart.

[0] not to mention community forum, reviews, and art gallery.

I don't even know how to actually check what I have on my Epic account without going to past purchases. It's baffling how a company that's trying to take more marketshare from a platform as polished as Steam without focusing more on UX.

Any chance they had of getting me as a customer died when they started doing Epic store exclusives. I won't give them money to build another walled garden. There's more than a few games I haven't purchased because of those deals and by the time they finally come to steam I don't care enough about them anymore to spend the money.

Even though Borderlands 3 is now on Steam, I still refuse to buy it because of their exclusive deal... I own every other Borderlands game, but I will never buy that one

If you buy it from steam, they might have an incentive to actually move more games over there.

I understand the sentiment though.

They're just annoyed and lashing out by spending their unexpected Fortnight fortunes. There was no strategy.

> But hey, you can instead distribute with Epic, a storefront so advanced it doesn't even have a shopping cart.

Which is kind of odd, since the Unreal Marketplace in the same launcher does have a shopping cart.

What’s the problem here? Check out reviews on steam and participate in the discussion forums, and make your purchase in Epic, to support the developers.

My personal number one issue with Steam (aside from the obvious fact that it's still DRM at the end of the day) is that I think their family sharing feature is kind of bullshit. You cannot let somebody play a game in your library and be able to play yourself another game in that same library at the same time.

There is no good justification for this restriction and it makes that whole feature sound more like a PR move than something that was really released to help the consumer.

This "feature" bothers me a lot. When my girlfriend tries to play Planet Coaster from my account via the family sharing feature, sometimes she kicked off even though I'm not even playing a game at all! I think this is a big reason cloud based services like Steam are a step down from physical games with no reliance on internet connectivity. Truth be told my friends and I were doing fine before Steam existed, even if it meant sometimes needing to get friend's IP addresses and troubleshoot firewall issues to play multiplayer games.

If it's of any help, you can play games at the same time if you go into offline mode in your main account. That way you can atleast play one multiplayer and one single player game at the same time

I'm aware of that workaround but there shouldn't be any need for a workaround in the first place. Valve shouldn't get to freeze my entire library when I want to share a single game with a family member or friend.

They take a bigger cut then most other digital store fronts and they have a history of using the loyalty of fans to do unpaid work such as translations and perform the majority of moderation on Steam.

... So basically they're exactly like every other content network that currently exists?

Pretty much, yes. They're just more consumer-friendly in some ways, and they do some cool stuff. Also, trading cards.

> screwing the content creators r

Good to know, then devs can sell their games somewhere else? Oh, I guess they don't. Nevermind.

Haha, agree but most places do it anyways, steam screws content creators about equally.