I do love GOG Galaxy but its nothing more than a facade. It helps to tell you what games you own but launching them is every bit a pain in the ass since you still need to own and launch them of the platform you bought them on.
I love GOG but GOG galaxy is a clusterfuck and their library is made up of mostly (very) old games (go figure) ;)
I bought The Witcher 3 on steam just because it's better with updates (GOG had so many TW3 updates issues, I got a GOG key from NVIDIA as a Titan X owner and it was just fubar).
Steam is also a social platform, most of my friends are on steam which is their biggest competitive advantage which makes most other platforms kinda pointless as a platform DRM free or not.
GoG should refund you for that if you run into it in the future. I don't buy games that require accounts with 3rd parties or need some weird client installed. I eventually installed Steam, but that's it for me.
I'm not installing Galaxy either, and GoG has developed some dark patterns to try to push it on you (links to the actual installers keep getting buried deeper and deeper) but as long as they continue to let you download games without it I'm happy enough.
I love gog, and have gone through a similar shift for any games that I can.
However, I hate to point out that, GoG does in fact have some games with DRM, even though they make a big deal of the fact that they are an anti-DRM shop, and they get away with it buy pretending the definition of DRM is different to what most people think.
E.g. I recently bought Worms WMD. You need a Galaxy account to play. I'm not even sure you can cross-play with Steam, I think you can't. Without it, the game is crippled. I would not have bought it if I had known.
I bought a game on GOG recently. It funnelled me hard into getting their terrible launcher and now requires me to start the launcher to play the game, exactly like steam. I'm sure there is some way of avoiding this but it wasn't obvious at all.
Edit: according to this post on the forum the feature is not maintained or supported (as of 2016).
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.
If there's one thing I don't understand about other PC gamers, it's why any of them want to use these stores in the first place.
Whenever possible, I buy from GoG, but not because I want to use Galaxy. With GoG, I just download an exe, run the installer, and my game appears in this wonderful launcher called The Freaking Start Menu. It's great.
What do I get from using a client? I don't want my games to be integrated into a social network, I just want to play them, and not be interrupted until I'm done.
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My second choice after GoG is usually itch.io, but my third choice is actually becoming EGS. I'm not sure if this was intentional, but a significant portion (maybe even a majority?) of EGS games don't actually need EGS to run. You can download them with an open-source tool like https://github.com/derrod/legendary, back up the files, and run them. I've personally done this with Journey, Beyond Two Souls, Control, and Detroit.
A handful of Steam games allow this too (one recent example is Ori and the Will of the Wisps), but it's much less common than on the Epic Store!
Thanks for the info and yeah, this adds another brick to the GOG pile of shame unfortunately.
GOG has been very lethargic to the point of straight-up dishonesty regarding their plan for Linux support for games, galaxy and their downloader. Their rollout of Galaxy has been panned and definition of what qualifies as DRM-free has been eroded over time.
I understand the disparity of resources, but steam has done much more lately to embrace Linux and their community than GOG and gaping security holes is just unacceptable.
Ah I see your point now.
In that sense GOG is a godsend, admittedly as it’s name implies, more for older games. Although they could theoretically lock your access to your library (which as far as I’m aware they haven’t done) you’d at least have access to what you downloaded.
Another advantage of GOG: you're typically launching the game from the desktop, rather than through a launcher that also serves as their storefront. There is far less temptation to acquire new games that you'll never play.
As a (slightly) more than casual gamer, this is a hard sell. I have a deep catalog of games in Steam & GOG, and having to re-purchase them is a non-starter, especially given alternative streaming services that let me use my back catalog. It's even more surprising that Google doesn't have some way of accounting for this because GOG does: at least for a limited selection of games, GOG let's you link to Steam and get the games into your GOG library.
The beauty of GOG is in its similarity with Steam, but without the DRM. Much like Steam, they just don't sell games, they provide added value in their (optional, and I hope it stays optional) GOG Galaxy client, their community, things like that that do appeal to people.
I always saw Abandonware as a necessary evil, flagrant copyright violation when the copyright holder has zero interest on their property, but GOG and such are a good alternative. Not only the games are sold at reasonable prices and put under rather regular sales, but avoiding DRM does make sharing significantly easier.
I use gog.com, come to think of it it's the only thing I have any sort of brand loyalty for. They seem to genuinely care. I use steam if it's not on gog though.
Different strokes, I guess. One of the main draws of buying games from GOG instead of Steam, for me, is the fact that I don't need an extra bit of superfluous software just to purchase and launch my games. I have a perfectly good application launcher already, which relies on standard .desktop files.
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