On the one hand I like GOG because it has no DRM and has better prices (in my country) than Steam and I have the feeling that on the one hand it follows more the open source philosophy than Steam itself, but Steam has helped enormously to play Windows games on Linux, so I haven’t really made up my mind.
On the one hand I want to buy on Steam for the convenience, but on the other hand I prefer GOG because (in my country) is cheaper. Which platform do you prefer and why?
To give an example, The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth is currently $15 on Steam with regional pricing, but on GOG it’s worth just $6.
I do like GOG. All of the games are free of DRM but they still don’t have a fucking linux client. So I refuse to use them. At least Steam natively supports Linux and even improves the linux gaming experience for everyone.
But I believe gog lets you direct download any of the games. No client necessary.
Except you might want a client, both to keep your games in one place, and for extra features it can provide (like cloud saves and updates) - and if you’re on Linux, you’re excluded from that kind of stuff on GOG.
You can directly download your games from GOG inside Lutris, no additional software needed. Same thing for Heroic Games Launcher.
Having an open protocol to get your games is way more important than a dedicated client, because it goes against the kind of artificial market fragmentation we see in the Streaming world with every service having their own dedicated client (times the number of platforms they support) instead of people being able to just have one client for everything.
IMHO in some ways the experience with GOG games in Lutris is superior to that with Steam games and the Steam client because Lutris doesn’t get in your way when all you want is to play the damned game, whilst Steam always fires up the full client and at times even forces you to wait for an update to complete (and in Linux it can get pretty bad because of cached “shader translations” being downloaded, and those can be pretty massive for certain games - for example over 1GB for Borderlands 2) before you can even start the game and even defaults to starting the Steam client on the shop-front and the user has to figure out where in the client configuration they can change that if they want otherwise.
I can see your point, but it’s a pretty weak reason if at all valid, IMHO.
That’s not really my problem with GOG. It’s the fact that they seem to be ignoring Linux. If they are that unwilling to make a Linux client, then I also don’t want to use their platform.
GOG Galaxy on Windows is an awful client so I shudder to think what they would do with a Linux client