Well - The only thing I can say is that I have a decent amount of games on Steam, but I have more games on GOG. That's not only old games, but also recently released games.

Why do I have games on Steam? Simple - I had to sign in on Steam if I wanted to play my Halflife 2 game (that I bought on disk in a plastic cover in the time games where sold in a game store by the way). GOG was not existing in that time and it was way into the future.

I always hated that I needed to have a Steam client running just to play my games. I felt uncomfortable about that dependency. That is the reason that I bought more and more games on GOG when GOG started to host games, and more importantly - Offline installers. Those off-line installers are my primary reason to buy games on GOG. I never liked that GOG got a Steam-like installer named Galaxy. I don't like that GOG is shifting priority to Galaxy. I buy games on GOG for the off-line installers. Those are my top priority, and I do not care one bit about Galaxy. It's nice for others maybe, but not for me. Anyway - I now own far more games on GOG than I have bought over the years on Steam. And that number is only growing, because if possible I prefer to buy my games on GOG.

And yes - I really, really, really HATE that publishers force people to use their own launchers, even if you already have to use the Steam client. I simply don't buy those games. Their loss, not mine. The same goes for DRM. I really very seldom buy games with DRM (like that stupid Devuvo). The ones I bought over years can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Lucky enough some publishes see "the light" and remove DRM, but sadly some add DRM (and forced launchers) to games that where DRM/Launcher free for years on Steam. I now feel sorry to have bought these games, even if that stuff is forced upon me retroactively.

Let's end on a bright note here. Sony just has made a statement that the stupid mandatory PSN account will be removed from games. I can only hope that this paves the way to publish these games on GOG. That includes games like Horizon Forbidden West and God Of War Ragnarok. So let's hope we will see those games here very soon.

When you are not a fanboy of one and a hater of the other, you can play all the games you are interested in. At the end of the day they are all free, and you don't even have to buy a seperate platform. As far as game preservation goes, it's not Valve's fault that publishers like Rockstar, Sega, and Epic are removing a lot of their games from the Steam store either because they want to replace them with a trash collection, remaster, or because they are anti costumer. Luckily I bought everything I wanted so far.

What a lot of GOGers tend to hate about Steam is the drm (especially when it is disguised as ownership like Steam does it) and also the fact they are the main driver for deep platform-specific integration into games that is hard to decouple (some devs would do it deliberately anyways, but many do it accidentally) and makes games harder to obtain drm-free.

But we tend to hate other drmed stores too. In fact, the only thing that I like about them is that they cut into Steam's margins a little although not enough to prevent it from being it a quasi-monopoly (still, it could be worse).

But otherwise, while some GOGers are very exclusive to GOG, I've shopped around among those stores that mainly/only offer drm-free games. In the past, I've bought games from DotEmu, Humble Store and recently bought some VNs from Jast and am strongly considering getting Celeste from itch.io (I get a feeling the game will never come here). However, the DotEmu store is gone, Humble store mainly sells Steam keys now and the games I bought there are no longer available to download. While those games are backed up, they are not getting updated anymore which has some value and those lessons taught me that all things considered, it is best to buy your drm-free games from a store that is more likely to be around in the future (and in the drm-free arena, that is GOG right now).

Steam can go down forever at any moment.
And it will. Like all companies in history, without a single exception.

The main difference with previous companies going down is that with Steam, the products will become unusable the day the company goes under.

Some wanting to play those games, not the other games. Why deny one's self something one wants just to get some warm fuzzies inside? Such stances are more negative to the holder than others and often large waste of time.
I used tab manger to clean up and store extra tabs, and now have too many sessions saved. Ironic? Maybe.

This.

So many things can go wrong and I believe those who think it cannot are being complacent. The only good argument for Steam is "I want to play any game I want right now and I don't really care if I'm likely to no longer have access to my purchase at some point in the future". Maybe for some people who only want a few very specific games and don't want to replay or share them with their children later, that is a valid argument.

Private commercial entities are not ultra stable over long periods of time and aren't meant to last forever. For a vibrant competitive economy, that is a good thing. However, contingencies need to be put in place for them to fail gracefully. And in the case of Steam right now, them failing would be a gigantic train wreck for so many people. It is sad really.

IKR?

And it's not even restricted to "steam failing" lol. As far as I know, losing internet for any reason, be it you're in some remote location or only got your laptop on an army mission if your army lets you in the first place, etc, in these scenarios, as far you're concerned, steam has already failed and you're in the post-steam era, at least temporarily.

Want to know what happens to your steam games when they go down? Plug off the internet, wait for offline mode to expire. Have fun.

To buy something means that, from that point onwards, you own the thing. Billionaire scum Gabe managed to fool everyone into buying and owning nothing and be happy about it.

Valve as a company and Steam as a store/launcher will outlive all of us, so no, I'm not worried about my Steam games at all. Valve makes more money off of Steam than you can imagine. They won't go down, no matter what some of you haters think.

It's doubtful Valve will "go under". However, Valve is also a privately owned company majority controlled by one obese dude (Gabe) now in his 60's who doesn't keep himself in the best of shape. If in 10-15 years time he's no longer with us and his kids decide to sell their inheritance to say Microsoft or EA who gradually 'fold' Steam into the Microsoft Store / Origin, I think some staggeringly naive people who think Steam will continue to exist in its current form unchanged for the next 500 years will receive one hell of a wake up call when those 3rd party launchers you started complaining about in the thread pretty much end up in all (former Steam) games... ;-)

Popping nutrient pills would probably be more convenient than eating real food, washing the dishes etc. A muffin fluffing tamagochi is more convenient than a real pet. Jpegs on your computer are moe convenient than physical paintings. Convenience isn't everything.

I'd take 200 physical games not requiring Steam over 200 Steam games any day. I wish I could still buy nice big boxes with cool extra stuff in them now that I could afford it, and I will never forgive Steam for killing physical distribution for me years before it actually died.

"Your corporate overlord is mighty and eternal" is a really lousy justification for customer not owning anything.

It never ceases to amaze me that these days companies have fanboys who downright rejoice in their power over us.

Can someone explain to me why Steam is typically viewed differently from other launchers to begin with? Moving aside the community aspect of Steam's client, what does it do better than Epic or even the Xbox app. GOG is the only real outlier I'm aware of that's providing something unique.

At this point I have even less of an idea than I did before, all I can say is "the Valve logo". There's no other reason why idiots see Steam as "God" but when Epic decides to make Epic Steam suddenly "Tencent has stakes in Epic" becomes a problem and all of a sudden they care about data collection/privacy.

Or funnier yet the complaints about "exclusivity", Darwinia was made into a Steam exclusive years back and even had its Linux version delisted because Steam did not support Linux. Now everyone wants me to praise Valve for making Linux a far easier platform for them to conquer by making a fork of Wine and porting their DRM. But yes, plenty of games exclusive to Steam, where were the "epic exclusives bad" guys back then? Does having a closed source, constantly updating black box software sending data home only matter to these people if a possible destination is "China" but not when the destination is the "United States of America"?

When you move out, you don't take 10 fridges of food with you to another country or continent. What if there will be a flood in your house while you are not home or something burns down and your 200 physical games are burnt or flooded? Exactly. My 200 Steam games will be perfectly fine even than. Steam didn't killed off physical games. There are physical games that are tied to Steam. I have a physical copy of Tomb Raider (2013), Batman Arkham Origins, Resident Evil Origins Collection, Resident Evil 2 (2019), Mortal Kombat (2011), and Crash Bandicoot N.Sane Trilogy for example. I like physical media too, but I rather play my games than look at the box art and collect them on my shelf. I don't get left out of the PC games that are only on GOG. People like you on the other hand get left out of tons of good games that have been on Steam since many years. So who is the fanboy and the hater here?

Very simple. Steam was made with the purpose to make PC gaming better and more convenient, while the rest (not counting GOG) was made for the sole purpose to get the financial success that Steam got. Of course none of them succeeded.

Sony removed PSN from the games they implemented in on Steam thanks to people voting with their wallet, and 2K did the same thing. Keep hating and missing out on games you would like to play.

The same that would happen to those paintings that jpegs are apprently superior to.

Yes, there are advantages to digital distribution. I'm just saying that "convenience" isn't the end-all be-all answer to everything and doesn't outweigh the downsides (at least not to everyone). Also, those advantages are not exclusive to Steam and don't actually require what Steam forces, so they are no argument in favor of Steam at all.

Everyone gets "left out" of tons of games, unless they haveu nlimited cash and play games 24/7. I have to narrow down what I'll buy and play somehow anyway. There's over 130 games on my wishlist on GOG, which if bought them all would be enough for probably something like 5 years for me, plus I have a backlog of unplayed games. Plus there are other places to get games than GOG without DRM and I don't mind using those. So it's no skin off my back if some publisher doesn't want to sell me their games on fair terms. I have access to more games than I will ever actually likely play.