Fair enough. But I've seen more than one post on here refer to 'GoG exclusives' when it comes to certain games, most recently the Tie Fighter/X-Wing games until the other day when Steam started to carry them.

Indeed that does happen. We need only see the thread title for an example of it. It seems to typically be fueled by GOG fanboyism and/or a wish to "get back" at steam (a wish generally coming from GOG fanboyism). Basically, steam has their exclusives, we have our own, and some people go full console war on this.

That said, there seem to be 2 kinds of GOG exclusives: those that nobody else bothers to sell (which seem to be in the decline with i.e. steam starting to sell older games as well) and old games that GOG fixed and are only sold here for limited time. None of them are platform exclusives, which is what I would call an exclusive in gaming context, and whether timed exclusives can be counted is debatable.

If you want to make fun of people calling X-wing games "GOG exclusives", I'll be supporting you. That's why I entered the thread in the first place. If you want to try to convince me that steam exclusives aren't really exclusives, I'm out, I have better things to do.

Until there is such a thing as a Galaxy exclusive, right? ;)

Can't disagree with that; I've had similar experiences.

That said, X-Wing is thankfully nothing like Ultima 1-3 or C&C Tiberian Sun. :)

Indeed. Hopefully the day that an optional client will be mandatory to play a game will never come, and would be weird on a client who claims cross platform compatibility as a selling point, but worse/weirder things have happened.

I doubt that could ever happen, other then offering exclusive multi player - probably for older games that can't get it to work otherwise.

True, still, TIE Fighter is such a huge improvement over X-Wing. I never found the same love for X-Wing that I have for TIE Fighter. Oddly enough in case of this particular series I don't consider it quite necessary to play them in order, possibly because of how the games' plots are related to the movies. The Wing Commander and FreeSpace games on the other hand I really need to play in order.

I see where you're coming from. My only argument is that when there are a lot of improvements in a series and you start with the later games that include those improvements, it's difficult to go back and play the early games that don't have them. On the other hand, I think you don't miss those improvements as much in the early games if you play the games in order, and you appreciate them that much more in the later games when you get to them.

I came across a post and found it a little sad:

"I knew it wouldn't stay gog-exclusive. I used to buy stuff on gog because it was older stuff and it was never on steam. Nowadays it's just a matter of waiting until stuff comes to steam. Not saying that's a bad or a good thing, just the way it is. I expect we'll see all the other star wars games coming out too."
...
"It doesn't stop me from supporting gog, ... but I prefer my games on steam; I only bought games on gog back when I didn't think they would later come to steam."

Fortunately GOG continues to grow, as far as we know. :-)