http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/xib5i/i_know_quite_a_few_people_are_still_unfamiliar/

It appears to be someone who is uses GOG.com, yes.

How surprising that all of the pro-Steam comments have billions of points and the anti-Steam comments have billions of negative points...

Sarcasm or not? :) r/gaming adores Gaben and Steam; they seem to respect and like GOG, but certainly not to the degree of Steam.

Well reddit points are a lot like GOG rep, which is a lot like points in Whose Line Is It Anyway. It's just a shame when good comments get buried for voicing a minority opinion, and vice versa.

No, but I do find the thread interesting because there seem to be a lot of even-tempered responses that explain why Steam's intrusion is forgiven: the extra features (auto-patches, social networking, etc.). It makes sense to me, because frankly I don't really like that stuff and I just find Steam to be a pain. I will say, though, that GFWL offers the same features and has been consistently slammed on reddit to high heaven. I think I've had about as many problems with one as I have had with the other, TBH.

This, I've had a one time problem with GfWL ever and arguably it was just the fucking game that decided to shit and corrupt my save game. GfWL "just works" every bit as well as Steam does.

I think the biggest complaint, and the only valid one I can find, is that it "just works" in a way that takes a much longer amount of time to work than Steam does, and requires a lot of restarts and such when patching and the like occurs.

That being said, I don't have anything against GFWL in and of itself, having had to use it with the first Kane and Lynch, but putting it on top of Steam, and then putting SecuROM on top of that when it comes to games like Batman: Arkham City is just downright insulting, and I can side with anyone who's against that.

I haven't played Arkham City on PC yet but I have played the Steam version of Arkham Asylum and it was absolutely fine, type in my existing account, click "automatically sign in" and done, seriously, that easy, I get achievements and nearly 100% of the friends list and other shiznit from my XBox 360 experience. It's fine if you don't actually care for it but saying it is ass is a bit of a lie. Same with Age of Empires Online and Fable III PC (the one that corrupted the auto save).

Comparing GOG.com and Steam is unfair to GOG.com, imho: Valve's tech is an on-line service where you "own" absolutely nothing of what you pay for. You can defend Steam as much as you want, but this is the absolutely factual truth.

GOG.com, on the other hand, is a STORE of games in digital format where you get ownership for your purchases. I don't value "digital" ownership myself that much, but the difference with Steam is appalling to me...

I think GTA IV topped that, didn't it? I believe it was Steam and GFWL and SecuROM and Rockstar Social Club. Talk about a DRM clusterfuck.

GfWL in Arkham City is fine unless you're one of the unlucky sods who ran into the silly bug where the game just randomly deleted all your saves without any warning. And because someone thought it would be a good idea to tie savegames to your GfWL ID with some sort of encryption algorithm, presumably to prevent achievement cheating or some such nonsense, you couldn't just ask someone else for their saved game to pick up from there – either replay the whole thing or piss off.. Happened to a few people on this very forum, so it wasn't a very rare issue, either.

That shit does happen, but your key isn't deleted, if you make backups of your game saves dirs (and GfWL games at least have standard locations for these, which is a fucking improvement) you can restore them fine. I'm not defending fucking up saved games, Fable III did that to me as well, but afaik there's nothing to prove that that's GfWL fucking it up and rather possible the games are doing it (Fable III is definitely what ate my game on further reflection).

I'm guessing GfWL will get cloud saves soon just like XBL, so it'll soon be a moot point provided you're willing to use the service.

Twice. :-/

And it was determined it si GFWL fault. When you got some achievement it got registered with Steam but not with GFWL, thus throwing the save out of synch and making it disappear. Yes, it was repaired but it took them more than 4 months. It wasn't possible to back-up the save. Or more precisely it wasn't needed. The save remained intact, only GFWL couldn't recognise so there was no reason to do it.
And it was only one reason for save disappearance. For the first time it was for some strange other reason and I wasn't able to retrieve it. Me and a lot of other people.

Hmm, I wasn't aware of that period of GfWL history, sad to hear it, but glad it's fixed. I do know that at least a couple of forum members do use it heavily, it seems to work fine for them as well. I've probably clocked 2000 or more achievement points in the last month or two on GfWL so I do play it a lot, no problems. Others kick my ass at how much they use it;)