wytefang: Well people aren't going to stupidly turn off Steam Guard just to have this integration working. I'm pretty confident the guy talking about Valve making this not work purposefully is 100% on the money with his estimation/guess/idea.
What a shame. SMH
jdm12983: Not sure how anyone with common sense can go along/believe that rant.
Seeing as there are tons of sites that pull Steam stats that Steam hasn't shut down yet. And seeing as you still have to have Steam installed and running to run your Steam games even if you launch out of GoG; it in know way effects Steam.
To me the guy is just ranting because he is all butt-hurt over Steam.
GoG isn't replacing anything; just allows you to see a lot of info in one place. You still have to have Steam, Uplay, Origin, etc. all installed to play any game you have through them, weather you launch them in GoG or not.
I don't have any inside knowledge into the workings of steam, but I have worked for and alongside major retailers including Walmart, Target and Amazon and can assure you that the theory you're referring to would be well inline with online strategies that Walmart.com or Amazon.com would take. It's also common for Walmart and Amazon.com to target much smaller competitors in their marketplace and use 'allegedly' monopolistic practices in order to reduce or eliminate their market share. I see no reason why Valve, as a large corporation, would act any differently than these retailers.
It would not surprise me one bit if Valve has data which shows them how many people switch from GOG to Steam each time the sync breaks and they choose to continue to do this over and over in order to obtain more primary users while reducing the primary users of their competitor. Valve is in the driver's seat here due to their massive size compared to GOG and there's no reason to think they would act differently than how Walmart acted when they put 100s of local pharmacies out of business by selling products below cost (this one doesn't require an 'allegedly').
It's confirmed now that the latest issue is a result of the v0.55 update (Roundlay's fix works), so this isn't a conspiracy theory at all - it's a rational theory. Then again, lazy coding or ambivalence to GOG altogether are also rational theories.
I'm frankly amazed that so many of these online stores have gotten along so well for so long and for the sake of the consumer I hope it continues.
(As a side note - if you want to open an Ubisoft game you have purchased through steam using GOG, you must have steam open - as you noted - but if you purchased the game through Epic games, you can bypass Epic and go straight to Ubisoft. Something to think about while you consider Valve's priorities)
