Incline [Poll] Steam vs GOG. Which one do you prefer?

[Irata]

Gog rolled over for CCP censorship. I'd take the worst DRM before I'd accept that.
Regardless, if you're worried about "owning" your games, removing the DRM on nearly every game on Steam is a simple matter of replacing a single file.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

on the technology side, gog installers are fucking horrid.
Have any of you installed any larger games using them? Shit's like installing a fitguygirl repack.

 

[I'm Big Into Anal]

steam

 

[Trithne]

on the technology side, gog installers are fucking horrid.
Have any of you installed any larger games using them? Shit's like installing a fitguygirl repack.

Sometimes that's because they are.

 

[Dadd]

I prefer getting the .exe directly from the developer's website.

 

[luj1]

on the technology side, gog installers are fucking horrid.

Can u elaborate why

I know Galaxy sucks ass

 

[rusty_shackleford]

on the technology side, gog installers are fucking horrid.

Can u elaborate why

I know Galaxy sucks ass

the installers use outdated compression and only one thread to decompress, they're actually just a variant of inno setup and you can extract them using innoextract on linux.
larger games take a looong time to install, significantly longer than downloading for me

steam downloads & decompresses simultaneously, but it would be nice to not require their client to do it.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

I prefer using zipped folders without installers.

 

[racofer]

on the technology side, gog installers are fucking horrid.

Can u elaborate why

I know Galaxy sucks ass

the installers use outdated compression and only one thread to decompress, they're actually just a variant of inno setup and you can extract them using innoextract on linux.
larger games take a looong time to install, significantly longer than downloading for me

steam downloads & decompresses simultaneously, but it would be nice to not require their client to do it.

And don't forget that everything extracted passes through your %windir%\temp folder, regardless of where you're installing the game. Even Fitgirl installers are not this terrible.

I have Galaxy installed just to apply updates. Whenever an update pops up, I just open Galaxy and let it update the game. It's faster than installing the whole game again since it only applies a differential update of the game files like Steam does. My whole offline library is kept up-to-date and hash-checked with lgogdownloader running on WSL.

 

[Kev Inkline]

Is there a good third party app for tracking hours spent on a gog game (or a steam one for that matter -- or even any app), that'd be nice.

 

[Ereshkigal]

Is there a good third party app for tracking hours spent on a gog game (or a steam one for that matter -- or even any app), that'd be nice.

And as an added feature, it won't sell your data to third parties.

 

[racofer]

Is there a good third party app for tracking hours spent on a gog game (or a steam one for that matter -- or even any app), that'd be nice.

https://playnite.link/

Shits all over Galaxy, works 100% offline, supports everything (GOG/Steam/UPlay/Battle.net/etc), supports emulators, lots of plugins, fully customizable...

 

[Kev Inkline]

Is there a good third party app for tracking hours spent on a gog game (or a steam one for that matter -- or even any app), that'd be nice.

And as an added feature, it won't sell your data to third parties.

And where do you record the data in this thing, whatever it is?

 

[Vic]

Playnite has an extension called GameActivity which shows even more detailed stats

 

[lightbane]

I used to like GOG over Steam, but my mind changed as the former began to become... Weird and lose functionality, while Steam got better (to some degree). The final straw was that one game that I liked bought for GOG some years ago, Dropsy, got a DLC free update for Steam a month ago or so... But nothing for the GOG version so far. There's an Excel list of all of the stuff that is missing in GOG available in Steam. The forums also became hilariously terrible but I'm not sure if the Steam ones are better.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

That's a tough question, because while I like GOG's stated mission of being a curated, bug-free and DRM-free experience, they're not really living up to it. Their idea of being curated is to bring up shitty games while ignoring games that do because...reasons. Only taking them after they've already been on Steam for some time, at which point, why bother? Grimoire has been discussed to death, but recently I was motivated to purchase the remaster of classic space sim Ironseed, the kind of game that should be on GOG. Its not. The lack of updates to games that should have them and the gradually disappearing DRM-free policy have eroded what point they had. At this point you'd be better off pirating the original versions of games they sell, because you'd get the better experience that way. For DRM, with modern games there are places like Itch.io and Zoom that sell modern indie games DRM-free, so why bother?

 

[Konjad]

Is there a good third party app for tracking hours spent on a gog game (or a steam one for that matter -- or even any app), that'd be nice.

There was a very good one with similar features as Steam (before Steam had them):

But eventually they sold out to some large company, and the new owner started putting advertisements literally everywhere (including pop-ups) and that drove users away (including me), then it died within months.

 

[Ryzer]

307 hours sunk in Oblivion, Yup a true codexer.

 

[†††]

307 hours sunk in Oblivion, Yup a true codexer.

How else is he gonna tell if the game is bad?

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

It's not a choice for me. My gaming computer has no internet access, so it's either offline installer or torrenting. I'd like to have an alternative to GOG, but right now there isn't one.

 

[Black_Willow]

GoG, because no DRM.

 

[schru]

It should be pointed out that the DRM aspect of Steam is entirely optional and left to the developer's or publisher's discretion. Even if Steamworks is used with a game it's not required that the Steamworks DRM for executables be implemented, only that if the publisher wants to make said game work without the Steam client, some or all of the Steamworks features will be disabled.

 

[smaug]

Just went back on GOG to get some stuff. Why is there so much anime porn?

 

[PrK]

DRM-free installers are too important given the necessity of historical preservation and censorship protection.
For everything else steam is incomparably better.
Apparent solution since steam doesn’t offer DRM-free installers: pirate and archive everything.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Steam just edges it for me, because when I tell the missus I'm going to play a game on it I start singing the utterly shite East 17 song "Steam" during the desciption.

"Yeah babe, I'm gonna check out those new games I bought on.....Steam....Steam! There's no need to be afraid....Steam!...."



Does her fucking head in.

Holy shit I never realized Lei's theme from Tekken 3 used a sample from that song:

 

[Fronzel Neekburm]

If you had asked me a couple of years ago, the answer would have been gog, hands down.

Nowadays I hate them both about equally for different reasons.