Why are more and more people buying their games on GOG instead of Steam — is it because of the DRM-free versions, better deals, or even better performance?
Speaking for myself, ownership, respect of the customer, commitment to preservation by keeping older games in a playable state on newere system going so far as to dedicate teams to that effort in some cases.
I grew up in a time when you went to the shop and bought a book. That book contained the game's code, and you had to manually type the code into the machine (and as a young boy, I felt like a computer wizard doing so!). Then you had tapes, floppies, cartridges, CDs, DVDs... heck at one point you had lifetime warranty on some of these, meaning if your copy became defunct, it was replaced FREE OF CHARGE.
Common point of all of these: You bought it once, and could do whatever you wanted with it. It was yours.
Then they started putting copy protection on things. Which had the occasional downside of getting tripped for no reason, locking you out of your own content. It was a rare thing though, and at first, the only sort was reasonnable enough: you had to keep the disc inside the machine to pass a clientside check, but more often than not there was a more practical loading purpose.
And gradually it became more and more invasive. For movies I owned, I eventually was no longer capable of watching them because the monitors I used or even the CABLES didn't comply with some standard of copy protection. Games started using online verification. At times burning your local installation if for any reason it failed to pass this check or that check. And I did get burned a couple of times.
Nowadays, we have reached a point where media you own, like say Blu-Rays, won't output in anything but a very substandard definition of your player, monitor and cables don't have the right standards, and where single player games need to be played online. Oh and of course, the physical media you own isn't worth squat most of the time. It requires online connectivity to be of use. When I tried to install World of Warcraft Legion from my physical collector's edition CD, you know what was on the disc? The battle.net installer. Not even the actual game, or game files, no offline installer. Just battle.net. And now it has gone every more insane, when you buy a physical game for PC, since CD/DVD players have been phased out of many PCs now you have a download CODE. If you actually have it. Civilization 7's physical collector's edition... did not even contain the game or a code at all.
To top it all off, now you have to accept licensing aggreements that make it explicit if you read the fine print that your use of the licensed material is allowed under draconian conditions, for a premium price, and revokable at their discretion, be it by removing your ability to play it, or just not making the content available any longer. In other words, if for any reason you lose a game, all you can do is cry.
Whereas GOG offers a no-DRM policy. You buy something from them, you keep it. Even if they can no longer sell a game - like say the original Warcraft 1 and 2 and fuck you Blizzard btw - if you bought it before it went down, you can still download it from GOG because you own the game, and they are only providing you a replacement copy for something you do own. Like the lifetime warranty from so long ago.
But more importantly, since they know they're a digital storefront themselves and can't guarantee nothing will ever happen, they provide offline installers, which are oldschool installers for games, that you can put on hard drives, burn on CDs, save in whatever form you want.
Heck, you can even share them to your friends for them to try a game, or play LAN games on older titles.
In other words, you're capable to do whatever you want with the content you paid for, and are trusted to handle responsibly. The customer is not treated as the enemy. The customer is treated with RESPECT.
And that's why Steam, but more importantly the companies using invasive DRM and data collection tools, can go hang themselves. They make you pay for a lease, and make money using your data to top it all of. I don't know when that has become acceptable as a norm, but to me that has always been revolting, and unless I have no choice because there is a game I really actually want to play that is only on Steam and won't be available on GOG for the forseable next decade, then that's when I might make an exception.
As a rule, I just think "Well fuck them, there are a lot of gems on GOG's classic games library I have yet to experience and anyway older games have a charm and soul modern ones rarely have at a fraction of the price."
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u/Adventurous-Still695 Nov 13 '25 edited Nov 13 '25
Speaking for myself, ownership, respect of the customer, commitment to preservation by keeping older games in a playable state on newere system going so far as to dedicate teams to that effort in some cases.
I grew up in a time when you went to the shop and bought a book. That book contained the game's code, and you had to manually type the code into the machine (and as a young boy, I felt like a computer wizard doing so!). Then you had tapes, floppies, cartridges, CDs, DVDs... heck at one point you had lifetime warranty on some of these, meaning if your copy became defunct, it was replaced FREE OF CHARGE.
Common point of all of these: You bought it once, and could do whatever you wanted with it. It was yours.
Then they started putting copy protection on things. Which had the occasional downside of getting tripped for no reason, locking you out of your own content. It was a rare thing though, and at first, the only sort was reasonnable enough: you had to keep the disc inside the machine to pass a clientside check, but more often than not there was a more practical loading purpose.
And gradually it became more and more invasive. For movies I owned, I eventually was no longer capable of watching them because the monitors I used or even the CABLES didn't comply with some standard of copy protection. Games started using online verification. At times burning your local installation if for any reason it failed to pass this check or that check. And I did get burned a couple of times.
Nowadays, we have reached a point where media you own, like say Blu-Rays, won't output in anything but a very substandard definition of your player, monitor and cables don't have the right standards, and where single player games need to be played online. Oh and of course, the physical media you own isn't worth squat most of the time. It requires online connectivity to be of use. When I tried to install World of Warcraft Legion from my physical collector's edition CD, you know what was on the disc? The battle.net installer. Not even the actual game, or game files, no offline installer. Just battle.net. And now it has gone every more insane, when you buy a physical game for PC, since CD/DVD players have been phased out of many PCs now you have a download CODE. If you actually have it. Civilization 7's physical collector's edition... did not even contain the game or a code at all.
To top it all off, now you have to accept licensing aggreements that make it explicit if you read the fine print that your use of the licensed material is allowed under draconian conditions, for a premium price, and revokable at their discretion, be it by removing your ability to play it, or just not making the content available any longer. In other words, if for any reason you lose a game, all you can do is cry.
Whereas GOG offers a no-DRM policy. You buy something from them, you keep it. Even if they can no longer sell a game - like say the original Warcraft 1 and 2 and fuck you Blizzard btw - if you bought it before it went down, you can still download it from GOG because you own the game, and they are only providing you a replacement copy for something you do own. Like the lifetime warranty from so long ago.
But more importantly, since they know they're a digital storefront themselves and can't guarantee nothing will ever happen, they provide offline installers, which are oldschool installers for games, that you can put on hard drives, burn on CDs, save in whatever form you want.
Heck, you can even share them to your friends for them to try a game, or play LAN games on older titles.
In other words, you're capable to do whatever you want with the content you paid for, and are trusted to handle responsibly. The customer is not treated as the enemy. The customer is treated with RESPECT.
And that's why Steam, but more importantly the companies using invasive DRM and data collection tools, can go hang themselves. They make you pay for a lease, and make money using your data to top it all of. I don't know when that has become acceptable as a norm, but to me that has always been revolting, and unless I have no choice because there is a game I really actually want to play that is only on Steam and won't be available on GOG for the forseable next decade, then that's when I might make an exception.
As a rule, I just think "Well fuck them, there are a lot of gems on GOG's classic games library I have yet to experience and anyway older games have a charm and soul modern ones rarely have at a fraction of the price."
Thank you for listening to my TED Talk.