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this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2024
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So what's the problem about using third party clients like heroic game launcher ? Or did I understand the first line of your post wrong ?
Heroic is just as terrible. None of the alternative ways to manage game libraries support any of the large list of features that Steam does that I rely upon to make PC gaming a comfortable experience, and that list was far from comprehensive.
Until there's an open game library management tool in any way comparable to Steam, DRM free has no value to me. I'm willing to (and want to, for the things I haven't yet) self host movies, ebooks, audiobooks, TV shows, etc, because you can get a functional experience with them. I am not willing to do so with games because you cannot.
Steam makes millions of dollars for Valve. They can afford to put a lot of work into making it impossible for anyone to ever catch up to them. If you will never use anything else until it has feature parity with steam as well as having other upsides compared to it, you are never going to benefit from the other upsides.
What upsides?
A. Many games that are DRM free on GOG are also DRM free on Steam.
B. Most of the games that are only DRM free on GOG are old, out of date builds that don't get bug fixes and updates.
C. Even if both of those weren't true, DRM free isn't worth a terrible UX and no features. If GOG had feature parity for everything Steam does except big picture mode, big picture mode alone would outweigh the outrageously small chance that Steam somehow removes access to my games.
But they're not just not at feature parity. They're like 2 out of 10 software. Better than Epic's 0 of 10, but still really bad.
I challenge you to download an offline installer from Steam for these DRM-free games they host.
Why do you need an installer? Most of the games we're talking about you can just run the executable and be fine, because those are the games actually willing to publish on GOG. The ones that are substantial enough to need an installer are the same ones I talk about in B, that don't get basic patches and bug fixes, because GOG's customer base isn't worth the effort and GOG wouldn't have the games at all if they required update parity.
But again, it's completely irrelevant, because GOG and Galaxy don't offer any of the features to manage a library I need. If Steam didn't exist, I would abandon PC gaming entirely. No other platform on PC is anywhere near acceptable.
I don't get that installer thing ? Steam downloads the game executable as well as all of the required libraries and assets into the steamapps directory and runs install scripts. It also runs potentially needed dependency installers like c++ visual studio redistributables or directx installers. The same thing does the gog installer. And the games I own on gog have always had version parity with the steam versions. I thought this would be the standard if a publisher publishes on both stores.
He's saying the script with dependencies relies on steam. GOG's runs offline. But like you said, copying the end result is generally fine (and especially so on Linux where it's all contained in the fake folder structure).
If there's not some moderately heavy DRM on Steam, you're more likely to get the same build on both stores (not always, though). It's when GOG is actually the only DRM free version that you tend to end up with a lack of version parity.
I talked about the
line. Like what makes a game substantial enough to need an installer ? Steam and every other game launcher with install capabilities is more or less just a fancy installer. There is no more effort needed for a publisher to generate a new installer binary than it is to generate a new steam patch. Even if gog installers are offline it's more or less an archive with a binary stub to unpack it and the install script. This one is on the publisher and not on gog. And for the version difference, do you have an example where the gog and steam versions differ ?