Steam continues to dominate the PC gaming market in both players and revenue, but GOG’s new owner believes its success comes down to convenience, not content quality. He says GOG plans to compete by focusing on a curated library of classic and modern titles rather than matching Steam’s scale.
I mean, it’s true that there are lots of games sold on Steam that aren’t great games, but that doesn’t hurt me much.
There are lots of products on Amazon that aren’t that great.
There are lots of websites on the Internet that aren’t that great.
As long as I can get to the stuff I want, all good.
EDIT: I think that a better selling point for GOG than that it excludes more not-good games is that the offline installer model can survive GOG going down.
Or maybe that GOG gives you control over updates. There are ways to do this with Steam, but it’s not an intended mode of operation, and some people, like heavy Skyrim modders, where an update can cause major breakage, really want control over when they update.
If the dev isn’t a bastard they can make different versions available through steam. Rocksmith found the last shred of decency in their body after breaking cdlc and put the previous version up. Outside of that, yeah it can be rough.
The publishers can do it via uploading beta branches, but there’s also a way to tell the Steam client to fetch old versions independently of that. I remember it coming up specifically with Skyrim, because updates broke a lot of modded environments, and it takes a long time for a lot of mods to be updated (during which time people couldn’t play their modded installs).
searches
https://steamcommunity.com/app/489830/discussions/0/4032473829603430509/
The
download_depotSteam console command.The above link is about Skyrim, but also links to a non-Skyrim-specific guide that talks about how to obtain manifest IDs for versions of other games.
But, yeah. It’s really not how Steam’s intended to be used, and I imagine that hypothetically, one day, it could stop working.
There are also IIRC some ways to block Steam from updating individual games, but again, not intended functionality.
searches
https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/0/3205995441631274440/
If you specifically want control over game updates for some game, then GOG can be a major benefit for that.
One concern I have is that games can be purchased — Oxygen Not Included, for example, was purchased by Tencent, which added data-mining. Fortunately, in that case, Tencent was open about what they were doing, and allowed players to opt out — if they let Tencent log data about them, they could “earn” various in-game rewards. But I could imagine less-pleasant malware being attached to games after someone purchases IP rights to them and just pushes it out. Can’t do that with GOG, since there’s no channel intrinsically available to a game publisher to push updates out (unless the game has that built-in to itself).
Not using Kagi anymore? What have you moved on to?
DDG mostly. I’m not unhappy with Kagi on any particular technical aspect, but I’m not happy about the fact that I learned that it was operating out of Serbia (it was often listed as being based in the San Francisco Bay Area; this appears to actually be a residence of the founder, not where the employees and offices are). I’d be much more comfortable about them getting in practical legal trouble if they wound up retaining data after saying that they don’t if they were operating in a US or EU or something legal jurisdiction. I posted about it to [email protected] a while back.
If they moved operations to the US or somewhere like that, I’d have no problem using them.
Thanks, good to know. I split between DDG and Kagi, not entirely happy with either.
I miss the old google.