Avogadro6: That, and the delay of patches and updates, are the main reasons I don't buy new games on Gog.
Maxvorstadt: But on GoG the patches are checked by the GoG team if they work and don`t cause bigger troubles as the problems they should correct.
On Steam (and similar sites) you might get a patch faster as you would on GoG, but also the risk is greater that this patch brings new major bugs and render your game unplayable.
Sure, GoG is not allmighty, and they make mistakes too, but they are not like Steam who say: "Ah, new patch? Cool, let`s apply it and fuck the users if there`s something wrong with it!"!!!!!
All I know is that I would prefer dealing with the occasional bad patch every now and then, than having to wait a week or more for all the good ones.
All the few major releases I've followed on Gog (Wasteland 2, PoE, Witcher 3 and more) had issues either due to patches delay, or because the games\updates were broken (hello Viking Conquest). There's also the problem of some devs/publishers discontinuing support of the Gog version and while that might not be Gog's fault, I'd rather dodge that bullet too.
Steam lets the devs handle patching because testing and managing hundreds of updates manually is simply not feasible. Gog's system was fine when it was only about making old games work on modern systems, but now that they have Linux support, Mac support, and a growing number of newish games still actively patched to deal with, it's obvious they are struggling to keep up. Imho they should just move toward an automatic system. Testing and QA should be done by the devs anyway.