I have just redownloaded GOG Galaxy as I remembered I bought Witcher 3 a long time ago and never got round to playing it. What I have noticed however is that it is cheaper to buy the Witcher 3: GOTY version on Steam than it is to buy just the expansion pass on GOG which seems crazy to me. In fact the expansion pass alone is showing up as £19.99 on GOG, the GOTY edition is only £13.99 on Steam, the expansion pass being only £9.99 so half the price. What I am wondering is do GOG offer any sort of Price match? If I like the game, which seems likely given the reviews and its sucess, it makes sense for me to just buy the GOTY edition on Steam and remove GOG again. Let me know what my opions are.

Cheers
Dan

Hello Dan. The reason it's cheaper to buy the GOTY/Expansion Pass on Steam is because of the Winter Sale. GOG also had a 2-week Winter Sale which, incidentally, ended yesterday (and yes, it had the same discount as on Steam).

Now, as for your options:
1) Buy it on Steam
2) Wait for a new discount on GOG (they are pretty frequent)
3) Buy a GOG code from Amazon.co.uk:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Witcher-Wild-Hunt-Expansion-GOG-com/dp/B00XO24FHA/

It's a Mad Mad World:)

Thanks for the reply, gutted I randomly thought to play this game a mere one day after a 50% sale ended haha. Sods lore that. I will play the main game I guess and wait for the expansion pass to come back on Sale (Edit: Just clicked your link and Ive seen that Amazon have it for £9.99. Appreciated, Thanks again. My awful timing strikes again !

60% comrade, 60%!

I stand corrected :D

As far as i know, GOG do sells games here @ a competitive price but u have to buy them during sale for the best price. Doing so wld roughly get u a game which sells for around the same price from Steam during their sale which may or may not coincide with GOG's sale period.

From my experience, buying games from Steam is almost always cheaper than from GOG except a few occasions when GOG offers a very huge discount (read: 95%) on some games.

Even when both are having sale @ the same time, usually the price is about the same but Steam will still be slightly cheaper due 2 regional pricing. However, i prefer buying games over here on GOG than Steam as only GOG games are confirmed DRM-Free & some also comes with additional freebies that only GOG provides.

So unless both versions are basically the same (aka DRM-Free) & no additional freebies from GOG or ONLY Steam sells the particular game i really wanted then i'll consider getting from Steam.

Hope this info helps. :)

Just one more point of clarification, as I don't think it was addressed by anyone else: GOG don't price match. However, they tend to time their big sales (Summer and Winter) to run and end just before Steam's, so if you keep that in mind, you should be able to scoop up some tasty GOG deals.

Could you claify the benefit of a DRM free game? Does it just mean you can play the game without an internet connection?

Among other things, yes. There are various kinds of DRM, it ranges from requiring to be connected to the internet each time you install a game to having to be online at all times while playing it (notoriously there was a phase where Ubisoft's games would just stop working if you got disconnected while playing, it even affected singleplayer games like Assassin's Creed II). Then there's also activation limits, some games can only be installed a fixed number of times, although luckily this doesn't seem to be the case with (most?) newer games anymore.

So yeah, DRM-free means that you don't have to be connected to the internet to play a game and that you can also download an installer that you can store and move freely between computers and use as much as you want. The most extreme case that DRM-free protects you from is if the distributor goes down. As unlikely as it is for now, the day Steam goes down you will basically lose access to all games you've bought on there. If GOG goes down but you have copies of all your game's installers on an HDD or something you will still be able to install and play all the games you bought on here.

It's odd that you don't mention the retro catalogue and GOG making sure that these old games work on current systems.

Only a few hours of sleep. I spent the night playing Civilization with my brother. My apologies.

#1-#4 reasons: those mentioned above! :)

I make sure game purchases that I plan to play in 5-10 years are GOG titles. I know that GOG cares about compatibility, and I know DRM won't hinder me from playing my games.


DRM can be almost invisible (my daily life, Steam DRM has only annoyed me a few times and prevented me from playing a few times). Or it can be a nightmare. I had an Ubisoft flight sim that had a decent manual (maybe 8-12 pages, my memory is fuzzy [as is everything after that play-a-thon last night]) and the manual was only about how to "play" the DRM. How to get online and deactivate keys before making hardware changes to your system. And how even if you did deactivate the keys, each hardware change had a point system. And if you changed enough hardware to earn enough points, you would win the DRM game (which meant you would LOSE the $30 game I bought). I was so disheartened that I quit playing it after a few days. I'm always messing with my hardware -- especially in those days b/c I had a budget PC and was always getting whatever parts I could get for free from hand-me-downs. I just didn't want to mess with it, even though it was supposed to be an amazing simulator.

I didn't buy Ubi games for a long while after that. I think Might and Magic X may have been the turn-around, I can't remember. But Ubisoft just makes some interesting, unique games and they make them well. So I get and play them now. Their DRM feels less obtrusive now. But I'd love to play Driver in 15 or 30 years and I'm not sure that Ubi will still be around then. So when UPlay disappears, so do my games. That sucks.

I applaud Ubi for putting what games they "can" here. But unfortunately, "their policy" is preventing them from DRM-free new games. Their spokeswoman was hilarious when she said it. As if they really wanted to provide DRM-free games, but this evil "policy" was just unavoidable. Drats! What 'evs. I try to buy their games on consoles b/c at least then I have the expectation of the game disappearing after a decade or two.

I for myself hate it that I have to be online to play the Campaign of Heroes 6. I'm not sure if the same is true for their other games, as I haven't tried any newer. Without being online you can't use Dynasty weapons and traits which is very annoying to me.

Right now I'm always online so I wouldn't notice. But I completely agree. Its ridiculous they spend time and money on screwing people, especially people who work away from Internet (hotels - that was me for some time) or live in rural areas without reliable internet or other situations.

It makes no sense why they try to screw their customer. On purpose. That's why I limit my ubi purchases pretty strongly to budget prices or free on uplay (I count them as rentals) or get them on console where I know I'll be home.

With my current job, I'm only away from home a week or two a year. I used to be gone every week and hotels didn't Lal Ave good internet. I always kept some gogs on my computer so I had something to play. That's what got me strongly devoted to DRM freenes. I'm not a nut about it, but when given the choice of DRM free or DRM, the choice is obvious.