Any loss as you call it, was no different to that involved with any other promotion, including giving away free games.

Such is the cost of advertising etc, or encouragement to come to GOG and get games, which obviously includes making an account. Call it sowing seeds if you like, that could well bear fruit one day.

Right now and for many years, free loaders have been getting free games from Epic every week.

GOG have made it clear they are in the game long term, just as Epic have.

And GOG always had full control, and so wouldn't have been impacted any more than they wanted or were prepared to be.

So calling it a loss due to some free loading Steam folk, is kind of quite naive.

It doesn't work like that at all. Developers/Publishers on steam are able to generate steam keys at will (might be some arbitrary limit per time period). Gog would have made a deal with the developer/publisher (no idea how much money that deal would have involved, if any), and wouldn't be dealing with steam in any way.

In exchange, they would've (potentially) drawn customers away from Steam.

GOG Connect seemed like a good idea but nobody really wanted to take part of it. I don't remember many notable games being added through this other than Torchlight 2? Or Shadowrun Returns? Stuff like that.

Oh, they finally removed the link. I was wondering about that.
Well, it had a good run, I guess GOG couldn't support it.

It was a great idea. For the people on the site.
Not so much for GOG itself, I would wager. Especially since it was one way; you would buy games on steam and get it for free here (if lucky), rather than buy games here and get it for free on Steam.

It was already dead, this was just a very late burial.

There are a lot of people commenting on how terrible it was because GOG was providing for free what Valve had been paid for, but I think people are missing the point. It was a loss leader... that is to say it was a promotion which cost GOG money but got people to make accounts. It probably wasn't worth it in the long run, but I certainly understand the logic behind it.

There were only a handful of games I would have considered using Connect for at all but GOG doesn't have any of them. The dealbreaker was that it required a permanent link to a Steam account.

I only used this for the Saints Row games. Ultimately, I wonder why it took them so long to actually kill it?

What some here don't really seem to understand, is the psychology behind GOG Connect.

Anyone who is happy using Steam, is unlikely to be interested in GOG, unless they have some curiosity at the very least about DRM-Free, or GOG have a game they are interested in that isn't available at Steam.

What GOG Connect allowed Steam users to do, was try out GOG and DRM-Free, with games they already owned at Steam. It meant they could try a game they know as DRM-Free and see whether they liked the benefit. Sure, many of us that were already using GOG could also take advantage if we had a game at Steam but not at GOG, and it was available via GOG Connect.

In any case, half the challenge for GOG, has always been to promote awareness of the store and not just DRM-Free amongst mainstream gamers, the huge majority of them use Steam. So getting that awareness is the first step, second step is getting a Steam user to create a GOG account, all of which makes it easier for that Steam user to then make a purchase at some point, if motivated enough.

Getting a free game from GOG, even if you already owned it at Steam, fostered good will.

What value is a free game from GOG of a game you already own at Steam, if you don't care about DRM-Free, and are quite happily using Steam? None really, except it is a chance for GOG to sow a seed via curiosity perhaps.

None of us really know what GOG Connect cost GOG, and none of us really know how much the game providers of those games that were made available through GOG Connect had a say. Maybe they gave GOG a blessing without charge to provide their game. In all reality, I don't imagine that many game providers to GOG care all that much about promoting GOG. If GOG did not exist, their games would be available elsewhere, if not necessarily DRM-Free.

So GOG Connect while great in theory, is only as good as the support for it.

And to be honest, many of the games I saw on GOG Connect were DRM-Free Lite at Steam anyway, so no real significant advantage to the Savvy to get it again from GOG. All the free games at Epic too, would have had a big impact.

Eh, it was fun while it lasted (a while ago btw), it was an easy way to grab some games I already had on my steam account on GOG instead, without the DRM or launchers.

I wish I got DRM-free versions of some more of my games like this, but eh. What I got is better than nothing.

Man all the nonesense about "Steam freeloaders"...

If anything the issue (for GOG) was that Connect was really never properly pushed to the public, which means of the people I know the only ones who actually made a decent use out of it were already GOG customers and that removed (for GOG) the actual benefit of keeping it running.

The rest is a load of b. as others already mentioned free games via connect were no different than the free games you get via other promotions (sales) or on other stores (EGS), yes the store in question sacrifice some revenue but with the intent of retaining existing customers as well as bring in new ones.

Farewell, GOG Connect.

I checked you at least once per week, even though you didn't have anything to offer for quite a while. I loved the concept, and always hoped to move another game from Steam to GOG. GOG is my preferred store because of the DRM-free games.

Never been really really alive, has it.

On rare occasion, publishers would give GOG games to anyone with the Steam version and accounts for both stores. The page to claim these giveaways was until recently at the bottom of every page on this site, but it hadn't been used in over a year anyway.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sarcasm