Steam gets a lot of good indie games that never come to GOG. Steam also allows for more community and dev interaction... as well as populated MP games. But...

... searching through Steam is INSANE.

If not for having joined Steam communities around specific genres, I'd never find most games.

Let me say (again) what I always end up saying...

... GOG, I don't want to give Steam my money. But if your curation stays as "stingy" as it's been in accepting games (specifically indies), I'll keep grudgingly giving Steam money (however sporadically).

And of course, many of us here disagree with you.
You are however, entitled to your view, and it is only a view, as I certainly see no facts to back it up.

GOG's curation, while not perfect, is certainly good enough to keep most of the shovelware you see on Steam and at Itch.io, away from here. For that, many of us are truly thankful.

It's a sad true fact of life that you can't have everything you want.

True.
It seems Steam has some deal with big companies and their IPs.
This same pattern is seem in games from such companies, as you said. We can only expeculate, though.

Yeah, whenever I debate Steam's monopoly with people they tend to tell me how much better Steam's client is. When I ask why it's better 90% of what they say is social features, basically. I think people who aren't into that stuff vastly underestimate its mainstream importance.

Which is odd because you'd think places like Discord and Reddit would make Steam irrelevant, but I guess not.

Absolutely, I believe that without social features there wouldn't be much of a Steam to talk about. That, and around 20GB cloud storage for your screenshots and artworks. Sometimes I actually like to look at my old screenshots, believe it or not and having them in separate cloud is simply more convenient than having them on disc.

I understand completely that for most folks here on GOG features like these are useless, but for majority of Steam population they are not. Of course some peeps also enjoy achievements, trading cards and such but personally I never saw any fun in those.

Come to think of it, I believe that GOG is actually trying a bit too hard to be like Steam, with the client consolidating all other clients and all that. I believe their niche market are people who like simplicity in their gaming habits, like offline installers and drm free nature of games they own. But I'm not a businessman so I'm not gonna judge.

A perfect, full of wisdom and knowledge commentary.
I, too, for the explained reason, left Steam 3 years ago because the launcher was getting way too bloated for my liking, and it was getting a chore to use it if you value simplicity.

Old Steam launcher was good enough, well optimized, and with everything that it needed: Store, Library, Community for forums. Now the launcher is an ecosystem on its own. Specially the useless points shop, which servers no practical purpose customer-side, but to make people spend more money for cosmetics and to make the launcher slower.

That's actually why I don't use Galaxy.
I just want the game, and, if anything else is needed, searching the web will solve it.

Still, if people want that on their Launcher, its fine.
Just don't force people to use something they don't want to.
For that I will say it again: Long live drm-free and offline installers.

Thanks for your kind words.

Personally I find Galaxy to be a bit of a third wheel when considering GOG vs Steam situations, an opinion I'm sure many will find controversial. To put it bluntly: I think Steam client is superior to GOG Galaxy in basically every way. In my opinion GOG's strength lies in games they sell being playable completely offline and without any client whatsoever.

Right now I think they are catering more to people who just want Steam only different than to the die hard DRM free crowd they have seemed to cater to in the past. Maybe there's money in that and that's why they do it. As I said, I'm not gonna judge, GOG is a business after all.

Agreed. Will GOG be able to compete agaisnt Steam and Epic, though?
I'd say, with all due respect:
No, they will not, specially now with SteamDeck focusing on Linux gaming.

So they In my humble opinion they should focus on their niche again:
DRM-Free, simple, 'launchless' gaming and possibly on Linux builds too.

But like you said, probably they're getting a share from the drm'ed with launcher crowd through Galaxy and this could be necessary for the company feasibility.

It's what the vast majority of people want, so if GOG was to grow bigger they needed to try and attract those people. Many here will say they should have been happy serving their niche market and that's it, but businesses naturally try and grow larger and make more money. That's the purpose of their design.

In any case after much investment I think GOG has learned now they can't compete with Steam in those areas and have resigned themselves to that fact. Tim Sweeney at Epic will resign himself to it as well, eventually.

$50 BRL is currently just over half the us price

I have to say that i do enjoy the current version of steam. Outside the recommendations that work fine based on a wishlist and tags gathered from the games i enjoy most. Library management works quite well and with the new option to be able to remove multiple games at once i'm actually quite settled. I usually have around 200 games installed, so keeping track of things is sometimes necesary. The GoG librarian on the other hand excells at providing quick glances in general statistics. Which games do i still need to spend some time on etc etc.

The only thing that steam still lacks is an offline time tracker.

The thing with Epic is, they don't offer much outside of free games every week or so. When that well runs dry people will start noticing that and Epic will, at best, remain people's second launcher of choice for all the freebies they received and maybe an ocasional purchase or Fortnite match.

GOG on the other hand at least has it's inherent merits, launchers notwithstanding. It would be stupid for them to drop things like offline installers now, although from what I'm noticing less and less people actually care about their games being drm free nowadays, myself included. To be completely honest with you I just can't bring myself to care about video games with so much shit going on in real world right now.

I'm sorry if this has been said in this thread before and I just didn't see it, but what happens is:

1 - Steam changed regional pricing recommendations for Brazil a while ago, increasing them for a lot of games (for example, No Man's Sky is now more expensive there).

2 - GoG doesn't do regional pricing for all of its games, for a lot of them, GoG just converts the US price to BRL, using the conversion rates that they post regularly here in the forum. These are the cases where GoG tends to be more expensive for us than Steam.

I was recently looking at Steam prices for Argentina over on SteamDB and I felt pretty frustrated. But, it is what it is. *shrugs*

Yeah I mean your only hope of competing with an entrenched market share dominator like Steam is to offer something fresh and unique that captures everyone's attention. That's why GOG went for the whole "one launcher for all your games" thing, which ended up being something not many cared about (probably because they own everything on Steam anyway). It was a failure apparently, but I get why they went for it. Epic doesn't seem to even be trying in that regard, they just hope freebies and exclusives make people use their client enough to prefer it I guess? Seems like a lost cause to me.

As for DRM I've never really cared about Steam DRM to be honest, on a technical level. Steam isn't going anywhere in my lifetime, and even if it did the PC gaming community has shown they'll do what it takes to keep abandoned games alive. The reason I have always bought on GOG when possible is just the principle of the thing, supporting the guys who don't insult me with dumb and pointless DRM.