Hi everyone,

Up until this moment i used to buy games on steam because it’s trust worthy and i could play offline, then only some games and now none. I also realised that achevements don’t mean squat to me anymore so i don’t care if gog have them or not and the DRM free is a massive selling point.

My question is what other benefits does gog offer?

I’ve got too many front ends as is i don’t want add another place to the list unless it’s worth it so i thought i’d ask the people first... i will end up getting cyberpunk from here, i’m done with always online

Well, you already summed it up pretty well! XD
The difference is all in the offline installers (or your whole installation, if you prefer): you buy it, you keep it. DRM-free means no restrictions or nasty surprises down the line like limited activations, if GOG goes down tomorrow your backup is still where you left it.
Besides, with GOG Galaxy you can manage your other non-GOG games without going back to the other clients. It's a feature I don't use myself, but I can see the benefits it can give to somebody with a large collection elsewhere.

By the way, welcome!


EDIT: also, the community game-specific subforums are extremely useful, you'll often find the solution to your problems in a generally friendly environment.

The main reason I like gog is it doesnt automatically update my games. I hate when I get a game how I want it, it updates and breaks everything Ive done.

It's really primarily the offline-installers.
Gog also seems to be better at making old games run on modern machines than Steam, but of course you might not care about that.
If you're primarily into more recent games, you might be dissatisfied with Gog, apparently patches are often coming later to Gog than to Steam.
So it really depends how important having offline installers (which you should back up imo) is to you and whether you're more interested in older or newer games.

They're European and they have cute support staff.

Well, congratulations, you found out that always-online-drm is 'evil', and that unnecessary client software that goes mandatory with game purchases is not something you should be forced to install on your PC when buying a game - welcome to gog :-)!

When buying here you should be aware that gog also heavily promotes their form of 'drm-free'-customer client named galaxy. Many of the younger or not so tech-savvy customers will probably like that, but if you really care about drm free and completely offline playable games always go for the offline installers, download them and keep them in a save place, maybe an external harddisk. That way if gog ever goes out of business you will still have your game installers available. Also note that sometimes newer versions of some games are very different compared to previous versions as some features are added, removed or replaced. If you keep your offline installers you still have a choice of what version of the game to install and play while those who rely on online-/galaxy-/client-installed versions only will probably have to use the latest version.

The bad news about gog.com is that sometimes they are rather late when it comes to games updates (compared to other stores like steam). It may take days, sometimes weeks for some games to get updates, and more often than not you may get an update in your game library but no changelog so you will have to search for the reason for the update on other websites which can be quite annoying.

And it may be worth mentioning that over the years gog.com threw away some of their early principles, e. g. about non-regional pricing ('one price for all' obviously did not work for them) and some other things, in some cases even drm: for some games you have to install their galaxy client if you want to play multi-player online games or you have to play via the server of the game publisher and create an account there. Unfortunately they rather make game publishers add some form of galaxy support to their games instead of asking them to make the games really drm free and allow us players to play either with local lan settings or direct ip-to-ip internet play without unnecessary client software (i. e. making the game really drm free for multi-player too!)

But on the whole all you cannot go wrong to buy here when no drm is important for you as this - unfortunately - still seems to be the only place where you can get a lot of games for (during sales) reasonables prices and with an option to download their offline installers which may be installed on PCs with no internet connection.

One final note: even games installed with the offline installer setup files may sometimes try to phone home. If you are using windows as your operating system either disconnect your PC from the internet or rather use a third party firewall software that allows you to prevent programs/games from accessing the internet when installing/playing games...

edit: removed typos

Yea, why indeed ?

Why should anyone need a specific reason to use a particular seller store or brand ?

Steam does not require you to stay online indefinitely so there's that of course. Not to mention that there are only a few titles such as Warhammer II that require you to come online for a sec once in a while so personally i don't see any value of worth in the comparison with GoG if that is in your mind. I do have to admit that downloading file cabinets does offer somewhat more flexibility in cases that you suspect to be outside online range for prolonged periods of time.

The DRM factor seems to fit for a lot of buyers for GoG. Pursuiing this form of idealism that does have its merit. On a personal level i am to rightwinged to appreciate this in the full but oke.

Personally i buy older games through GoG. Games i played in my youth and have fond memories of. Now since i almost completed the collection i remember from my youth i also realize that most are literally unplayable but are nice wannahaves and with a specific trend ruling the forum atm i actually find myself on the other side of the line finding little to no reason to purchase through GoG so i have returned to steam and/or buying through the developers platforms if applicable since that seems to be the best way of supporting your supplier of good fun ( Slitherine/Matrix Ubisoft Electronic Arts etc )

As for me, i download games by Galaxy but i still like to launch them directly form .exe files. I don't have that good an internet, i like to just junp straight into the game. GOG is polish not American. By supporting GOG, you support Europeans.

Besides, they gave us Diablo Hellfire and Icewind Dale 2

Wow thanks for all the responses, i miss the days of managing my own installers, i am sick to death of having to load a client to play all my games. I will be getting cyberpunk tomorrow and if all goes well i will be sticking with this going forward i hope you all see this and thanks again

GOG is run by a girls-only club, if you're into that I mean...

Almost all games are DRM free here, and that's pretty much the only selling point of GOG. Still, it's the only one that matters to me, which is why I'm here.

Now for the cons:

Unfortunately GOG's customer service is inferior to steam's, GOG's game selection is inferior to steam's, and GOG's game update system/policy is inferior to steam's.

Europeans aren't inherently better than Americans (or any other humans). Ubisoft is European too; do you support Uplay DRM too, just because it's European?
That's all I have to say about it! Just keep your silly nationalism private.

True enough, but Cyberpunk is set in the US (California?) and seems to have a very American aesthetic (also a truck with a trans flag), doesn't have any of the East Central European charme the Witcher games had.
But I agree it's good to support a European company like Gog, not everything should be US-centric.

"Curation" on GOG is not an advantage, but rather, the antithesis of one.

It leads to GOG rejecting all sorts of good or great games for no legitimate reason.

And it also leads to GOG censoring games by way of simply not allowing them onto it's store. GOG has very few AO-rated games, for example, and seems to have a non-publicized policy to have it's 'curators' reject them as a general rule. Whereas Steam generally doesn't censor content in that way, which is one of the reason why Steam has a much better selection of games.

And it's not like "curation" keeps bad games out of GOG anyway. It certainly doesn't. There's tons of bad games here.