They were Good Old Games for about 4 years until 2012, when they started selling modern games and rebranded to just GOG, dropping the whole “old games” moniker.

(Yeah, I’m also old. I was there when they rebranded, but I thought it was recently, around 2020!)

I’m confused as to how people with English as a second language even learn the word “costumer”. It’s reasonably obscure!

Eh, Heroic isn’t free of fault either; e.g. when it offered to auto-install REDmod along with CP2077 I couldn’t launch the game because the REDmod it installed was completely broken. I’d say that Steam is slightly less buggy than Heroic overall, both of them being pretty damn solid. Haven’t used Lutris much because, well, Steam and Heroic work well enough.

Would a leaner Steam be nice? Yeah, but reliable, lean cross-platform GUI toolkits aren’t easy to come by.

I use heroic to install and have the setting on to auto add them to my steam library

I’m on Linux as well and I just use heroic for my gog library

I thought more of Lutris and GameHub, forgot about Heroic. There’s also Legendary and Cartridge but i don’t know them.

I have recently realized that I could claim tons of games from amazon with prime subscription that are claimed in GOG. And it seems GOG has some games available for Linux. There usually are couple of download links for different OSes

Lutris was pretty janky IME. Bottles has similar issues with Lutris and some very bizarre UI decisions (like IIRC you can’t delete bottle snapshots from the UI, so unless you manually go and delete them in the filesystem, creating snapshots just takes up an ever increasing amount of space). Honestly Heroic is kind of janky too and throws errors about login status half the time, but it generally works at least when it comes to launching the games. The problem is Steam almost always just works, and if it doesn’t work it’s pretty much always the game’s fault and thus I would have problems with any launcher.

Steam doesn’t enforce the use of its DRM (which is super easy to bypass anyway but that’s a side note).

Steam lets you publish your game on their platform and hand out as many keys as you like to resell on other platforms (at no cost) while still doing all the heavy lifting of hosting and distributing.

Steam doesn’t decide what kinds of titles get published on their platform any more than GoG does, so the bit about remasters, etc. is a bit weird. Besides you the user should get to decide what you want to buy and play.

I love GoG, but I love Steam as well. They’re not mutually exclusive and you can have both.

RAM eating we browser? What, you playing games on 256 MB?

Also, you can 100% customise Steam. There are various user created skins out there you can just plop onto Steam.

Can’t play Stellaris through Heroic because of the launcher being broken.

Bypassing the launcher requires some convoluted setup, and it also removes the ease of modding.

Manually installing Stellaris through Lutris works, but Lutris isn’t well maintained, and even though it’s connected to GOG, doesn’t update Stellaris. Says it can’t find updates despite there clearly being one.

What did Steam do to offend you?

But this does nothing to address my need for towering pillars of hats, masks, and outfits!

Nope! I’ll horde steam and gog both, now i shame you into flossing your feet and brushing your butt.

I feel like GOG would be more popular if their client were better. Maybe more usable with a controller too?

And something that would help competition in the game launcher space in particular would be if OSes had great built-in controller support (and controller OS navigation) so we wouldn’t have to rely on Steam for it.

I get both sides of this. I understand wanting GoG to have an official Linux client, but the Steam Client is such garbage.

I like both Heroic and Lutris

I think these days, “costumers” are called “cosplayers”

Imagine being sane, neither an steam only, pc master race enthusiast, nor a FOSS Linux 100% privacy and anonymity zealot.

An under-discussed topic is what will happen to Steam after Gaben crosses the rainbow bridge. It’s practically begging to be enshittified.

With games I own, I never have to worry about this.