*giggles

steam is sooo kiuhute

I do use steam of course and something i really like are the new steam sale profile backgrounds every year. Outside those, it is just ease of use.

There are a lot of abandoned games on Steam:
a) Early Access / Kickstarter projects that didn't complete. Broken promises everywhere.
b) Game-breaking bugs and/or compatibility problems that won't get patched anymore.

Just yesterday I studied the product page of a small artsy puzzle game named "Pavilion".
The description still says: "A game in two chapters; Chapter 1 out now(this). Chapter 2 out in 2018 as dlc." Yeah, right.
Selling incomplete/ broken/ incompatible stuff at full price is more than just a little bit scummy.
So, one surely has to be more careful and attentive when venturing out into the depth of the Steam shop.

c) False promise moonshots where lies were revealed about the development team, damaging their credibility. (Starbound, Forager, others.)

Sure, but abandoned games you can find everywhere. In our case there are games that DO get updates - just not on GOG.

One thing I like is how much money Valve is giving open source projects.

A few things I don't like
-Some games having a separate launcher to play their games.
-You need to download the steam client to download your games.
-Their monopoly on pc gaming that I feel once Gabe retires or dies, that Steam users are going to get hosed.

Not gonna read all of OP post and quite frankly you should have summarized your points to 1 paragraph.

Anyway, steam has more games.

A bit late to the party but here're my two cents:

- Universal controller support.
- Despite what the Steam Workshop entails, accessing and installing mods through it it's a very usable and hassle-free experience.
- It's specified on the product page when a given game requires agreeing to 3rd-party EULAs, has Denuvo, or requires another launcher.
- Easy-to-access information about a given game's update history.
- It's possible to update and/or delete reviews.
- The review system provides useful information at a glance, and their ranked tiers work for the most part in favour of their customers and not against them.
- It has all the Annapurna Interactive games.
- The steam fest events are great for discovering upcoming games and for creating a sense of community and celebration.
- Despite not being DRM-free, Steam feels trustworthy and reliable in the sense that it doesn't seem like it's going to explode come next Wednesday.
- They develop Proton.

The best thing I like about Steam is that it has more games than any other PC Launcher.

Steam got stable, fast and accurate servers... this is really valuable.

All the other stuff i could be living without, and there is some alternatives... but servers screwing up is a no go.

"More games" is not a huge matter, more important to have the "right games", and at the current time GoG is not bad performing at this spec, yet there could be more.

I do not care if GoG is doing almost nothing, but they should fix their dam servers.

I love how Valve’s marketing managed to hide 30 years of WINE development.

Maybe so, but blame wikipedia for it because being well aware of my shortcomings, I fact checked my simplified/reductionist statement there before posting here (ok, also attribute the lack of specificity to my laziness but nevertheless, I thought everyone would understand the point I was trying to make). Still, well spotted and thanks for the info and correction!

Rest assured that I do not blame you at all for that, Wikipedia is indeed a very good example showing how well Valve managed their "assimilation" ;)

The new storage manager is truly something amazing. You can move multiple games, remove them and overall have an exact glance in manner seconds about who exactly are your culprits. This is especially handy if you use multiple nvme drives and a HDD. Not to mention the easily bored attitude and the fear of not having something in hands reach if you would like to need it. Also, it is cheaper to move files between drives then to continually download everything.

Stay green chaps ^_~

edit: added an attachment of the whole manager

Most frequently, I use it for specific game forums. They are, sadly, usually vastly more active than the GOG counterpart.

Other than that, I don't really use Steam anymore. Already finished most of the 100 games I have there and no new ones will ever appear since freebies from magazines or retail copies that needed Steam have dried out. A lot it is also duplicates with what I have on GOG now. Last time I played something through Steam was in October 2022 and the game before that July 2022.

Never bought anything through Steam directly, don't even have a payment method set up in my 12 years of having the account.

Steam never had the illusion that a artbook could be free as a goodie for buying a game; unless on special occasions.

Steam always knew that regional pricing is a good thing and if someone is living in a certain "rich" country, this person always got more than anyone living in a "poor" country... this has been proven by some science i never heard about.

Steam even knew long time ago that a game without a DRM can not be a good game... oops... okay this is certainly a fairy tale. At least they are correct in that aspect that there will be MORE games.