Everyone's experience differs. I've never had a problem with Steam's customer support (and I've returned a my fair share of games). I've also returned a couple on GOG, and it's a lot more difficult there, but they will do it eventually.Rath Darkblade wrote: ↑Sun Nov 18, 2018 9:59 pm Coming back to the thread topic (Steam and GOG) - This article from Lifehacker summarises the good, the bad, and the ugly about them both.It's from early 2016, though... any idea if it's still accurate?
Steam's return window of "less than 14 days and played under two hours" is really there to prevent people from playing a game and then returning it, or in some cases, using it simply to get cards. Yes, people actually buy games just to get trading cards to sell on the marketplace and then try to return the game. I don't see how anyone makes money by selling cards there since the vast majority of cards sell for around five-to-ten cents each. You'd need to spend all day, every day, gaining and selling cards just to afford a discounted title, let alone games at full price.
Speaking of pricing... that can be a little weird. In most cases, GOG is more expensive than Steam, at least in Canadian dollars. Sometimes they're equal and on rare occasions, might even be the reverse. If you did a direct monetary conversion from USD to CAD, you'd find that in MOST cases, Steam charges less than if you went by pure conversion rate.
I think GOG might be more fair to Europeans, but I don't know that for sure. I know I have bought games on GOG and been given a small credit in return, but even if you take the credit into account, the price is usually still more than you'd find on Steam.
That said, it might be different in Australian dollars or any other currency. I wouldn't know, would I?
One area where GOG is much better than Steam is gifting games. Steam won't let you gift someone a game if the price is more than 20% higher or lower in their own currency. In other words, I've been prevented from getting games for my brother and Dad because the price difference was enough between USD and CAD that it wasn't allowed.
Why does Steam do this? Here's a quote about it from Kotaku:
In other words, people were acting like assholes, so everyone suffers. Same story as always.[...] this will also probably strike a heavy blow to sketchy gray market sites like G2A, seeing as there are now fewer ways for people to acquire Steam keys. Moreover, the way it worked previously was, resellers would sometimes buy a gift, keep it in their inventory, sell a copy of a game on G2A, and then friend whoever they’d sold the game to and give them the game as a gift. Now that’s no longer possible. This, when paired with upcoming changes that’ll allow developers to directly hand out keys to reviewers within Steam (rather than distribute them as exploitable keys), will likely turn that scene on its head.
GOG will let you gift a game to anyone, but I have a feeling part of their more relaxed attitude on this is due to have a smaller user base. GOG has a lot of users, but it's nowhere near the amount Steam has, so GOG can be more flexible at times in regards to rules.
Something else GOG does every once in a while (it's really up to the game publishers) is called GOG Connect. Honestly, I'm way too tired to try to explain this one, so here's a link about it: https://www.gog.com/connect
In terms of the actual client, GOG Galaxy is... well, I'd only use it to update games. It has a lot of problems otherwise, including extremely slow download speeds. And that is the fault of the client, because download speeds are much faster when downloading directly from the website or through the Downloader. A small handful of games actually NEED the Galaxy client because they're online games. Unsurprisingly, there are lots of arguments on the discussion forums at GOG relating to this issue.
Wow! It looks like I haven't missed anything by not having FB. Yikes.
