I take some sense of ownership over my Steam library in that I can and will immediately pirate the game with the DRM stripped out if Valve ever decides to revoke my access to it.
On the other hand, this – and buying from a better company – is why I actively prefer GOG, even in cases when the price is higher. (But pssst, hey, Beyond a Steel Sky is $3.50 on GOG right now compared to Steam’s $35.) The fact I have to launch the Steam client to play a game I paid for is absurd, and I regret every purchase I made, like Stardew ValleyTerraria, before I knew GOG existed. The main outstanding issue to me now is that GOG refuses to port its Galaxy client to Linux.
Heroic is an impressive achievement. It just isn’t a full replacement – and most of these points I’m about to list aren’t things it’s trying to or should necessarily do as a games launcher. Off the top of my head:
It doesn’t work for social aspects like friends, statuses, etc.
It doesn’t work for monitoring achievements.
The storefront is just the actual gog.com webpage rendered as a surface. GOG Galaxy’s store UI, by contrast, flows with everything else.
I don’t think games auto-update, although I could be wrong.
It’s bloated by nature of also being a launcher for Epic and Amazon – platforms I will never use. GOG Galaxy allows crossplatform stuff, but it’s not a full-on multilauncher.
The UI is pretty ass. I sympathize a lot with this one as someone who works on the (often disastrously undercoordinated) UI of a similar-profile project.
Rectangular UI elements’ corner rounding is all over the place (from sharp 90° to Material 3 and everything inbetween).
Themes are extremely samey with an enormous bias toward dark themes (I say this as someone who exclusively uses dark themes: a single light theme and thirteen dark themes means you don’t give a shit).
You can’t hide the left-hand menu bar to actually center the page you’re viewing.
Actions like toolbar dropdowns have no animations (I understand not wanting these; that’s accommodated with a “Disable Animations” option).
There’s absolutely zero compatibility with Orca (screen reader) that I can find.
Etc.
Again, all of these except the UI aren’t things Heroic is doing wrong or even supposed to be doing at all.
Side note: in Heroic, the GOG storefront opens with UTM parameters in the URL for “adtraction”. Wonder what that’s about.
I take some sense of ownership over my Steam library in that I can and will immediately pirate the game with the DRM stripped out if Valve ever decides to revoke my access to it.
On the other hand, this – and buying from a better company – is why I actively prefer GOG, even in cases when the price is higher. (But pssst, hey, Beyond a Steel Sky is $3.50 on GOG right now compared to Steam’s $35.) The fact I have to launch the Steam client to play a game I paid for is absurd, and I regret every purchase I made, like
Stardew ValleyTerraria, before I knew GOG existed. The main outstanding issue to me now is that GOG refuses to port its Galaxy client to Linux.Heroic launcher can manage your GOG games on linux
Heroic is an impressive achievement. It just isn’t a full replacement – and most of these points I’m about to list aren’t things it’s trying to or should necessarily do as a games launcher. Off the top of my head:
Again, all of these except the UI aren’t things Heroic is doing wrong or even supposed to be doing at all.
Side note: in Heroic, the GOG storefront opens with UTM parameters in the URL for “adtraction”. Wonder what that’s about.