On the one hand I like GOG because it has no DRM and has better prices (in my country) than Steam and I have the feeling that on the one hand it follows more the open source philosophy than Steam itself, but Steam has helped enormously to play Windows games on Linux, so I haven’t really made up my mind.
On the one hand I want to buy on Steam for the convenience, but on the other hand I prefer GOG because (in my country) is cheaper. Which platform do you prefer and why?
To give an example, The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth is currently $15 on Steam with regional pricing, but on GOG it’s worth just $6.
A long time ago I finally pulled down my Jolly Rogers and stored my eye patch, due to GoG, since one of the biggest gripes I had with games (all the way back to the 90s) was the DRM in the official bought versions and all hassle and problems it caused (but not in the pirated ones, which made them a superior product) and GoG’s principle since the very beginning was “No DRM” and they never wavered on that.
I also have the practice of downloading the installers for my games and keeping local copies - which GoG lets you easily do but Steam does not - since a long time ago and due to professional experience I became aware that if you don’t have it in your hands you risk losing it for some stupid reason and now the problem is yours (are you really willing pay what it takes to take it to Court?) whilst if you do have it and they want to take it from you, it’s up to them to justify it in a Court of Law (and, lo-and-behold, when they have to prove it rather than just update a row in a database to say you don’t own it, suddenly it’s not worth it for them anymore). I would say the various instances of shops closing and taking the user’s entire (supposedly bought) collection or even just shops outright taking eBooks and films from the collections users had hosted with them and totally getting away with it have more than proven my caution on that.
I did eventually also got Steam and bought some games from them up until the point when a game I bought would not work and they refused to refund it (because I only got around to try it out more than a month after I bought it), at which point I stopped buying games from Steam (curiously, when I moved to Linux I tried that game out again and under Linux it works). Even without that, with Steam I’m always wary because they have more restrictions than GoG and possession of my games in Steam is theirs, not mine.
Anyways, my GoG collection is many times the size of my Steam collection, I’ll always favor buying a game from GoG over Steam if available in both (even if I pay a bit more for it in GoG, as the way I see it a game for which I can download the installer and keep it forever is a higher value product than one were I have to trust Steam for ever and ever to exist, have a client for my OS and not do any shennenigans) and a game only being available in Steam makes it far, far less likely that I’ll buy it.
I’m only commenting on the Steam refund part. That’s crazy to me, of all places to return games. The most relaxed has been Steam and never had any issues with them. Even if waiting a month, they normally only care how long you played it, which I think is supposed to be less than 2 hours. For comparison, I tried returning a PS5 game and was immediately denied because they claim as soon as the game is launched once they will not accept it back, which is awful.
That sucks they denied you. It really sounds like they should have let you return it.
I played all of 7 minutes, which was all took to go all the way to starting a game and the game getting stuck in some kind of freeze loop, and then doing it all over again twice to make sure.
People have lives and sometimes they buy games on impulse and only get around to have time for them later, and Steam does have a record of when players actually got around to download the game and even when and for how long they ran it, so the refund clock should start when people actually tried the game or at least when they downloaded it. That refunds rules don’t actually follow logic but instead something else, probably means that such refunds don’t actually exist driven by genuine will for good customer experience but, more likely, because in some countries there is legislation for online purchases that forces refund windows linked to purchasing time.
I had gotten that game very cheaply and only asked for the refund as a matter of principle, and following this I totally stopped buying games from Steam, so funnily enough even with me favoring GoG over Steam for games available in both, at their 30% revenue cut from sales Steam quickly lost in sales many times that refund amount.