The average PC gamer has to wrangle all sorts of different digital storefronts and launchers if they want to play games without leaving the house, and most of them truly suck. Steam’s UX is head and shoulders above the competition.
But GOG has long been a valid contender—both with its DRM-free storefront focused on archaic software, and with the collection-syncing GOG Galaxy launcher. Its successes haven’t resulted in anything like Steam’s Canada-sized user numbers, however, and even with new owners it remains an uphill battle taking on Goliath.
New Blood CEO Dave Oshry, who heads the studio publishing games like Dusk and Ultrakill, said in an interview with RPG Site that GOG’s lack of comparable success goes all the way back to when Steam first “opened the floodgates” by adding classic games to its storefront.
“Steam would be for your new games and GOG would be for all your old games, right? Then Steam let anybody put anything on there,” he said. “All of a sudden who needed GOG anymore?”
He praised GOG for its features, saying its one-click mod installers and “being able to host things like Fallout London” are worthwhile selling points. “For guys like me, I don’t mind moving files around and shit, modding the old way, but we’re getting to a point now where people are either too old or too young and don’t know how modding works,” he said.
However, he argued that it’s not enough to make converts of most people. “The problem is it’s still 1 to 5% of the sales on Steam, where it used to be closer to 5 or 10% … Everybody roots for GOG, right? We want GOG to be a great thing, and GOG’s great. It’s just that I don’t have a reason to use GOG or GOG Galaxy instead of Steam.”
Oshry did mention that GOG’s new owner has “been outspoken about what he wants to do, just providing a better experience,” but also added that he recently played The Journeyman Project games on GOG, and getting it working on a modern system “was a pain in the ass. But I got them running. I played them for five minutes. I got my nostalgia fix, and I uninstalled it.” That and Fallout London are the only games he has installed on the platform.
To be fair to GOG, it does have other draws—it’s possible to bypass the launcher entirely and save your games locally without any DRM, which is still a valuable distinction in a world where Steam is selling retro games with strings attached. It also has lots of classics Steam doesn’t offer despite the floodgates being open, such as Diablo 1, Ultima Underworld, and the old-school versions of the first three Resident Evil games.
Oshry had a harsher critique of the Epic Games Store, which he told RPG Site “can’t beat Steam just with free giveaways and high developer percentages. You could give developers 100% of the royalties if you wanted, but if nobody’s buying. What’s 100% of zero? Like, who gives a shit?” In the past, Oshry has said that giving out a game for free on Epic may work best as a way to market it on other platforms.
“I love their preservation efforts and everything they’re trying to do,” Oshry said of GOG, “But they need enough people to give a shit, or how long are they even going to be around?”
