It’s been a while I checked what was happened with the Epic Games Store and GOG - I don’t remember exactly why, but I was reminded of their existence a few days back, and started to wonder how many people were actively purchasing games on such stores. Just to talk about my experience:

• I was a pretty big proponent of GOG because of their DRM-free stance and their early Linux support, until they completely dropped the ball. I decided they were not worth my money anymore.
• Steam is the obvious choice for me: while I don’t like the proprietary aspect of Steam in itself, they are the drivers of Linux Gaming. With their unlimited money printing capabilities, they can support numerous FOSS projects that have huge impact on the desktop environment as well.
• Epic Games Store: I used to collect some (most?) of their free games, and tried to run things with the Heroic Games Launcher client, but it grew tedious and I mostly forget that it exists nowadays. I have certainly never purchased anything in there :-)
• Itch.io: I have checked it a few times, but I see it as a platform where anything goes, which means there’s a bunch of very amateurish indie with a few gems here and there, and I don’t have the time to find something to play in there. I see the value of such a marketplace, but I’m just not the right target for it.

For a few years now, pretty close to 100% of my spending goes to Steam. And as a reminder, this is not an ad, we are not affiliated with Steam - it’s just a statement of a fact.

Where You Buy Your Games for PC

So, how did you guys stand on this? We managed to get quite a large sample of answers this time around:

Unsurprisingly, Steam is the place where most people (according to the survey) buy most of their games, by far. I was however fairly surprised to see GOG so big at 17%. I was expected it to be 5% or less overall. This is a consequence of our little Linux gaming world, where there is a much higher representation of people who care about FOSS, about DRM-free aspects, than in the mainstream gaming audience. While GOG has a few high profile games, it’s missing a lot of recent AAA and even indie releases, so if you shop there you are basically limiting your access to a bunch of games. Not making a judgment, everyone can decide on their own priorities. As for Itch.io, it’s pretty much what I expected it to be.

The funniest one in the lot is the Epic Games Store that started in 2018. It’s basically a Fortnite machine at this stage, and despite their huge spending in free games to attract gamers, they are not moving the needle at all. All that money thrown away and just 1% market share is an utter failure. They have many of the games that Steam has, and they are supposedly a better deal for developers with a larger cut of the cake in terms of profits, but I guess nobody cares. Not even the devs themselves.

In a way, Steam wins almost by default - it has a lot of games and has the top of mindshare in the PC Gaming space, so it’s very, very hard to do anything to undermine it. They have a lot of demos, have good discovery queues and decent recommendations, and organize Steam Next Fests to make new indie games very visible. And of course, they made the Steam Deck which is a little miracle of a device in itself (thanks to Proton) and it will likely strengthen their position in the years to come.

It’s not that Steam is perfect, though. The Steam client is a horrible piece of shit that takes 30 seconds to load on even a beefy PC, has way too many features that were never cleaned up and removed, and still lacks a proper Big Picture Mode that works well on the most common GPU configuration, i.e. Nvidia. It’s a piece of software in beta quality that we have to endure, because the alternative on their other stores is, honestly, even worse.

NO CHANGE, THEN?

So there you have it. This is pretty much a statu quo. The risk of store fragmentation that I envisionned in 2019 did not come to fruition. And Microsoft is still sleeping at the wheel, so ultimately this is not a bad outcome. I do wish that GOG was a little stronger when it comes to Linux support - I believe they are completely missing on our (small) market where they would have the most faithful proponents of their offering if they cared a little more.

There’s a fairly new comer on the market with Playtron, but that will be for another time, as it deserves a whole article for itself - they are approaching the market with a totally different angle.