Its to be an alternative, coexist if you will.

However GoG has had to carve out its market share from a dominate entrenched company which has not only has some passionate customers and a PR worship only the devil could have arranged, but also a captive customer base all the while doing so with the Mantra of DRM Free.


I've said this before, its not David vs Goliath, But a Atheist David walking into Philistine stronghold after loosing his sling.

Never, because GOG and Steam are competitors. (Notice that GOG never gives out Steam keys.) GOG Connect is a marketing tactic to get more people to use GOG and invest in/build their GOG library, and GOG is ultimately hoping a portion of those people will stick around and spend money on other GOG games.

That sounds like it'd be making things too complicated for GOG. Not to mention there are plenty of devs already that you can email, send over your receipt, and they'll give you a Steam key. And you know how GOG is about doing things that the community already knows how to do, albeit less efficiently, themselves.

You have to think of this in the mind of the average Steam customer. The average Steam customer has no idea GOG even exists and probably doesn't care. They want the better functionality of the client, they want the achievements, they want the new games (just look at the fact that The Witcher 3 is what makes this store probably 70% of its profits and ask yourself why that is - add to that the fact that buying TW3 elsewhere [though I forget where] usually gives you a free GOG code, and add to THAT the fact that people often stop by the trading thread frequently to get rid of this code and try to trade it for a Steam copy of the game). To them, Steam is the only thing that exists and they're shocked when you tell them there are alternatives. Chances are they don't even know what "DRM" is.
The point of Connect is to say to these customers "Hey! Come over here! Free games!", have them show up and go "Wow, what's this place? I didn't know about this before! And now that I've got free games here, maybe I'll give it a try!" and be hooked. If you do the opposite, all you're doing is encouraging people to play their games on Steam instead of GOG. It's nice to do for the customers, sure, but this is the equivalent of advertising for your opponent.

The goal is to coexist with Steam, but the competition is natural. It's built into the business whether you like it or not. In order to coexist with somebody who owns a monopoly, you have to get some of their customers unless you're satisfied with the barely over $1,000 in profits that GOG was originally making.
The purpose of Galaxy and appealing to Steam customers and whatnot isn't to try to directly attack Steam (which, if they did, I assure you they would be miserably crushed if not swallowed up whole), it's to try to appeal to their customers by giving them a smooth transition to a setup that's familiar.


Also, for goodness' sakes, quit downvoting the OP just because he dares say something that even remotely smacks in favor of your Hated Demon Steam, ya morons. The man's just trying to ask a question, and a legitimate one at that, a rare treat to get around here some days.

Because then they would be promoting their biggest competitor, instead of competing with it.

The stores that have done that (offering Steam keys on the side, when you buy games from their service), have bit by bit become mainly just Steam key sellers. Like Gamersgate, Green Man Gaming and Humble Bundle, For the most part, they have destroyed the chances of their own service remaining viable by promoting Steam at the same time.

They have basically made their own service redundant, especially in the publishers' eyes. Especially now as GOG is trying hard to promote its own multiplayer service, achievements system etc., it would all seem kinda pointless if they were offering Steam keys on the side as well, as if they don't believe in their own service.

A game publisher: "So you offer Steam keys for our games to your customers as well... remind me, why exactly are we releasing two different sets of our games in your store? Couldn't you just sell Steam keys for our games like the rest of the Steam key stores, that would save both of our time?"

Also there has been some problems with these "extra keys" becoming trading items, instead of people actually activating them on their own account.

I think a more accurate question is: is the goal to compete with Steam, or to succumb to Steam and promote it even more?

Does e.g. EA Origin offer extra Steam keys when you buy games from their service? No? Can you think of any reason why?

It would really be exactly the same as the process they already have for asking permission from devs for GOG connect except that they'd get a list of Steam keys in the reply (and perhaps on a regular basis since). And they need a key delivery system, which I highly doubt GOG isn't capable of doing relatively easy.

Sure, I doubt they *want* to go down this road but considering pretty much every other site is capable of doing this rather easily I wouldn't think 'complicated' is the argument against it.

Ask the publishers. Some like Devolver Digital would probably do it for you. But for games with no further patches or multiplayer, the GOG version is the ideal one to own. For anything that's new or has multiplayer, you're better off getting the Steam version. By the time GOG gets Galaxy going, those online games will no longer have a community to cross-play with. ^^

Nobody knows what will be possible in the future for principal reasons and also I don't know of any plans regarding this, but expecting a game to buy once on a platform and then to have it available on more platforms is a bit like asking for too much because, as you said, the maintainer of the second platform doesn't see a penny for his efforts. You would have to split the revenue somehow and seems to be too complicated for the present I guess.

GOG connect is an exception because GOG is much smaller than Steam and hopes to gain new customers. I don't expect the reverse to come true though because Steam doesn't need new customers/ has enough of them already.
But who knows. In the future, it may be possible.

This is the reason why I say they wouldn't do it. They can't just do everything by email, asking for individual keys and hand-delivering them for each customer. Considering how little they tend to fix things on the website, I really doubt they'd be capable.