I'm being lazy by asking, but... My library is pretty much split between Steam and Gog. I want to get Manor Lords. Is there a preferred platform these days? I've generally stuck with Gog for downloadable installers, but my knowledge is out of date.
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The most reoccurring issue reported in news here is retroactive censorship through patches. Both suck in this regard. GOG has offline installers, which facilitates data hoarding and piracy; still very inconvenient. Steam has per-game "beta" where a dev can offer rollbacks. Steam's DRM is at least easily cracked by warez groups, and notifies third party DRM. GOG is less bad because the same games won't have third-party DRM.
Sometimes a game is behind on patches with GOG. 95% of the time you want patches.
CDPR/GOG went woke/corporate over the past decade. Valve funds proton and open source/linux development. For now it is beholden to private investors. I only wish Valve had the disposable resources to overtake Linux desktop development from Red Hat/IBM. For this reason I buy games off Steam unless a select title warrants GOG.
Currently (unless something changed very recently) steam's console API does still allow you to download any old version number of a game in your library, provided you know the depot number, for which steamdb is your friend.
It's a fairly precarious system, but it does mean you can download and archive pre-censored games, even retroactively.
Auto-update is trivially ignored by just running the application directly (comfy old-school vibes too) instead of through the launcher, so you don't have to worry about cracking the older version to play it either.
It's not super user friendly like GOG, but steam is actually pretty good for letting you download static copies of your games with only a little user savviness. At least until someone shuts down that function...
This is useful information, thank you!
Would be nice if steam made the "revert to game version X" feature available in their UI.
Knowing corporate censors, such exposure would jeopardize availability of verboten materials.