[branon]

Apples and oranges yes, but to most users (even Linux users) there's only a very blurry line between these concepts. I admit this is not ideal.

I believe choice of storefront is more a service and support problem, and less about the product itself.

Game licensure and game ownership are equivalent products at the end of the day in most instances. Rugs could be pulled, yes, but thus far haven't been very often or to any significant extent (that I know of).

Most paying customers are fine to run proprietary code, accept DRM, or buy a license instead of owning a game. Even Linux users will do this if the company (Valve) has a decent track record at practicing "don't be evil" (they do).

As a Linux user, when you purchase a game from GOG (and I concede that this is ideologically superior to a license from Valve) you are on your own afterwards. Windows users can get a bit of help from Galaxy and I think GOG even does tech support now but this doesn't apply to our segment.

You must now divine a scheme whereby your game is made runnable. Cue fighting with distro repositories and Wine versions/prefixes/winetricks, or depending on a third party launcher (Bottles/Lutris/Heroic/pick one), or adding the game to the Steam client (that you probably have installed already anyway) because Steam knows how to run things with Proton... and then you must maintain this going forward.

This might not bother you or you may even find it therapeutic (and I do, for certain games). But the majority of the segment doesn't like it, and it won't scale as well as a first-party solution, not even for an individual user.

My assertion is that exchanging game ownership for game licensure currently looks like a pretty fair deal if I receive first-party support for running the game on my OS. But GOG could change that!