Steam has daily and weekend sales as well as publisher sales, though their biggest sales are their winter and summer sales. Steam is known for their deep discounts (discounts on games range from 10% to 95%) on games and has pushed many other stores to do the same seeing Amazon and other storefronts match their pricings when sales go up as well as hold their own seasonal sales.
Many older titles (10-15 years or more) are no longer supported and thus require much manual tinkering to run properly on windows 10, requiring digging though forums and trying many things. Compare that to GoG where these titles often run out-of-the-box.
Users can gift games to their friends, which is great for when there are sales as one friend can pick up games for the rest of his friends cheaply. There is often 4 packs of a single game that can be picked up to easily gift to 3 other friends as well.
Valve have ripped off bad launcher design from competing stores instead of sticking with the better design they already had. Strong negative response including multiple customers suffering medical issues is being ignored instead of taken on board.
Linux support is generally overlooked. It is recommended to disable in-game overlay and to use a real browser to interact with steampowered's website. Basic library access works usually without a hitch.
Also do not expect real tech support on Linux. Forum questions of bugs often go unattended and unanswered.
Steam forces you to periodically log into Steam Store every two weeks, or your games will stop working. They will force you to keep adding the API number, which is a pain. There is an Offline Mode, but you still have to log in at least once every two weeks.
GOG may charge more in some regions as publishers request so. But in those cases they give the extra cash back as credits for buying another game.
For example, the lowest price for the game is U$20 in US, but if in your region it costs U$30 they will give you U$10 back as credits for your next purchase.
Installation scripts have a lot of bugs and dependencies. Packing games in archives would be better. Extracting archives from installation scripts is possible, but difficult.
The Linux library on Steam is far bigger than in GoG, many titles have its Linux version both in Steam and its respective web page, but GoG only lets buy the Windows version.
Humble Bundle offers bundles of games for pay what you want pricing. These happen quite often with indie bundles, publisher bundles as well as weekly bundles. There are different tiers to the bundles that go higher in price depending on how many games one wants from the bundle. The higher tiers have a higher price floor but still offer considerable discounts on games. All bundles payments can be put towards a charity for that bundle as well as towards the developer or the HB themselves.
The way Humble Bundle works is that it is donation based in that you can pay what you want for the bundle, with the minimum being a dollar. There are separate packages in each bundle that also ask for a minimum price, which depends on the "beat the average" price which is what on average has been donated so far..
Users are not only giving to a charity and choosing the portion of the price they pay to a charity but they can also select from a list of charities to donate to. Thus giving some control to the consumer as to what kind of organizations they support.
Just as a user can choose how much to give to a charity out of the price given, they can also choose how much to give to the devs. So if one does not feel like supporting a charity for a certain bundle they can choose to give all of the funds to the developers.
GMG often offers discount codes on newly released games or pre-release games. For those looking to get a new release GMG is a good place to look as users can often find a discount of 15-20% off the game instead of purchasing at full price.
GMG pushes an account with Playfire, which is a game tracking and community service. By signing up with Playfire GMG users can earn discounts on games sold through GMG.
GMG does not offer refunds on Steam, UPlay, Origin or MMO titles. Basically if you purchase a code to a different store GMG will not refund your money if there are issues which means one will have to deal with the keys origin store for help.
Makes it one of the best places to support your favorite creators as there is no limit as to what you want to set for the platform fee since it can be set all the way down to 0% or set as high as 100%. It is up to the developer to pick what they would like.
Users can pay any amount they want to for a game, down to a minimum specified by the uploader. The minimum can be zero. A user can go back and pay more later if they want.
It's very easy to find the best prices for the games you are looking for. Just type the game in the search bar and hope that the game will be there and see the price comparisons and pick the one of the online stores to go to the page and buy the game you wanted.
buy a key,activate on steam,save money.Just make sure that youre buying games on correct platform and region.Some random examples from today:Dark Souls 3 Steam 15 Euro with -75% discount-Allkeyshop 10 Euro.Farcry New Dawn 45 Euro steam-Allkeyshop 15 euro.Rage 2 60 Euro steam-Allkeyshop 22 Euro
While keys are usually legitimate, there is often no way of telling how these keys were obtained. There are cases in the past where stolen credit card information was used to purchase a bunch of game keys and then those keys would be sold on platforms like this. So in that way it's similar to Ebay as well. However, it may be that it's blown somewhat out of proportion by gaming publishers who would earn more off gamers if they'd buy brand new keys.
If you have product keys for games that you don't need, you can sell them on Kinguin. It works similarly to Ebay, but it's a marketplace dedicated to keys.
Websites like Kinguin and G2A are usually the cheapest way to get game keys. There are tricks like using discount codes for -3%, -5% or even -7% discount. These keys can usually be easily found through a simple Google search or through a Twitch streamer who's partnered with Kinguin. Another trick is not to use the shield service. It's usually a waste of a dollar, given the fact that in reality issues with game keys are rare.
Epic gives a better revenue cut for publishers and developers than GOG and Steam other than a few specific games.
Note: As of writing this pro it's 12%.
Epic uses other platforms to sell a game, getting free advertisement and pre-orders then switching to epic exclusive, essentially engaging in false advertising.
As G2A is a user-driven market place, not all keys sold may be legitimate. Anyone from anywhere can list a key for sale Ă la eBay and Amazon. However, like eBay and Amazon, G2A provides the seller's feedback rating and number of sales prior to purchase.
As G2A is a user marketplace, keys may be purchased during sales and resold for significantly less than current market value. Because of this, keys tend to be very inexpensive in comparison to Steam, Origin, and Uplay.
Many people have reported issue with the "Shield" subscription service, that seems to auto subscribe users when purchasing keys. It has also been reported that is is pretty difficult to get this subscription turned off, which can be frustrating for those that never wanted it in the first place.