GOG vs Steam: 30-Day Refunds vs 2-Hour Limit [2026]

Two philosophies define PC gaming’s digital storefronts in 2026, and they could not be more different. Steam, run by Valve, is the 125,000-game behemoth that most PC gamers never leave. GOG, the Warsaw-based storefront now independent of CD Projekt after a $25 million ownership change, sells roughly a tenth as many titles but backs every purchase with a permanent, DRM-free installer and a 30-day refund window that beats almost every retailer in tech. The GOG vs Steam question isn’t really about which store is “better” — it’s about which trade-offs matter more to you: scale and ecosystem, or ownership and permanence.

This comparison walks through the specs, the pricing, the refund fine print, the platform-scale numbers, and even the privacy jurisdiction each company operates under — then closes with a migration guide for anyone thinking about moving part of their library from one storefront to the other.

What Is GOG in 2026?

GOG began life as Good Old Games, a CD Projekt subsidiary founded in early 2008 to sell classic PC titles patched to run on modern hardware, according to its own company history documented on Wikipedia. The site rebranded to simply GOG.com in 2012 as it expanded beyond back-catalog titles into current-generation releases, and it introduced its optional GOG Galaxy client in mid-2014 to add social and library-management features on top of its no-DRM foundation.

The bigger 2026 story is ownership. CD Projekt sold 100% of GOG to company co-founder and major shareholder Michał Kiciński for roughly PLN 90.7 million (about $25 million), a deal that closed at the end of December 2025. A distribution agreement keeps CD Projekt RED’s future releases — including the still-unreleased Witcher 4 — shipping on GOG even though the storefront is no longer under the same corporate roof. That transaction was significant enough that it became a headline in CD Projekt’s own shareholder-approved rename to CD Projekt RED, covered in our report on the $25M GOG sale and CD Projekt’s rebrand. GOG is now a standalone company again, run by the person who helped start it, with a catalog of roughly 12,000 titles curated specifically to avoid the shovelware that floods larger stores.

What Is Steam in 2026?

Steam launched out of beta on September 12, 2003, initially as a way for Valve to patch its own games automatically. It stayed a single-publisher tool for two years before opening to outside developers in 2005, starting with the physics-based fighting game Rag Doll Kung Fu, according to Steam’s own Wikipedia history. Two decades later, that side-project has become the default distribution layer for PC gaming almost everywhere outside mobile and console storefronts.

Steam is Valve’s PC gaming platform, and by any measure it remains the dominant force in digital PC distribution. Third-party trackers that monitor storefront traffic, including SQ Magazine and Icon-Era, put Steam’s share of PC digital game distribution at roughly 74-75% — Valve itself does not publish an official market-share figure, so treat that number as an informed estimate rather than a company disclosure. What Valve does publish, via its own SteamDB-tracked telemetry, is concurrent-user counts, and those numbers keep climbing: Steam set an all-time peak of 42,318,602 concurrent users in March 2026, breaking its own record for the third time in three months after hitting 42,042,778 on January 11 and 41,816,052 on January 4, according to Notebookcheck and PCGamesN.

That scale hasn’t come without scrutiny. Valve is currently defending a class-action antitrust suit brought by a proposed class of roughly 32,000 developers alleging anticompetitive pricing rules, a case we detail in our coverage of the $3.1B Steam antitrust trial. Steam’s catalog has also ballooned to a size no curator could realistically police: SteamDB-style cumulative tracking puts the total at around 124,000-125,000 games released on the platform to date, with tens of thousands added in 2025 alone, per Backlinko’s Steam usage data.

GOG vs Steam: Specs and Features Compared

Before diving into any single category, here’s how the two platforms stack up across the features that actually change how you buy, install, and keep your games.

Feature	GOG	Steam
Owner	Michał Kiciński (independent since Dec. 2025)	Valve Corporation
Headquarters / jurisdiction	Warsaw, Poland (EU/GDPR)	Bellevue, Washington (US)
Approximate catalog size	~12,000 titles	~124,000-125,000 titles
DRM policy	100% DRM-free, always	Steamworks DRM common; varies by publisher
Offline installers	Yes, standalone .exe/.pkg, no client required	No standalone installers; client required for most titles
Refund window	30 days, even after play, no questions asked	14 days AND under 2 hours playtime
Native client	GOG Galaxy 2.0 (optional)	Steam Client (required for most features)
Mod support	Manual install only; no workshop system	Steam Workshop, auto-install and versioning
Family / library sharing	Not offered	Steam Families library sharing
Native Steam Deck / SteamOS support	No; requires Heroic Games Launcher or Lutris	Native, built on SteamOS/Proton
Cloud saves	Supported on many titles via GOG Galaxy	Supported on most titles via Steam Cloud
Preservation initiative	GOG Preservation Program (267 games, 1,461 fixes as of 2025-2026)	None equivalent
Major sales per year	4 seasonal sales	4 seasonal sales
Achievements (per GOG’s 2025 wrap-up data)	14 average per player	11 median per player

The pattern is consistent across nearly every row: Steam wins on scale, infrastructure, and hardware integration, while GOG wins on ownership guarantees and consumer-friendly policy. Neither platform operates a paid subscription tier — both are pure storefronts — so the comparison stays focused on catalog, DRM, and policy rather than monthly fees.

DRM and Ownership: The Fundamental Divide

This is the single biggest philosophical gap between the two stores. GOG’s entire brand identity rests on one promise: every game sold is DRM-free. That means no launch-time authentication check, no dependency on GOG’s servers to install or run a purchased game, and a downloadable installer you can save to an external drive and run years later even if GOG itself ceased to exist. Because there’s no DRM layer to strip out, GOG games also tend to be trivially portable to other operating systems or virtual machines, which is part of why classic-game archivists and Linux users gravitate toward the store.

Steam takes the opposite default. Most titles ship wrapped in Steamworks DRM or a third-party layer (Denuvo, Ubisoft Connect, EA App authentication, and similar systems are common on AAA releases), which means the Steam client has to verify your license before most games will launch. Valve does allow publishers to opt out of DRM entirely, and a meaningful number of indie titles on Steam are DRM-free in practice — but it’s a publisher choice, not a platform guarantee, and there’s no simple storefront filter that reliably surfaces which Steam titles are DRM-free versus which aren’t.

The practical downstream effect shows up in file security, too. Because GOG installers are standalone executables you download once and keep, it’s worth verifying their integrity the same way you’d verify any downloaded binary, especially if you’re archiving installers long-term rather than re-downloading from GOG each time:

# Verify a GOG offline installer before archiving or running it
sha256sum setup_gog_game_1.0.0.exe

# Compare the printed hash against the checksum GOG lists
# on the game's own download page in your GOG library
# before running the installer on a new machine

Steam users don’t typically perform this step manually because the client handles file integrity checks automatically on download and on every “Verify integrity of game files” pass — one more example of how Steam trades manual control for automated convenience, and GOG trades convenience for a file you fully own and can independently audit.

Library Size and Catalog Depth

Steam’s catalog dwarfs GOG’s by an order of magnitude — roughly 124,000-125,000 games released cumulatively as of mid-2026 against GOG’s approximately 12,000, based on community catalog tracking. That gap is intentional on GOG’s side. The store has always positioned itself as curated rather than open, rejecting a large volume of the shovelware and asset-flip titles that make up a meaningful share of Steam’s long tail. The trade-off is obvious: if you want the newest indie release from a first-time developer, Steam is far more likely to have it day one, simply because Steam’s submission process is comparatively low-friction next to GOG’s manual curation review. Steam Direct, Valve’s self-service publishing pipeline, charges developers a flat $100 fee per game — non-refundable upfront, but automatically credited back once that title earns at least $1,000 in adjusted gross revenue on Steam, according to Valve’s own Steamworks documentation. GOG has no published equivalent self-service fee schedule; new titles go through editorial review by GOG’s own curation team instead, which is slower but is exactly the filter that keeps the catalog at roughly a tenth of Steam’s size.

Where GOG competes is on major releases that matter to its DRM-free audience. Larian Studios ships Baldur’s Gate 3 DRM-free on GOG the same day it’s available on Steam. CD Projekt’s own Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — which has sold 65 million copies cumulatively as of May 2026 — are both available DRM-free on GOG alongside their Steam listings. For classic titles, GOG’s advantage widens further: Capcom’s Dino Crisis and Dino Crisis 2, Breath of Fire IV, the original Resident Evil HD Remaster, the Devil May Cry HD Collection, and Total War’s back catalog have all joined GOG with dedicated compatibility patches that most of these games never received on Steam.

Pricing, Sales, and Discounts Compared

Neither storefront runs a subscription tier, and list prices for new AAA releases are effectively identical across both platforms — publishers set the base price, not the storefront. Where the two diverge is regional pricing breadth and how aggressively each runs its seasonal sales. Steam supports regional pricing across roughly 150 countries and regions, which meaningfully lowers effective prices in lower-income markets. GOG’s regional pricing support is narrower, though it still adjusts for many major currencies.

Both stores run four guaranteed seasonal sales a year (spring, summer, autumn/fall, and winter), and GOG’s Summer Sale 2026 gives a good sense of typical discount depth:

Example (GOG Summer Sale 2026)	Discount	Notes
Cyberpunk 2077	70% off	Phantom Liberty expansion also discounted 45%
Fallout 4: Game of the Year Edition	Cut to $16 from $40	60% off list price
Hitman: Blood Money	90% off	GOG Preservation Program title
Alan Wake	90% off	Classic-catalog discount
Call of Cthulhu	85% off	Mid-catalog title
Total games discounted	Over 5,000 (some trackers cite 8,000+)	Discounts up to 95% platform-wide

Steam’s own Summer Sale 2026 ran the identical June 25-July 9 window as GOG’s, with an average discount of 45% spread across more than 4,000 participating titles and top-tier cuts of 90% or deeper on select older games — Watch Dogs 2 was discounted 95%, according to Tech Times’ coverage of the sale. That Watch Dogs 2 example is also a useful reminder of where GOG’s catalog simply can’t compete on selection: Ubisoft’s back catalog, including Watch Dogs 2, isn’t sold DRM-free on GOG at all, because Ubisoft’s own Ubisoft Connect authentication layer is baked into the game regardless of storefront. Steam’s willingness to host publisher-mandated DRM is precisely what lets it carry titles GOG’s no-DRM policy structurally excludes.

Figures on GOG’s summer 2026 promotion are drawn from GOG’s own announcement and corroborated by GamingOnLinux’s coverage of the same event. Side by side, the two sales tell a consistent story: comparable discount depth, wildly different catalog breadth.

Same Games, Two Storefronts: Five Real-World Examples

Specs and policy tables only tell you so much. Here’s how five specific titles actually play out across GOG and Steam in 2026, which is often the fastest way to understand what the DRM-free-vs-ecosystem trade-off really means in practice.

Baldur’s Gate 3: Larian Studios ships its own game DRM-free on GOG the same release day it lands on Steam — a rare case of a current-generation, GOTY-winning AAA title getting full day-one parity on both stores, and a large part of why GOG is taken seriously by mainstream PC gamers rather than treated as a retro-only curiosity.
Cyberpunk 2077: CD Projekt’s flagship, unsurprisingly, gets the same treatment: DRM-free on GOG, standard Steamworks listing on Steam, and both storefronts discounted it roughly 70% during their respective summer 2026 sales. The GOG version’s install package is meaningfully larger up front since it bundles everything needed to run without any launcher, while the Steam version leans on the client for patch delivery.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt: Having crossed 65 million cumulative copies sold as of May 2026, this is the title most likely to sit in both a player’s Steam library and their GOG library simultaneously — many long-time PC gamers bought it on Steam at launch in 2015 and later picked up the GOG copy specifically to guarantee a DRM-free archival install.
Fallout 4: Game of the Year Edition: Discounted to $16 from its $40 list price in GOG’s 2026 summer sale, this is a Bethesda title that, like most Bethesda catalog games, is available DRM-free on GOG — useful for players who rely on community mod frameworks that behave more predictably against a non-DRM executable.
Watch Dogs 2: The flip-side example. Discounted 95% in Steam’s 2026 summer sale, Watch Dogs 2 has no GOG listing at all, because Ubisoft requires its own Ubisoft Connect authentication even on games nominally sold through other storefronts. Any publisher whose business model depends on always-online account authentication is, by definition, incompatible with GOG’s blanket DRM-free requirement — which is exactly why Steam’s catalog will always include publishers GOG structurally cannot.

Refund Policies: 30 Days vs. 14 Days and 2 Hours

This is the category where GOG’s consumer-first reputation is best earned. GOG’s official policy, published on its own support and news pages, lets you request a refund up to 30 days after purchase — even if the game has been downloaded, launched, and played. Pre-orders can be refunded any time before release and for 30 days afterward, and refunds can be issued either as GOG Wallet credit or back to your original payment method. The company does reserve the right to deny refunds in cases it judges are being used to exploit developers, but the baseline policy has no playtime cap at all, according to GOG’s own refund policy announcement.

Steam’s policy, published at store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds, is stricter by design: a refund is automatically approved if requested within 14 days of purchase and under two hours of recorded playtime. Miss either threshold and the refund becomes a manual, case-by-case request instead of an automatic approval. Valve extended similar logic to Advanced Access and early-access playtime in recent policy updates, closing a loophole where players could rack up hours before a title’s official launch date and still qualify for a refund — a change covered in detail by PC Gamer’s refund explainer. DLC follows the same 14-day/2-hour structure, and in-game purchases inside Valve-developed titles get a narrower 48-hour refund window.

In practice, this means GOG is the safer bet if you want to fully play through a shorter game before deciding whether to keep it, while Steam’s model assumes most refund requests happen early, before a player has meaningfully experienced the bulk of a title.

The GOG Preservation Program: Saving PC Gaming’s Past

Launched in November 2024, the GOG Preservation Program is a formal commitment: any game carrying GOG’s “Preserved by GOG” stamp will be actively maintained by a dedicated internal team, indefinitely. Across 2024 and 2025, the program grew to cover 267 games and shipped 1,461 individual preservation improvements — compatibility fixes, restored cut content, stability patches, widescreen aspect-ratio support, modern controller support, and fixes for engine-level bugs like frame-rate-dependent physics errors, according to GOG’s own pressroom announcement.

Titles that joined the program at launch or shortly after include Dino Crisis, Dino Crisis 2, Breath of Fire IV, Resident Evil HD Remaster, the Devil May Cry HD Collection, Cold Fear, and multiple entries in the Total War series. GOG has backed the initiative with industry outreach too, joining the European Federation of Game Archives, Museums and Preservation Projects (EFGAMP) and securing a board seat, receiving a Checkpoint Award for preservation work in 2025, and lining up a dedicated preservation panel at GDC 2026. Steam has no directly comparable program; individual publishers occasionally patch old titles on Steam, but there’s no platform-level commitment analogous to GOG’s stamp-and-maintain model.

Steam Deck, SteamOS, and Linux Compatibility

Here the advantage flips hard in Steam’s favor. SteamOS is Valve’s own Linux-based operating system, and it’s the foundation not just of the Steam Deck but of a growing list of third-party handhelds now shipping with SteamOS pre-installed, a shift we tracked in our report on SteamOS 3.8 landing on six-plus rival handhelds. Steam’s Proton compatibility layer lets the large majority of the Windows-only portion of its catalog run natively on Linux with no extra setup, and Valve continues to invest directly in Linux gaming hardware, from the Steam Deck itself to the higher-power Steam Machine console covered in our Steam Machine launch coverage to peripherals like the relaunched $99 Steam Controller.

GOG has no equivalent first-party Linux or Steam Deck integration. GOG Galaxy itself doesn’t ship a native Linux build, and there’s no GOG-branded handheld or OS project. That said, GOG’s DRM-free installers are exactly the kind of file that Linux compatibility layers handle best, which is why GOG libraries slot cleanly into third-party tools like Heroic Games Launcher or Lutris — both of which wrap Valve’s own Proton (or a compatible Wine build) around GOG’s offline installers to run them on SteamOS, desktop Linux, or the Steam Deck. It’s not native support, but it’s a well-trodden path, and because GOG installers don’t check in with any authentication server, they tend to be more forgiving of the kind of non-standard environments Steam Deck power users often run.

Client Software: GOG Galaxy 2.0 vs. the Steam Client

GOG Galaxy is explicitly optional — every GOG purchase can be downloaded and played as a standalone installer with no client at all. If you do install it, GOG Galaxy 2.0’s headline feature is aggregation: it can link your accounts from other storefronts, including Steam, so you see one unified library, one friends list, and combined playtime tracking across platforms rather than juggling multiple launchers. Cloud saves, achievements, and an in-game overlay are all supported, though feature depth varies title by title since GOG can’t mandate SDK integration the way Valve can with Steamworks.

The Steam client, by contrast, is effectively mandatory for most of what makes Steam useful: Steam Cloud saves, the in-game overlay, Steam Workshop mod installation, Steam Families library sharing, and achievement tracking all run through Valve’s own SDK, which the large majority of Steam publishers integrate directly. That deeper integration is also why Steam supports genuinely automated mod management through Workshop — subscribe to a mod and the client handles downloading, installing, and version-matching it to the game automatically — while GOG has no equivalent, leaving mod installation on GOG titles a manual, drag-and-drop affair using tools like Nexus Mods’ manual-download option.

One quirky data point favors GOG: in the company’s own “GOG Year 2025” wrap-up, players logged an average of 14 achievements each, compared with a Steam-wide median of 11, according to a Yahoo report on GOG’s 2025 player data. That comparison mixes an average with a median, so it’s not a perfectly clean statistic, but it lines up with GOG’s smaller, more curated library — fewer games generally means deeper engagement per title.

Platform Scale: Concurrent Users, Growth, and Reliability

Scale is where the two platforms are least comparable. Steam’s all-time concurrent user record of 42,318,602 (March 2026) came, notably, with no blockbuster launch driving the spike — it reflects steady baseline growth in Steam’s overall user base rather than a single game’s release window, per SteamDB data reported by Notebookcheck. That figure has climbed dramatically over the platform’s history — Steam’s previous “huge” concurrent milestone, set during the initial COVID-19 lockdowns in April 2020, was 24.8 million, meaning the current record represents growth of well over 70% in six years.

GOG does not publish comparable concurrent-user or monthly-active-user figures, official or otherwise, which is itself informative: it’s a meaningfully smaller operation, now running independently of a public parent company for the first time since its 2025 sale. That scale gap cuts both ways. Steam’s size gives it negotiating leverage with publishers, faster patch/update infrastructure, and the community mass that makes Steam Workshop and Steam Families genuinely useful features rather than empty checkboxes. GOG’s smaller footprint is precisely why it can hand-curate its catalog and commit engineering time to reviving decades-old titles under the Preservation Program — a level of individual-game attention that isn’t practical at Steam’s scale.

Privacy and Data Jurisdiction

For a security- and privacy-focused reader, jurisdiction is worth flagging even though it rarely comes up in mainstream storefront comparisons. GOG is a Polish company headquartered in Warsaw, which means it operates under EU data-protection law, including GDPR, regardless of where a given customer is located. Steam is operated by Valve Corporation, headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, and subject to US data-protection law — which, outside of state-level rules like the CCPA, is considerably less prescriptive than GDPR about cross-border data transfer and user data rights.

Neither company has disclosed a major data-handling controversy specific to 2025-2026, so this isn’t a “which platform is safer” claim — both companies have to secure standard account data, payment details, and library records either way. But GDPR’s baseline requirements (the right to access, correct, and delete personal data, and stricter consent rules around tracking) apply automatically to GOG regardless of jurisdiction, while a Steam user’s practical privacy rights depend more heavily on which state or country they live in. If cross-border data governance is something you weigh when choosing where to store years of purchase history and account data, it’s a legitimate, if secondary, factor in the GOG vs Steam decision.

Account security has converged more than data jurisdiction has. Steam has offered its own Steam Guard Mobile Authenticator for years as the standard way to secure logins and trade actions with time-based one-time codes. GOG spent longer relying on email-only verification codes, but added support for standard authenticator apps — Google Authenticator, Authy, Microsoft Authenticator, and similar TOTP tools — in May 2025, bringing its two-step login roughly to parity with Steam’s approach, according to GamingOnLinux’s report on the rollout. Either platform’s account is a reasonable target for credential-stuffing attempts given how much payment and purchase history sits behind the login, so enabling authenticator-app 2FA — rather than relying on email codes alone — is worth doing on both storefronts regardless of which one holds the bulk of your library.

Who Should Choose GOG vs Steam: 5 Use-Case Recommendations

Classic-game collectors and archivists: GOG wins outright. The Preservation Program’s 267 actively maintained titles, combined with permanent offline installers, make GOG the only realistic long-term home for a library you want playable in 2036, not just 2026.
Steam Deck and handheld-first players: Steam is the clear choice. Native SteamOS support, Proton compatibility, and Valve’s own expanding hardware lineup mean a GOG-only library requires extra setup through Heroic or Lutris just to reach parity.
Modders and multiplayer-community players: Steam again, largely because of Steam Workshop’s automated mod installation and the sheer size of the active player base backing competitive and co-op titles.
Budget-conscious players who replay games slowly: GOG’s 30-day, no-playtime-cap refund policy is meaningfully more forgiving than Steam’s 2-hour ceiling if you tend to sit on a purchase before deciding whether it’s for you.
Privacy-conscious buyers and EU-based users: GOG’s Polish/EU jurisdiction and GDPR baseline protections give it a slight edge for anyone actively weighing data governance in a purchase decision.
Day-one AAA and indie release hunters: Steam’s much larger catalog and lower-friction submission process (Steam Direct) mean new releases land there first far more consistently than on GOG’s curated review process.

Most serious PC gamers in 2026 don’t pick one exclusively — they run both, using GOG for the specific titles where DRM-free ownership matters and Steam for everything else, including anything they plan to play on a handheld.

Migration Guide: Moving Your Library Between GOG and Steam

There’s no one-click “transfer” between the two stores — a Steam key doesn’t become a GOG key and vice versa, because they’re different companies with separate license databases. What you can do is consolidate management and make sure you’re not leaving value on the table:

Audit both libraries first. Check your Steam library page and your GOG account’s order history for games you already own on one platform before buying a “second copy” on the other.
Check for bundled dual ownership. Some CD Projekt titles, older Humble Bundle purchases, and certain Kickstarter tiers include both a Steam key and a GOG-DRM-free copy of the same game — redeem both if you have them.
Download offline installers for anything you want to keep permanently. This is GOG’s core advantage: save the standalone installer to external storage rather than relying on re-downloading from GOG’s servers years later.
Verify installer integrity with a checksum tool (see the sha256sum example above) before archiving installers long-term, especially if you’re moving them across machines.
Link accounts in GOG Galaxy 2.0 if you want a single library view — it can display your Steam library alongside your GOG purchases without requiring you to actually move anything.
Manually back up save files for GOG titles that don’t support GOG Galaxy cloud saves; Steam Cloud coverage is broader but not universal either, so check both before assuming a save will carry over to a reinstall.
On Steam Deck or Linux, install Heroic Games Launcher or Lutris to run your GOG-purchased titles through Proton or a compatible Wine build alongside your native Steam library.
Expect to lose Steam Workshop mods if you move a moddable title’s ownership emphasis to GOG — Workshop mods are tied to Steam’s infrastructure and won’t carry over; look for the mod’s manual-install version on Nexus Mods instead.

Pros and Cons at a Glance

GOG pros: 100% DRM-free catalog, permanent offline installers, 30-day no-playtime-cap refunds, GDPR/EU jurisdiction, an actively maintained Preservation Program, and no client requirement to play. GOG cons: a catalog roughly a tenth the size of Steam’s, no native Steam Deck or SteamOS integration, no Workshop-style mod system, no family/library sharing, and slower access to day-one indie releases.

Steam pros: a catalog around 124,000-125,000 games, native SteamOS/Steam Deck support backed by Valve’s own hardware lineup, Steam Workshop automated modding, Steam Families sharing, and a concurrent-user base north of 42 million that keeps the ecosystem — sales, community guides, mod communities — genuinely alive. Steam cons: a stricter 14-day/2-hour refund window, Steamworks or third-party DRM on most AAA titles, US data jurisdiction, and an active 32,000-developer antitrust suit that could eventually reshape its pricing rules.

Stacking every category examined above into a single scorecard makes the trade-off easy to scan at a glance:

Category	Winner
Catalog size and new-release availability	Steam
DRM-free ownership	GOG
Refund policy	GOG
Steam Deck / handheld support	Steam
Modding infrastructure	Steam
Classic-game preservation	GOG
Family / library sharing	Steam
Privacy jurisdiction (GDPR baseline)	GOG
Concurrent community size	Steam
Publisher breadth (Ubisoft/EA-style DRM titles)	Steam

Six categories favor Steam, four favor GOG — but the four GOG wins (ownership, refunds, preservation, privacy) are exactly the categories a security- and privacy-conscious buyer is likely to weight most heavily, while the six Steam wins are mostly about raw scale and hardware integration.

The Verdict: Which Platform Wins in 2026?

There isn’t a single winner, and treating this as an either/or choice misses how most PC gamers actually behave in 2026. Steam wins decisively on scale: roughly 10x GOG’s catalog, native handheld support across a growing list of SteamOS devices, Workshop modding, and a concurrent-user base that just broke 42 million. If you own a Steam Deck, play modded multiplayer games, or simply want the largest possible selection on day one, Steam is the correct default.

GOG wins decisively on ownership: a 30-day refund window with no playtime ceiling, a 100% DRM-free catalog you can archive indefinitely as offline installers, a genuinely unique Preservation Program actively maintaining 267 older titles, and EU/GDPR jurisdiction for anyone who weighs that factor. The honest 2026 answer is that GOG and Steam solve different problems — Steam for breadth, community, and hardware integration; GOG for permanence, curation, and consumer-first policy — and running both isn’t redundant, it’s the setup that gets you the best of each.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is GOG cheaper than Steam?

Not systematically. List prices are set by publishers and are typically identical across both stores. GOG’s Summer Sale 2026 discounts (up to 95% on some titles) are comparable in depth to Steam’s seasonal sales, though Steam’s much larger catalog means more total games are discounted in absolute terms during any given sale.

Can I play GOG games on Steam Deck?

Yes, but not natively. GOG has no first-party Steam Deck integration, so you’ll need a third-party tool like Heroic Games Launcher or Lutris to run GOG’s DRM-free installers through Proton on SteamOS.

Does GOG have Steam Workshop-style mod support?

No. GOG has no automated mod-installation system. Mods for GOG titles must be installed manually, typically using a mod’s manual-download package from a site like Nexus Mods.

What happens to my games if GOG shuts down?

This is GOG’s core selling point: because every purchase is a DRM-free, standalone offline installer with no authentication check, any installer you’ve already downloaded will keep working indefinitely, with or without GOG’s servers online, as long as you kept a copy.

Can I transfer my Steam library to GOG, or vice versa?

No. Steam and GOG are separate companies with independent license databases, and there is no official key-conversion or library-transfer mechanism between them. GOG Galaxy 2.0 can display your Steam library alongside your GOG purchases, but it doesn’t move ownership between platforms.

Is GOG still owned by CD Projekt in 2026?

No. CD Projekt sold 100% of GOG to co-founder Michał Kiciński for roughly $25 million (PLN 90.7 million) at the end of December 2025. A distribution agreement still guarantees CD Projekt RED’s future games ship on GOG, but the storefront itself is now independently owned.

Which platform has the better refund policy?

GOG’s, by a wide margin for anyone who wants to actually finish a game before deciding. GOG allows refunds up to 30 days after purchase with no playtime cap, while Steam requires a request within 14 days and under 2 hours of playtime for automatic approval.

Does Steam or GOG get more day-one game releases?

Steam, by a large margin, thanks to its lower-friction Steam Direct submission process and far larger install base, which makes it the default launch platform for most developers. GOG does get day-one releases from developers who prioritize DRM-free distribution, such as Larian Studios with Baldur’s Gate 3, but its curated review process means it doesn’t match Steam’s release volume.