Valve is what happens when someone who's not just outright fucking evil invents a money printing machine

Epic cons:

Also:

• Epic has already been caught scanning and collecting data from files on people's hard drives that are totally unrelated to Epic or its games.
• Epic's habit of interfering with game availability, through exclusivity deals.

Ties with Tencent (super anti-consumer chinese state-owned megacorp)

To be more clear about it, Tencent is Epic's largest investor, so they obviously have a great deal of influence over and access to anything they want from Epic (likely including user data) and they directly benefit from Epic's growth.

Steam pros:

Also:

• Actively funding and supporting development of linux gaming technologies for more than a few years now, to the point where linux is now very much a viable gaming platform.

Steam cons:
Drm

Given that DRM on Steam is entirely up to each game publisher, I don't think it's appropriate to list under "Steam cons". I'm not even sure that any of my Steam games have DRM.

If you mean that most Steam games expect to find an instance of Steam running, you should know that is not DRM, and it's trivially replaced with the open-source Goldberg Emulator or a similar tool.

Gog
I don’t know anything besides the fact that it has drm-free games

Another plus for GOG is that they let you download games with a web browser. No special app required. (I think Itch.io does this as well.)

Don’t forget that Epic buys up existing licenses to sell them as exclusives. They even pulled Rocket League from Steam after buying the studio.

Steam have DRM free games too, you don't have to launch them through steam even.

A con for GOG is their site is slow as fuck. And god forbid you want to go back to a previous page, you'll likely lose where you were looking 9 times out of ten. Especially so on mobile.

Pros: Can be the only place you can get old games that would've been unavailable otherwise

The older games are often really really cheap, especially during sales

I want to note that Steam isn't inherently a DRM platform, as there are many games on Steam which are DRM free. Even ones that require the Steam backend can be bundled with Steamworks, serving all the same backend requirements without Steam needing to be installed on the machine.

Didn't know about heroic... Gonna check that out.

Also, wow. You're the dude that appears in comment sections with well-formatted paragraphs 💯.

Appreciate your service.

Steam UI is messy but they have a ton of functionality in their store/system. Epic took ages to even get a functioning cart, Steam has tons of features which are not even tied to the games in their store like remote play and Steam VR. Family sharing is also really cool for example. Also Steam basically killed piracy for a long time due to amazing Steam sales + convenience of use.

Another Epic con: they bribe devs to not launch their games on Steam and GoG, because their store isn’t good.

Steam DRM is optional, it depends on developers to implement it.