When GoG’s conference with CD Projekt Red was announced, GoG promised a major announcement, and yesterday it delivered on that promise. The announcement in question: GoG Galaxy, a digital distribution client similar to Valve’s Steam. This is not surprising, GoG has clearly been positioning itself as a direct competitor to Valve’s service for a while, by expanding their offering to contemporary games, then launching a service meant to compete with Steam’s Greenlight, and now taking the next step to bring them into direct competition.
In a marketplace already cluttered with Steam clones, such as Origin, U-Play, Desura, etc.. it might sound foolish to launch yet another platform. However, GoG attempts to bring their own stamp to the client. Galaxy will be entirely optional, it will not be necessary to play the games that are sold through GoG, and it will continue the policy of no DRM that GoG has been committed to in their store front. The client will not require the users to be online in order to play their games.
The client will have some of the features that are common in competing platforms, such as achievements, social tools, messaging, etc… for those functions, it will obviously require an internet connection.
Their other intriguing feature is Cross Play, which will also require an internet connection. Cross Play will let Galaxy users play with friends in any other third party platform, so that they will not always have to have the same client to do this.
GoG is clearly looking to beat Steam by providing a more consumer friendly service, and by providing a cross platform solution, similar to what clients like Trillian do for messaging. Despite the saturation of clients in the market, I am very interested to see what Galaxy will look like.
There isn’t a launch date currently, rather Galaxy’s official website promises more news in 2014.
