Issues I can think of in the order they occur to me. These are off the top of my head refections not researched.

1. Group think: If I shop where most other people shop I have outsourced research and decision making. Is there a good reason? maybe, maybe not but I'm going to follow the masses because I can't research everything.

2. Stability: neither store offers physical assets so if the store shuts down my purchases could also vanish. Steam is a bigger player and appears to be more stable and GOG is DRM free.

3 The shopping experience: I personally find the layout of steam better for discovery and finding reviews. With the current epic coupon available I have looked on epic for games and if you're just browsing it is not a intuitive experience. GOG similarly has a variety of sorting tools available.

4. private vs public ownership: Epic is a public for profit company. Over and over I have seen public companies screw there customers in the interest of profit. Valve (I believe, this is really off the top of my head) is privately held and as such can choose to prioritize whatever their leadership wants. They can't just be bought out and taken in a totally different direction.

This all could be insane ramblings but these are the things that motivate me to spend my money on Gog or steam in general.

I like the way steam looks better and try to avoid spending money on software belonging to chinese companies like Tencent.

Epic client is a spyware.

I just don't like the launcher. It's absurdly slow and bloated even though it doesn't contain many features. On fast hardware, it takes 30s to open and lags harder than Pokemon Scarlet and Violet. It also eats up my CPU for no reason and has an invasive privacy policy. I try to use the open source Heroic launcher instead, it's much better.

Although recently Steam has moved from slow to within a stone's throw of the launching speed of the Epic Games Store. I'm now looking for an alternative to launch my Steam games.

I personally don't give a shit about whichever store I use for gaming because I have no loyalty to Steam like a lot of the people in this thread. It's just a store and launcher. I wish people would get a grip.

I buy games where it's cheapest, whether that's GoG, Steam or Epic or anywhere else. I use the wishlist functions to make sure I can price compare on sales etc.

Epic wanted exclusives by pulling games from other platforms. I will never spend a single cent on Epic Games. I'm happy to spend it on Steam, especially games that I have pirated before (Commandos series for example) or indie games (Banished anyone?).

For bigger games such as Civilians, I'll purchase it on Steam and then pirate so I don't need to run Steam. I am a big fan of patches to remove the intro screen.

The issue with Epic isn't as bad as people imply, but it's very real. They produced an incredibly shoddy launcher and store, frequently engage in anticompetitive practices like exclusives, and are happy to frequently update their launcher with new unhelpful bullshit without addressing its core problems.

Me, I'm not upset that Epic exists, even as a Steam user I would not like to deal with them as a true monopoly. But, they give me zero reason to use the store.

The problem is that it's a half-baked product.

Instead of offering anything to be a better platform they are burning money on the platform in hopes they can pay their way to dominance by paid exclusivivity and giving away games. One of those isn't bad for users. Now consider what Epic offers beyond being able to buy and download a game. Nothing. Epic is only a storefront and they've had years to work on this at this point. Steam has gained dominance and maintains it in no small part due to all the additional features available to everyone. Do you use the steam workshop for any of your games? Have you used the steam community forums to troubleshoot a problem? Do you use big picture mode for a more console like experience? Do you customize your controller settings with the pretty expansive controller support built into steam? The overlay? How about the custom profiles and badges and trading cards? Epic is only a storefront. That's it. That's all that's on offer. So they supplement it with bribing devs to be exclusive to their store and giving away games to try and attract users.

Basically Epic like every other publisher has created their own launcher/store.

They aren't trying to compete on features and instead using profits from their franchise to buy market share (e.g. buying store exclusives).

The tone and strategy often comes off as aggressive and hostile.

For example Valve was concerned Microsoft were going to leverage their store to kill Steam. Valve has invested alot in adding windows operability to Linux and ensuring Linux is a good gaming platform. To them this is the hedge against agressive Microsoft business practices.

The Epic CEO thinks Windows is the only operating system and actively prevents Linux support and revoked Linux support from properties they bought.

As a linux user, Valve will keep getting my money and I literally can't give it to Epic because they don't want it.