Back in June, GOG.com announced its new “GOG Connect” program, a way by which it hoped to undermine Steam’s dominance as a platform. Feel like you’ve spent so much money that there’s no way you could ever switch away from Steam? GOG’s plan was to provide you with duplicate, DRM-free copies of games you’ve already bought, alleviating that burden.
I don’t know how long we can keep writing “There’s a new batch of GOG Connect games for you to grab” articles, but here’s one now: There are seventeen new GOG Connect titles for you to scoop up this week. Eligible games this time around include 2D Tony Hawk-sim OlliOlli, murder-sim Hotline Miami, Wang-sim Shadow Warrior, and medieval exploration sim Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition. Also Teslagrad, one of my favorite puzzle-platformers of the last few years.
You can go here to hook up your Steam account and earn your duplicate game licenses, though the process should already be done if you linked the two back in June.
And why not do it? Even if you love Valve with all your heart and soul, there’s always a chance that Steam comes crashing down and you lose all your game purchases forever. A very, very slim chance, but it’s smart to have a back-up.
I can’t say I’m a fan of the way GOG’s rolled Connect out though. Back in June I wrote “It looks like the current crop expires in five days, after which we’ll presumably get a new batch of twenty.” Instead it took three months and there are only seventeen.
Game licensing is a thorny issue and I assume it’s even worse if you’re trying to convince publishers to give your customers free licenses. But still, I didn’t expect it to take this long for us to see each batch, nor did I expect we’d have to alert you to Connect’s continued existence upon arrival.
Ah well, free games. Can’t complain too much. Again, you’ve got six days (coinciding with the GOG Back to School Sale) to grab this batch of back-ups. Might as well take advantage.