GOG officially end their Steam-import scheme after six years
"For a long time nothing really happened there"
GOG has decided to scrap their GOG Connect service, which allowed users to claim a limited selection of games they already owned on Steam for free. The service was quietly killed off at the beginning of this year and removed from GOG’s site, which didn’t go unnoticed by frequenters of the GOG subreddit. GOG confirmed the closure of Connect to RPS fan site PC Gamer, saying “for a long time nothing really happened there, so we've decided to shut it down”. Fair enough.
The idea for GOG Connect wasn’t a bad one, and we reported on it back when it launched. Set up in June 2016 to “jumpstart your GOG.com library”, Connect was intended to let people grab a DRM-less version of games they’d already bought and paid for over on Steam. The major catch with Connect was its time-limited nature, with developers and publishers only allowing their games to be claimed for a relatively short period. Once you claimed a game though, it was yours to keep on GOG.
The DRM-free storefront updated their GOG Galaxy launcher in 2019 with the ambition of becoming a hub for starting all your games from across various PC libraries. Galaxy 2.0 lets you add games you own on Steam and the Epic Games Store alongside your GOG library, and launch them from within it. You can even add console games, for some reason, although launching them might prove a challenge. Still, Galaxy 2.0’s arrival didn’t help the case for keeping GOG Connect alive.
I don’t think I’ll miss GOG Connect, as I can’t say I ever used the service when it was active. Did you?