Oh my. They kept this secret even from Backers such as myself: I bought the DLC when it came out. Didn't see they sent an email with a key till I read this thread,

Bummer.

The thing is, not properly supporting your products is a bad signal to give off when you're working on a multiplatform release. What's to say they won't drop those after release as well? Likewise, making it clear in that way that you're not treating your customers equally is not a good way to make people trust your product. Putting a game up for sale somewhere is a commitment that doesn't stop once it seizes to be wholly favourable to the seller.

Oh. I was thinking about buying Armello, because it looked lovely, but I'm definitely not supporting these practices. It's a pity.

GOG, you need to put in your contracts:
1. That GOG versions will receive support, updates, and expansions at least as long as DRM versions do.
2. That GOG versions will NOT lack any features (for example, multiplayer, modding, or level-editor functionality) present in DRM versions. If such features required vendor-specific infrastructure, an at least vague approximation of the feature will be provided (an included server application that can be directly connected to by URL or IP replacing matchmaking, manual mod package installation replacing services like Steam Workshop, etc.).

I understand that rule 2 will make porting of certain (designed with insufficient foresight) games more difficult and time consuming, and may even scare away developers. You should probably work with developers to understand what the difficulties in providing certain features are and work out alternatives. There might occasionally be games where some features do not have any good replacement. In that case, you should consider carefully before making an exception, and ALWAYS include a clear warning on the game page. Rule 1, however, should be non-negotiable.

Looking into material people link from here, there's a distinct trend on GOG of devs cashing in on the DRM-free bandwagon to get money out of DRM-free-only buyers, and deliberately neutering their games (releasing only crippled versions, ceasing updates early, etc.) to ensure superiority of the Steam (or much more rarely, some other DRM service) version or out of a strange sort of... buyer's remorse? Specifically, the reaction of the Armello devs seems to show a rejection of the DRM-free ethos and an attempt at 'damage control' by ensuring the inferiority of this version. The (provably false) assertion that there is 'no way' to provide DLC on GOG stems from a DRM-centric understanding of software, with the actual meaning closer to "there's no way to prevent people from reimplementing DLC features themselves (besides legal threats)". This is actually also technically true of DRM versions (it is not physically possible to design perfect DRM), but it would be significantly easier with a DRM-free version.

As others have said, it would be simple to include a check for add-on files for DLC. It would be much easier to work around than the Steam version, but that's the nature of DRM-free. You treat your customers AS customers, and as potential repeat customers, NOT as criminals. The devs' response shows the commitment to treating customers as 'potential criminals' endemic in the logic of DRM culture. What I don't get is why they released the game here at all. It seems completely counter to the adversarial customer-developer logic they espouse now. Perhaps some political shift occurred within the company after the deal with GOG was already signed?

Multiplayer functionality would be more difficult to port. However, as a game with (as far as I can tell) no action elements, it shouldn't be too terrible. Certainly not as much of a headache as doing a similar conversion to a twitch game. Netcode for a turn-based board game doesn't have to be fast, it just has to work. Ideally things happen roughly in the order that commands were issued, and if your command fails to propagate or is pre-empted by another player's you sync back up and can see the 'canonical' state within a few seconds. Certainly cheating will be easier, but that's not a big deal.

Honestly, a lot of this mess is on middlemen like Valve encouraging developers to write specifically for an account management, networking, and DRM package like Steamworks, allowing porting (possibly with some difficulty) to other middlemen's equivalent, but severely complicating DRM-free ports because vital infrastructure for the game (netcode, user progression and stats tracking, save files, mod support) is farmed out to the DRM company. (But don't forget that devs are to blame for taking them up on this offer.) Fewer and fewer games actually support dedicated, user-run servers any more, which is one of my criteria for selecting games these days. It doesn't matter that you sell a DRM-free version if I can't actually play a friendly game of it after the developer is gone. The game still went down with the company. GOG should not encourage going down that kind of road, but it also shouldn't accept laziness when it comes to sloppy ports with missing features intended to cash in on, then dump, the DRM-free market.

I guess a crippled DRM-free version is better than nothing, but when it's so obviously deliberate it's not going to get my money.

Just one last thing that has been bothering me, then i'll give-up with Armello and move on.


If the developers can't release DLC on GOG, as they keep saying, then what is this?

https://www.gog.com/game/armello_original_soundtrack_wylds_call


You can't buy the soundtrack unless you own the actual game, so isn't this technically DLC?

It's DLC on Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/398911/

Bummer indeed, perhaps you could ask for a refund?

I didn't know it was common to get "inferior" version of games here.
Until I see : https://www.gog.com/mix/games_that_treat_gog_customers_as_second_class_citizens

I confess,I'm a bit disappointed...

I think gog is good for games that will most likely not need patches in the future, or very infrequently. Too many games have issues with patches here for me to think it is solely a "lazy" dev issue.

I'm afraid I owe credit where credit is due as I was made aware of that Wallet FAQ detail thanks to HypersomniacLive:
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/introducing_gog_wallet_the_simplest_way_to_pay_1d6d1/post155

Hopefully, he won't erase me from his bouquet list...

Oh look,

They seem to have broken the Playstation 4 version of the game too... This developer is priceless.

http://leagueofgeeks.com/forums/index.php?topic=2333.0

Thats the joke, Every time a new DRM is released, it is crack within 5 minutes of it being available. Proves my point that they are just about $$$ and the illusion that DRM will protect them.

Yep, that's the basics (along with your bookkeeping and multithread/process if you don't want to block during receive). The problem was all the objects for the the world, interact-able objects, & player characters. The engine had its own functions for dealing with networking and keeping objects synced, but those supported client-server and not peer-to-peer. To use basic networking and make it peer-to-peer, she would've had to dive down the rabbit hole of manually updating and rewriting private, likely undocumented, methods. The time for doing (and debugging) that eliminates an enormous portion of the benefit of the engine in the first place.

As I said, it was a bad engine.

I didn't mean DLC, I was referencing the question of multiplayer and how the network stack works for the game engine. I was responding to some statements about number of lines of code needed to add network support. For DLC they're just favoring microtransactions and otherwise being lazy asshats.

I've never developed something in a game engine personally and am not familiar with Unity. I have no idea how much the 10 or 20 lines of code the previous commenters mentioned would be correct for Unity or not. It's a big respected game engine that is frequently used, so it's quite possible. I just don't know.
While I can't say I agree with a lot of what you've said otherwise, I will agree that it's seemed like lately GOG has been pursuing boosting the quantity of games in their catalog a bit too much, and I'd agree they'd be a better store with a sparser catalog of properly supported games.

I don't disagree with you, but I think realistically to do this, GOG will need to release more in the way of tools to assist in porting from Steam to Galaxy. It's the way that once the Windows store scared Valve, they finally got serious about Steam on Linux and started releasing tools to make releasing native Linux Steam games easier. They had to supply the tools to convince the developers. Basically they need a Steamworks API translation layer in Galaxy, which is irritating, but that's what you get when the other guy is the market leader. I'm not sure what the Steamworks API licensing allows or not in that regard, but GOG would stand a pretty good chance of winning an anticompetitive behavior lawsuit against Valve if they tried to block it (definitely in the EU, quite possibly in US too).

This change definitely gives you room for a refund from the Kickstarter, since they can't fulfill as the campaign promised (which promised DRM-free). Though the FAQ on the campaign also listed IAPs... So I would never have backed, since IAPs pretty much depend on DRM.