I'm careful because the developers have not taken the updates that the game has in its steam version and also do not answer any questions about this issue or future updates.

It is shameful of some developers with gog users

While I appreciate there is sometimes a problem with devs not updating their games here, didn't it only come out a few days ago? Too early to be jumping to conclusions.

There are users who have already requested money back for the absence of updates. Gog should talk to the game developers.

gOg updates are slow as they are manually packed and tested. this process takes time. they may already have the files, but are working on them / testing them

Just wait until the game is in a playable state before buying.

So, the recently uploaded game is missing very old updates that existed prior to release?

If this is so, no excuses.

As far as I could tell from the Steam pages for the game, it came out on Steam in Nov 14 2017. Since then, it has apparently had two updates, patch1 in Nov 22, and patch2 Dec 6. Both patches seem to have had critical fixes, like fixing crashes and memory leaks.

Considering the game came out only now on GOG, do I understand the OP right that these patches were not integrated to the GOG version already now? That would be very odd indeed, why would the publisher release a non-upgraded version to GOG much later?

I was thinking of buying the game but I will certainly wait until that is clarified. No I am not going to buy the Steam version either, fixes or not. It is a nice-to-have game, not a must-have (same goes to 99.999999% of the games I buy).

For the missing features like lacking achievements, meh... Not sure what the DLC is about, is it just a cosmetic one and why wouldn't it be offered to the GOG version, not sure if I "need" it.

I can understand if a game is released and stops receiving updates after release for reasons stated in other threads (potentially an issue with uploading to gog or something), but releasing a game post updates, without updates included, requires deliberate work. Effectively, they would have to go find an old version of the code and recompile that instead of simply recompiling the current version. That takes effort. I want more info.

The only sensible explanation I could think of is that the publisher provided GOG the game files already in e.g. late November or early December (when either or one of the patches was not available yet, even on Steam), and these two months have just passed with GOG Galaxy integration or something, using that old version.

But even that doesn't make it ok as the publisher should have sent the updated files to GOG, notifying them that they are working with an old build missing fixes to crashes and memory leaks. Plus, apparently the GOG version doesn't have e.g. achievements, leading me to believe there hasn't been much of Galaxy integration needed either.

So something doesn't quite sound right. I read somewhere that the game has sold quite poorly on Steam so maybe the publisher has stopped making updates to it even on Steam (the second patch was from Dec 6; does it still have issues to be fixed?), but if they decide to get some more sales from GOG, the very least one would expect them to ship the version which was updated in early December.

Then again, until we get a confirmation that these patches really are missing from the GOG version, or not...

I can't imagine the publisher being OK with gog having the files all that time and simply not bothering to make them available. I can imagine that'd be in violation of the contract. If it were so, but not a violation of the contract, it would be so underhanded of gog that the dev would wish to discontinue business with gog, and justify no further updates, but gog would have the right to continue selling because of the contract. Galaxy's unstable, and we've heard other devs on the forums questioning how to reliably go at achievements and other things using the galaxy API, so i imagine it's not documented very well. And, i'd imagine they did notify gog. If not, gog probably has them on violation of contract. Exactly. I'd imagine there are some contract violations going on here.

Either GOG had this version since last year and was not aware of the new patches or this is the last DRM-free version of the game and removing Denuvo and re-applying the changes to this version since Denuvo was added takes a lot of time.
I'd give the developer/publisher the benefit of doubt right now :)

Does the Steam version really have Denuvo, or are you just joking? Wow, then they must have been very worried it will be otherwise pirated to hell and back, which makes it all that more surprising they'd release it a bit later on GOG, DRM-free.

By the way, what do you mean "GOG was not aware of the new patches"? That gives me an impression you feel it is GOG's job to poll for updates from the publishers, and not the publishers informing GOG that hey we have these shiny new updates with crashing and memory leak fixes in it? I would expect that the publisher is pro-active in offering updates to GOG, instead of not doing anything until GOG notices a game is possibly out of date in their store, and begs for the updates.

Yes, it was released with Denuvo on steam - not sure whether it was later really removed or not.

Everything is a manual process at GOG, and thanks to that it's easy to miss things like patches.
Ideally, the developer could just push updates like on steam, but...
I've already asked on the Outcast release thread.

I can't find any confirmation that the game ever had Denuvo. The only thing I have heard are assumptions because of the publisher's tendecy to add Denuvo to their games.