I'm also wondering about this. After the initial release, they should have it all automated in their build system. Hit the "build release" button and the thing should just spit out three versions (assuming building for steam, epic and gog), pulling in wrappers and dependencies according to what was required for the initial release. And this should have been automated, these build systems are very powerful and go way beyond #ifdef and stuff. You only need to make the effort to learn how to utilize them, and I fear this is where it breaks: instead of learning their toolchain of choice, they repeatedly do the packaging manually and as such each release is a lengthy affair. They'd need a system integrator, and maybe don't realize that.

One could view as proof that developers also don't seem to know how to handle their versioning tools, because of how often they get regressions, and of course when they start losing code, they don't even have a properly maintained backup system (and yes, RAID is NOT a backup). We tend to think they're so much more tech-savy than us, because they're pretending to be, but in fact they're just humans and it's just a job.

Doesn't actually depend on the publisher's whims?

You're correct about some games. There are multiple reasons why this happens. I've seen developers completely abandon their games on GOG.

To be honest, this behavior shows that these developers and publishers don't really care about their customers; they are only focused on making money. Which I guess is normal nowadays for anything

It's a slap in the face to customers who spend their hard-earned money, only to have developers and publishers abandon the game because it's not on Steam, the most popular platform. Making the money they want.

Then you have developers claiming it's too much work to update the GOG version, when often the GOG version is just a cracked Steam version.

I've also seen plenty of smaller developers update their GOG games at the same time as those on Steam without any issues. While I understand that Steam might receive updates first, abandoning GOG for flimsy reasons feels disrespectful to customers.

I thought PC gaming was about having freedom of choice. Not be forced to buy games on certain platform.

I also noticed this issue happening to not just GOG.

Sadly "Update Fatigue" is a thing that's been made worse by modern digital game stores each wanting to be their own walled garden ecosystem. Steam started the problem but all the time it was only Steam doing it, the effect was hidden. But when GOG, Epic Game Store, etc, each want their own Steam-like client that inserts their own Steamworks-like API (Galaxy, EGS, etc) code into the game itself hooking into their own Galaxy.dll, steam_api.dll, etc files for their own branded achievements in their own special format "Steam style", then devs can't just take one "base" DRM-Free version and reuse it between stores (same way how developer hosted pre-Steam patches worked for everyone regardless of where you bought the game), instead each update needs designing "for the store".

In developers own words:-

- "How much work would they need to support Galaxy any way?" - We actually did look into it. We spoke with GOG who gave us access to information about what we would need to do. As I mentioned in an earlier post, it was not a trivial amount of work, and we couldn't justify it given the expected future revenues, nor could we outsource it without losing quite a bit of money."
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/a_while_ago_i_wrote_to_dan_adelman_axiom_verge_and_asked_why_he_didnt_release_it_gog/post24

- "Going onto GOG I expected maybe something like 10% of Steam, but it's more like 1%. Same with releasing a Linux version. It's all worth so little for us that it's rather annoying to have to do the extra work all the time and carry that weight around. I wouldn't do it again."
https://steamcommunity.com/app/813630/discussions/0/2252308752476410536/#c2282708683255940081

- "Hey there we used to be GOG, but the amount of people using it to buy and play Besiege was so low that we pulled it again because the amount of support we had to do for that version".
https://www.reddit.com/r/Besiege/comments/1d3p20y/comment/l6jftqp/

These were just some of the devs who found Galaxy integration annoying enough to cause them to either not release their games here (or release but then remove them). There are others who haven't come out and said it, but we are obviously missing a lot of sequels to original games here that 'coincidentally' also happen to be missing updates, almost like they grew tired of updating their first game enough that it played a factor in not releasing the sequel here for same reason. Eg, Oxenfree launched on Steam, GOG, Epic, Origin, itch.io, Mac Store and MS Store. They very quickly got so exhausted of having to do 7x separate builds per update they stopped updating half of them ("As of this date, the game version is 3.1.0 on Steam but 2.7.1 on Epic and GOG, and 2.4.0 on Origin.", PCGW notes). Subsequently, that the sequel Oxenfree 2 released Steam-only is almost certainly "Update Fatigue" related.

There are many others who do release their games here but also still find the "30x updates actually means recompiling the game 90x times for 3 stores" workload multiplication annoying enough to no longer rush to keep GOG games in lockstep with every Steam update. Similarly, some "In Development" games (eg, GloomWood) that have had a "Coming Soon" placeholder page here for years, released on Steam and they update that regularly, but the dev has also said they only plan on a GOG release post 1.0 "to reduce the workload".

Bottom line - The "Steam Model" (putting as much Middleware store-branding (aka, store-specific achievements, cloud saves, etc) in-game as possible benefits mostly only Steam. For smaller stores following suit, it's ended up an unintended workload multiplier. It's not the only reason some games lack updates, but it is a major factor that developers admit to themselves.

I'd assume the reason would generally be "just not worth it". If GOG sales were significant enough, they'd make damn sure to keep everything updated. But when GOG sales constitute like less than 5% of total sales, it could easily cost more money to pay people the manhours required to keep the game up to date than the money it'd ultimately bring in. A simple business decision if you'd like.

In an ideal world, everything would be automated and builds pushed with a press of a button through a properly setup CI/CD pipeline. But then, we don't live in an ideal world. Somebody has to set that up properly, branch out the codebase etc. and there might be other peculiarities that might require work/fixing/maintenance when it comes to GOG builds, like Galaxy integration + achievements, where you can't reuse the implementation from the Steam build etc. And any studio that does not have this process automated would need to spend a non-insignificant amount of money on that as developers' time is notoriously expensive these days.

Thanks for the answers! The more you know...

Now I can only hope that GOG will grow more and more in the coming years. So that developers will find it more and more profitable not only to update their games, but also to release them here ^^


Anyways taking for example - Children of Morta, it's really sad that the devs promised to release the newest biggest update here on GOG and after 3 years they still didn't, just straight abandon the platform. There were a bunch of people who bought this title because they were promised they will get the new upadte with online co-op...

Don't forget the manual invoicing, unless that changed.

I've often wondered about this question: If GOG were to remove Galaxy, would that result in more games being available, or would developers simply find another reason not to update and release on GOG? I understand that sales would still play a significant role in their decisions.

We really only have one other DRM-free store to compare with, and they seem to have difficulty acquiring games, even without another launcher that developers might dislike.


Edit: Interesting from the Dev for Supraland

Saying: Linux is about 1,1% on Steam.
It's best to focus all energy on Steam + Windows, because that covers 97% of players. These 3% of Linux, Gog, Itch etc require so much effort.

I figure Itch was something simple to upload too.

An additional, compounding issue. The size and relative inexperience of the studios involved in making these decisions.

It is one matter to hire a couple of (seasoned, hopefully!) developers to produce a GOG version of a static, old game. For example, Dino Crisis; briefly outlined in this promotional video. It is another (as has been previously discussed regarding the cost in time, labour, and money) to continually produce versions of new games that are actively being developed and updated.
Many of the studios producing these new games are small, independent studios with only a few heads, and many of those may lack the required experience and foresight to completely comprehend the undertaking the have committed to; the maintaining of multiple versions over numerous storefronts. The manpower set aside for creating just one version of one game is now attempting to do everything else required with game production in addition to creating many versions of that one game.

It's a difficult to choice to make, that the developers cited in posts above have come to realise. Stymie themselves and slow their products advancement, damage their reputation and primary source of sales; the only saving grace being honouring prior commitments, or instead sacrifice a small amount of sales, remove a great headache, and actually be able to finish the game in a reasonable amount of time.

In a word, GOG is still an afterthought. A nuisance.

Pretty sure it's still manual.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1481170/discussions/0/3541546590714371136/

1. Most likely no GOG. They have an annoying system for uploading builds where you have to do everything manually and it's not worth the extra effort for our small team. The Steam version will be DRM-free; as in, you won't need Steam running to play it.


Now that was in 2022, but the game is not on GOG.

It doesn't seem to be just that if Epic and others also are falling behind on updates, but if it even is one part of the problem, then GOG would do well to realise that this is hurting them. But it seems like they are like a child that the instant it thinks of something new and exciting abandons whatever it was doing and leaves that half-baked and unfinished while pursuing the next bling-bling headline-in-spe. These developer tools GOG provides seem like Galaxy: mostly abandoned and half-done, with all effort having been shifted to publicizing the Dreamlist.

And meanwhile, more users learn the hard (=expensive) way that games on GOG more often than not won't get updates, fixes or any other response, which makes them turn to Steam, which in fact always works and gets updates till the very end (plus advertising launchers that noone asked for and wants ;) ), further decreasing sales on GOG, further emphasizing to devs that GOG is just not worth it, less games, less effort, less customers, rinse, repeat.

I don't think there's anything that cannot be scripted or automated with sufficient dedication, but it is GOGs part to provide this dedication instead of expecting that from their customers (which the game developers are as well), thereby multiplying the work instead of doing the work once and multiplying the results. ;(

Of course this all is speculation, but there seems to be a pattern in the posts about this topic, which of course might be due to only a few customers talking about it instead of GOG explaining things or simply doing what seems to be required so that the problems silently go away.

Also of course Steam will make sure that their libraries and interfaces cannot trivially (=legally) be reimplemented, because they very likely intend to promote this sort of issues in order to keep Steam the go-to platform. So everyone else has to make a different API at least. Though of course they could (and should) get together and create an open alternative to the Steam API instead of just insisting on making their own, just as custom, re-use averse, broken and less functional, implementation. They can play with their own back-ends and servers all they like, but imagine there was a common way to compile for and release on Epic, itch, GOG and Origin. Now, that might actually enable any of them to become at least marginally meaningful. I know, not gonna happen.

It's the illuminates that prevent it, brother! Reptilians have been hiding on the far side of the moon since prehistoric times. The new world order doesn't want GOG to receive updates... But NSFW games they are allowing, in fact, that's the reason there are so many here. Escape to the hills while there's still time!

They'd start blaming the lack of feature parity with something like Steam.

"You are missing achievements and cloud saves, we can't sell an inferior product on your platform!!!" into "Your solution for achievements and cloud saves it too time/money consuming/custom to implement for the miniscule portion of sales this brings in!!!".

There is sadly no escaping this circle without getting a bigger market share first.

That do be how it works. As long as you don't have enough people giving a hoot about stores other than steam, like I'm not even talking GOG's selling point of preservation/drm-free but rather diversifying the whole damn PC platform, we'll be stuck in a mountain of excuses and every other joint will be left behind in the dust. And there doesn't seem to be an easy way out.

Though I'm pretty sure I heard from somewhere that Galaxy essentially does the minimal effort required to take your Steam game and translate the necessary functionality to something Galaxy can understand, and that supposedly it's intended to be as painless as can be. So I'm not sure if some of these developers are just being lazy or if they're running headfirst into actual issues. "no you see akshuaally you get the choice of whether you buy updated game from steam or outdated one from ea orign steam!! this better than consawls where you buy from playstation live box!!"

I swear every argument of that sort ends up in "we don't have the choice to select our store on console, on pc we actively don't use that choice by staying on only one store" LOL.