I wonder when GOG upper management will get the memo about 'update fatigue' because I'm sure most of us would much rather have a somewhat outdated, stable game without client features than without it.

Whether APIs are copyrightable or not is still generally speaking unresolved. In the most significant case, Google vs Oracle, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Google deciding that Google's use of the Java APIs fall under fair use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_Inc.

There is some optimism among tech companies and the free & open source software community that reimplementing APIs is OK.

GOG seems to think so too: they have implemented a Steam SDK wrapper which should allow some Steam builds of games to run with no (or minimal) modifications on GOG: https://docs.gog.com/steam-sdk-wrapper/

(This is still an unfavorable position for GOG because they are forced to play a cat and mouse game where Steam can constantly change the API and make more work for GOG. However, it may be better than trying to get every developer on board to implement Galaxy integration)

I understand that it's annoying to create an update for 6 different platforms 3 times a month. But why is it too much effort to update a game once a year?! If I know I don't have any more updates planned for my game, why is it so hard to create a final patch? These kind of developers should really be boycotted, here and on Steam.

True... The perfect example are developers of Children of Morta. Last updates/patches were 3 years ago. They could have easily keep their word and release the final patch here too

That's a good thing, then, and I also think it should be OK because the more widespread the API is, the more it becomes an issue of interoperability, which AFAIK already has been ruled OK. So, by becoming the de-facto standard, Steam may have crossed that line anyway, even without further court decisions.
That would inconvenience all developers on Steam, so it's probably going to be (ab)used for some big stuff in order to slow down competition, instead of constantly nagging everyone. But then there'll have to be a compatibility layer for de-facto abandoned games that still are selling on Steam, so it might actually be infeasible.
True, especially if the wrapper mentioned above actually covers everything, this is even less understandable. Once a year should indeed be doable, and I would much much prefer to know that eventually (even if it takes said year) I will get the complete version than getting promises and gambling or looking up lists of bad-apple publishers before every purchase. If the posts about the subject I've read around here are any indication, this might apply to most, even to those who are relatively comfourtable buying on Steam instead of here but still have a mild preference for GOG.

And if nothing helps, there are measures that can be taken before delisting a game, like starting to deduce increasing amounts from the purchases going to publishers, up until witholding them entirely. In theory, one could even implement fines for lack of timely updates, but putting that in the agreements might just scare away smaller teams.


It might be interestiong to compare the sales percentages of day 1 listings on GOG with those of 3 months after listings. I'm sure that GOG has done such comparisons since they can at least ask CDPR for their stats. If people are spending premium just to have early access for 3 days or maybe a week, then there has to be a big difference there, and this alone might be what's keeping GOG down and the publishers should know better from their own figures than blaming things on GOG being small and unimportant.

GOG's Steam "Ghost" Wrapper sadly isn't some magic wand without issues though, and comes with still unfixed 6 year old Galaxy API bugs impacting offline installer users...

It isn't though if you understand what's going on "under the hood". A "Steam Wrapped" GOG game isn't a real "made for GOG" release at all. The developers are just uploading the literal Steam version with SteamWorks API still running, etc, to which GOG adds their own Steam-emulator crack that fakes having the Steam client running and passes through achievement unlock calls, etc, to a second layer of fake client (in offline installers)... GOG call it a "Steam Wrapper" but it works exactly like Goldberg crack pirates use (but with more bugs). So you're not really buying a "GOG" version of such games anymore, you're literally paying GOG to use cracked a Steam version that's pretending to be a GOG version...

It may be a 'cheap' way of reusing Steam achievements without having to manually rewrite them to Galaxy ones, but it's also buggy and has introduced unnecessary startup delays in offline installers (to the point they can take several times longer to start without DRM than actual Steam versions do even including an online DRM check...) as GOG's Galaxy stub and GOG's buggy Steam crack have to "talk to each other" before 'permitting' the game to start. It's actually a terrible system that's literally the last thing many of us want to see in already degraded enough "DRM-Free" offline installers.

But are they really losing money?
They probably only make a pittance from GOG sales compared to Steam etc sales.

And it is a well known fact, that some at GOG have gotten fed up and re-bought at Steam. So the seller gets the benefit of double dipping.

I have long suspected, that some don't do a genuine release at GOG, and before long abandon their game here. They possibly see GOG as a good way to advertise, not only the game, but themselves. They of course then try to lay any blame on GOG for their abandonment. We'd believe them easier if they reimbursed everyone, or gave a free Steam key, not that a good number of folk here would want a Steam key ... perhaps if the game was DRM-Free Lite.

I take with a pinch of salt, any excuses about extra work to do a GOG release or update. And if that is the case, then they really screwed up big time, approaching the whole GOG thing badly ... poorly thought out. But can they really be that naive?

DRM should be an added layer, even though it might have some degree of insertion. DRM also surely costs extra money. So I struggle to see how doing a GOG version should be more costly or time consuming or onerous.

So yes, I am totally suspicious about abandonment at GOG.

Steam don't charge for SteamWorks DRM so (unfortunately) it's free and there's zero cost to add it vs not using it. In theory GOG's DRM-Free builds should (and used to be) easier to do, but it's Galaxy that's wiped out that advantage, and there's more work involved in porting Steam Achievements to Galaxy vs adding one line of code to enable Steam DRM on Steam games. GOG also went out of their to push developers into using Galaxy to unlock DLC like Steam (DLC Discovery) instead of having the game handle it normally. Of course there is no Galaxy for Linux so if you want to upload a Linux build, the workload is doubled again because "this solution can’t be used on Linux operating systems", so you need to code the same thing twice over in different ways just for GOG (but only once for Steam / letting the game handle it 'internally' just by looking for the DLC files on the disk...)

GOG's "Great Idea (tm)" to overcome that (entirely self inflicted) "make-work" problem is to seemingly want to abandon "native" Galaxy achievements and reuse Steam achievements by using a wrapper. Read the threads linked to in above posts #21-22 though, and due to a buggy implementation all that's done is made offline installers worse to the extent GOG might as well drop the pretence and just start selling Steam keys with instructions to just drop GoldBerg into the game folder then zip that up and call that your "offline GOG installer", and for some games that would actually be an improvement over the "your offline installers work slower than ever because of TWO fake client stubs only needed for someone else's 'discount cheevos' that won't work in offline installers anyway" problem.

So there really is a lot of truth in developers complaints about how post-2015 GOG have made their DRM-Free builds increasingly and unnecessarily over-complicated, and it's certainly bewildering how a store has turned the elegant simplicity of pre-Galaxy DRM-Free releases into "more work than work" 'Rube Goldberg Machines' that somehow manages to p*ss off both gamers ("You use offline installers because you don't like clients, so we put TWO client stubs into them!") and developers ("No I'm not reading this bloody great encyclopaedia sized API documentation just to reinvent the wheel for everything except DRM when I can just upload the Steam version minus DRM by changing 1 line")...

For medium sized studios that update their games a lot, having their games on GOG feels like something they do because they either like the store/their playerbase asked for a GOG version and not because it's actually profitable, simple as

I can see big AAA games selling well regardless, and small indies trying to get their games on as many storefronts as possible, but if you're in that middle point where your game sells just fine on other plataforms, having to deal with Galaxy is probably not worth the trouble

There are exceptions to the rule of course, some games that are guaranteed to come here day 1 probably get more consistent sales (like Owlcat games)

Loosing money or not : abandoning a game on GOG is a breach in contract and GOG should use this to be more agressive with the devs / publishers. : i have the impression GOG is just too kind with them as the result their platform is harmed and their customers too. Recently i sent a mail to the devs of "Vambrace Cold Soul" and suddenly the game received its latest and final update ..... sigh ...

I always found odd ; some devs are updating properly their game here (ie : Black Geyser: Couriers of Darkness) and some not or worse forget GOG at all until someone reach them to remember GOG exists and their game is outdated since quite some times (in some case years).

There're some games with a very small team : ie : Edge of Eternity, trying since many months to get the latest update (GOG too) but no dice...

And yeah sure GOG is certainly guilty to some extent with their client : "what a marvellous idea" ! >.>

What is certain if GOG doesn't change its attitude : the problem will be worse and worse. Because actually some devs doesn't respect them at all. GOG = is just a marketing place for Steam (i doubt this point was in the contract which was signed with both parts)

GOG has another serious issue ; the lack of manpower...

GOG in this instance would be between a rock and hard place, so damned if they do or damned if they don't.

Unless GOG are dealing with a small studio, there is a power imbalance in favor of the game provider.
So being tough, would be something GOG can't really do, because of the fallout if they did ... considering they would be struggling to get decent providers as it is.

I wasn't really referring to that form of DRM.
Many games as you would know, have additional DRM.
And so Goldberg, from what I have read, is no solution for them.

As you say, GOG appear to have made things convoluted, but surely any game provider would or should know the deal before providing at GOG, so it's not really an excuse once they have committed. And it is the customer who is penalized, and so any failure needs to be redressed, but generally isn't, so such game providers don't get any sympathy from me.

How convoluted GOG have made things, I don't really know, but it seems illogical to be too convoluted, as that would work against what is already a tough sell for them. One can quite rightly expect them, to make things easier rather than harder, as they are supposed to be attracting decent game providers to their store, and DRM-Free is often enough of a hard task all on its own.

Well... updating really would not have been an issue if GoG actually stuck to old games... which typically don't get updates.

What keeps GoG relevant today is not only is it mostly the best place to get old games but it still has less games.... which means the indie games on it gets superior exposure compared to Steam's deluge of utter garbage with a handful of gems hidden.

But yes GoG shoots itself in the foot by not making the publishing process extremely efficient from the complaints we have probably all seen by now. It's an organizational problem most likely more than a tech one.

As for sales.... a lot of the time games on GoG is priced higher than on Steam so obviously more people will buy on Steam.... which is probably by publisher design. It does not take a lot of thinking why this would be an unofficial margin maximization strategy.

I also think something happened that can be called "lazy retiree passive income strategy" where people retire and open a video rental store or something because they think it's a perpetual money generation scheme.... but then it suffers or even folds because it requires actual work or the target market was misjudged. Both on the publisher side and on GoG's side where the owners just let it run on autopilot when they poured resources into Cyberpunk. An irony on it's own.... a "old games" store being linked to a new AAA game that now sells well but almost bankrupted them.