Let's be honest here it has less to do with EGS really supporting Indies (I wouldn't really call Kingdom Hearts and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater "indy" games) and more to do with them wanting to hurt Steam.

EGS wanted to compete with Steam as fast as possible and to do so they pumped millions without caring if they were profitable or not, lowering their shares, offering upfront paid exclusivity, etc... Them helping Indies in the process is more an unforeseen secondary side effect than the main objective.


Concerning the main point of the thread, something I discovered over the years is that most of the time the only difference between Indies and AAA studios is... their resources.

So there is not really a "problem" that Gog has with indies titles, it is just that most indies, like AAA studios, care about one thing : making enough profit with their games.

If they consider that maintaining two version (or three now) doesn't have a good enough return on investment they just don't do it, and that's it.

And as other have mentioned having EGS joining the fray and doing whatever it takes to increase its market share didn't help either.

That's not accurate - to someone who is browsing Steam without changing the filter settings, it's not flooded.

Today GOG isn't flooded either, but a publisher who bought advertisements saying "buy our game on GOG" might have the joy of finding their ad run coincide with GOG's "NSFW banner on the homepage" week.

Not exactly, because the GOG version of Skyrim has a colossal asterisk/caveat attached to it: namely, that it uses a different build version number than the Steam version does, of which the consequence is that many of the really good mods would require a GOG-specific version in order to be made to work with the GOG version of Skyrim, but the authors of many/most of those mods are literally never going to make any GOG-specific version.

Meaning, the GOG version of Skyrim is vastly less worthwhile and a vastly inferior product to the Steam version of Skyrim which has full mod compatibility (mod compatibility which accounts for 95% of the value of Skyrim as a game).

And this phenomenon which I just described is another symptom of the kind of malaise that GOG always suffers from, and that the OP of this thread is also getting at, albeit from a different perspective.

Very rare are the occurrences where a GOG game is 100% on par with and in zero ways worse than its Steam and/or EGS counterparts. And certainly the GOG version of Skyrim is nowhere close to being on par with the Steam version.

My bad. Had something else in mind.

This one is neither Gog nor even really Bethesda fault. Gog build number is a different version number because... it IS a different build. They (i.e. Bethesda) had to remove the DRM and therefore create a new build.

If you want to blame something then blame the way modding on Skyrim and it being so reliant on build numbers which already caused tons of issues at every updates. (In which case the blame most likely lies on Bethesda)

Another issue with indies that hasn't been mentioned is Galaxy. GOG pushes Galaxy very hard and expects all indie developers to do a load of extra coding work to support the Galaxy API. I wouldn't be at all surprised if many come to the conclusion it's just not worth it and walk away. We know for a fact that the burden of Galaxy API support was an issue for Axiom Verge, for instance.

If indie devs were able to simply throw GOG their PC version files, with no extra work needed on their part, it would seem a lot more attractive to them.

Wasn't Axiom Verge the game that came to GOG with a steam.dll and would not work without Steam initially?
(Edit: Or was it Absolver?)

That would only mean that the dev was a lazy ass (and the quality department at GOG sucks).

Steam and Galaxy have similar functions. If the dev knows what he's doing, he uses a neutral interface and does not adress the functions directly, so a middleware can be implemented for all platforms offering the same functions.
But of course writing a game with designed to interact with Steam and then converting it to another platform is a lot of work.

The contact method for indies suggests that GOG doesn't care. If you follow the link for contact info, it says: However, there's no FAQ there. There's just a form that says nothing about what terms the indie developer would be submitting it under.

The form does have a short paragraph of legalese about personal data, but it's completely inappropriate for submitting a game. If you're publishing a game then the only box on that form that you wouldn't be actively promoting is the exact email address (assuming you're giving Gog a "priority, avoids spam blocks" one).

Good examples, although Techland is now hardly an indie and ranks among the AAA publishers who like to put Denuvo on their games. Let's see how long it will be before we see Dying Light 2 on GOG, now that they've removed it.

Axiom Verge never came to GOG, and GOG never made any attempts to fix that bridge.

Though yes, there are many games that have a steam.dll that can and will malfunction if that file is missing, such as Starbound.

Maybe not flooded. But last time I was on steam furry porn games were showing up for me. Lol. Idk why steam keeps changing my filters settings. It's hiding games I like for some reason.

Wouldn't this logic also apply to any game store that has a launcher? Sounds like another excuse from developers. Like the one developer who would not release game anywhere but steam because he would have to do extra work creating store page. The real issue is money.

Yes, they might be able to use some sort of neutral wrapper interface, but another API is still going to require more work for testing, debugging etc. Ultimately, it's another platform to support.

And that is a big part of why Steam's influence on the PC gaming market has been so devious. They have normalized a situation where each store is considered to be a different platform. Which is nonsense - PC should be the platform. A digital PC game sold on one store should be an identical product to that sold on another store. Steam effectively murdered the PC as a neutral gaming platform and replaced it with their own proprietary one. An amazing heist, which they pulled off brilliantly.

Yes, it would apply to all online stores that have a proprietary API. But not all stores are equal. An indie developer may come to the conclusion that Steam/Epic have a big enough market share that it makes sense for them to do the extra coding to support their APIs, but they might not see it as worth it for GOG. Yes, it is of course about money - developers have to decide if the benefit of accessing a store's market is worth the cost of the extra work to support the API. Whether the additional work is going to pay off.

Yeah, but then said devs would be called all sort of name for releasing a gimped version on Gog which doesn't contains achievements, multi-player, etc... and, if what happened before Galaxy is any indication, most of the time for exactly the same price than the Steam version.