I would agree with you if this hadn't already been going on for years. People have been trying to get them to update their games for that entire time and as far as I'm concerned, the conversion linked to in the OP is Tinybuild saying they're not up for negotiating.

If GOG can get them to change their mind then that's great, but I read that exchange as a lost cause.

Well yes, they're evidently not negotiating with random customers. GOG itself might have a little more leverage though.

I obviously didn't expect them to start negotiating with a customer. :P

No, but they seemed to be pretty much stating policy there without any room for them to change their minds. If they do then great, but it sounds like they're not open to the idea of updating the games here - full stop.

If tinyBuild is reading this, I would appreciate it if you read it to the end. Taken out of its original context, you would no platform is mentioned. It's because in a context where platforms aren't defined, the quoted part is right. The soundtrack is going to be uploaded whether it was available on Steam, GOG, Epic, Origin or iTunes or whatever.

The music industry may be deep into streaming and I doubt they will ever let go of making streaming be the ONLY way to listen to music, BUT, the music industry did indeed drop DRM from MP3s and never bothered to protect them again. I'd go out on a hunch and say, if the music industry dropped DRM, then there is simply no such thing as protecting soundtracks from piracy for any period of time.

Basically, it doesn't matter whether it's on Steam or on GOG, the soundtracks are getting uploaded, so do suit yourself for that possibility. Now for other deluxe edition material, it depends, but if they're stuff like PDFs and pictures and computer icons, short of using PDF DRM, I don't think you're in luck. And if you do use PDF DRM, that entails with it its own set of challenges, top of which being GOG users upset that their PDFs are DRM'd. You DON'T HOPE for the internet to not "steal" it. You just don't. The internet is by nature, a medium where things spread quickly like fire. This message for instance will be distributed across the internet. Some people will screenshot it and repost it elsewhere, some people will link to it, the Wayback Machine could save a capture of this thread, etc. I can't stop any of this. And this is just an insignificant post on a forum, written for free, publicly viewed for free.

If you're thinking DRM may halt or stop this, well, let's play along. If you use Steam's regular DRM, this can be yanked out in minutes. The cracker needs the executable and an automated cracking tool to remove the DRM. That's it. It's this effortless. If not, Steam itself can be emulated, a program can pretend it is Steam and offer Steam's functionality but okays every verification check the game asks for. So right off the bat, your DRM is defeated.

Or you could use something like Denuvo. But in doing so, you will anger even more people as Denuvo isn't known to be "lightweight" or "unintrusive" or such other buzzwords. This becomes bad PR as people actively discourage other people from buying the game. That's not smart. Not at all.

Consider what I said above about DRM. It doesn't matter if you refuse to release the updates and DLC to GOG, you're still updating the Steam version. As far as I'm concerned, an update to the Steam version is cracked in the same way as described above and immediately uploaded. You can imagine the cracker being like "oh it's that game again."

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tinyBuild, ask yourself one question.

Is it worth giving GOG users the short end of the stick so that you could continue your losing war against pirates?

You're not making any sense. You don't want music to be pirated, yet you distribute it, and you know that even the music industry itself no longer uses DRM on MP3s anymore. You don't want piracy of updates to happen, so you don't update the GOG versions, but your updated Steam versions are just as prone to piracy as the original builds.

You're a publisher in the games industry. You have many developers working under your name. You ought to know better than that.

You did read what was written before that, right? They are talking specifically about GOG.

Yes. I intentionally took that quote out of context to say that it's true no matter the platform.

I could edit what I said to make this clearer.

Now that's just poor customer service, imo. Wonder who decided that this was a good idea/position to have as a company?

Yes, tinybuild are small enough and their catalog are indies and many of the users in this thread don't a care about them enough, so they're fine to use as a scapegoat to take the pitchfork's out for bad practices.

The irony is that what that employee says in private is what every ceo and representative of any large AAA videogames company say in public. But, sometimes, they release crumbs to us. And then we have every gog member clapping with the ears. And I don't see anyone asking GOG to finish their business with them or take their games out.

I call hypocrisy.

That's the thing. With the confirmation of intent, GOG is even more at fault here if they don't do anything about it. For one, they are choosing a single publisher over their own customers and second, they are supporting this atrocious behavior on their own store which damages their reputation.

+1 for keeping the spotlight on them. I bought the first Party Hard here, but deliberately held off buying the second one after it was released as I had a suspicion they'd do a repeat performance. Definitely won't be buying anything from them in future. It is dumb indeed as the only thing refusing updates does is both convince people the devs are lazy / incompetent, plus it takes a special kind of stupid to give those who pirate the Steam version the superior version, and give those who buy the GOG version the inferior one, thus promptly incentivising the same piracy they claim to try and stamp out...

As for "securing" the soundtrack from being sold on GOG, ignoring the fact over 20 Youtube channels have already uploaded the Steam version, one of them directly ripped it out of the Unity Engine data files ("This is the complete soundtrack of the game taken from the assets files"). Big "success" there TinyBuild...

I tend to agree here. I doubt there will be a change that comes from this. I also suspect that it will make it harder in the future to get anybody at a publisher to talk with this sort of thing in the forum.

Personally, I think it's really shortsighted of them to have a policy like this, but I don't think that I'd make a buying decision on this basis alone.

I call bad fail at logic.

You're saying it's morally the same for a major publisher to say "Uh oh, our game's gonna get pirated!" and then holding off a gog release for a decade or so (but at least it's going to be a feature-complete release) as it is for a two-bit indie dive to say "Uh oh, our game's gonna get pirated!" and then releasing a glorified Day 1 beta build that will never see any patches or post-release support on gog EVAR.

Sorry, I prefer the former. I'd rather wait a few years for a feature-complete release than being stuck with a de facto demo for all eternity.

Sadly, this old wishlist is still relevant:
No more outdated or abandoned games

Both, actually.

This is simply disgusting. I'm not going to buy a tinyBuild game anytime soon... Not that I ever wanted to :P