If you're going into this expecting a single player campaign that's even remotely the quality of the Starcraft campaign then you're going to be very disappointed I'm afraid.

As a former competitive DoW player, I can tell you with confidence that the majority of the community only really cared about multiplayer and the army painter. The single player campaigns sucked. The vanilla game only had a Space Marine campaign that's about 10 missions long. Winter Assault had a campaign that allowed you to choose between an "order" (Eldar and Imperial Guard) and "disorder" (Orks and Chaos) side, with each of them also being fairly short. They didn't even bother making a story-driven campaign in Dark Crusade or Soulstorm, they turned it into this lame RISK-like thing.

If multiplayer were DRM-free, it wouldn't be tied to any platform to begin with, so the whole concept of "cross-play" becomes moot. With DRM-free multiplayer, if you can talk to a host on the internet, you can have a game, no matter where the game was bought from.

Bear in mind that the original physical game had a LAN MP option, which was removed in the Steam version. Doesn't seem like it would be so difficult to add back in a feature that was there previously, but was removed? They made the effort to remove it in the first place, after all ...

In today's age of ten billion Discord servers, YouTube channels, forums, Steam groups etc. around a single game or series, you say people don't engage in communities?

That's a giggle-worthy claim.

And which amateur indie devs would that be?

Only IP holders have sales numbers. You don't. So don't even try to bring that up.

Says you.

If the warning on the storepage is to be believed, then GOG' s version will be similar to Steam's. That is, the Direct-IP/LAN option will have been removed and the only kind of multiplayer will be via GOG's Galaxy client.

Local multiplayer is not just a "principle" thing. For players who have a nearby social circle to play with (nearby friends, family, etc) and who much prefer to play with said social circle than with strangers across the internet, it has practical implications: You can play directly at home without much hassle (same screen, LAN, heck, even self-hosted server running on the LAN for all I care).

Same screen doesn't require further mention. For LAN, if you know some extremely basic networking (ie, what an ip address is), it is actually a lot simpler (both in terms of setup and resulting latency).

Plus, it is future-proof.

yeah, this is something you need to take up with the developers of the game. gOg can offer the framework, but that does not help if the developers are not using it. gOg can only offer the product the devlopers are making.

I wasn't talking about LAN, I was talking about "DRM-free online" which people are requesting instead of Galaxy multiplayer. A nice idea in principle, but you'd still be locked out of playing with most people online. Crossplay with Steam is unfortunately the only practical way to be able to play with nearly anyone.
Yes, but that is completely unrealistic. The best you could hope for is DRM-free multiplayer on the GOG version, at which point you're still locked out of playing with most people. You're not going to persuade people not to buy it on Steam, nor are you going to persuade them not to use Steam's matchmaking.
That's why I said we need DRM-free multiplayer for the principle and crossplay with Steam for practical purposes.

How would you be locked out of playing with most people if there was 100% Digital Rights Management (DRM) free multiplayer? This is not true at all.

Like I said I can think of four video games sold on gog.com that have 100% Digital Rights Management (DRM) free multiplayer that are also sold on Steam and if you purchase all four of these video games on gog.com you can play with the Steam PC video gamers who are playing these video games on Steam.

No GOG Galaxy or no Steam cross play whatever is required. Even the people who play on the physical disc versions can play with the gog.com PC video gamers and the Steam PC video gamers.

I can't believe I have to explain this. You would be locked out because the vast majority of Steam users will use Steam's matchmaking, they won't bother with a DRM-free option (if this hypothetical DRM-free option were even included in the Steam release).

It’s only a problem if you want to play with "random" people. For multiplayer sessions with friends, providing direct IP multiplayer on both builds (Steam and GOG) would be enough to play together no matter the store you bought your game from.

I don’t think most people here are asking for platform-agnostic matchmaking/ranking, almost all of the requests I’ve seen are for LAN and direct IP. The modes that used to be provided with this game before they were cut off in favour of Steam walled garden. So the network code already exists, and would probably still work today if it had not been dropped.

So ok, just to get this.
You claim, that today most people who purchase a game are actively participating in the community of the game, because there is so much stuff around you could use for that.
And basically you claim that this does happend to decades old RTS titles too.

Ehm - yeah...


But which devs claim, that the places the "community" does come together and to some degree comes into contact with the devs (and modders) is just populated by a fraction of the whole playerbase?

Well, for example Cryptic Studios and Gaijin Entertainment.
Now you could argue that those 2 don't do RTS. Yeah, Cryptic is running 3 MMOs and Gaijin is running - for easy understanding lets call it Battlefield with only vehicles (World of Tanks, World of Warships and World of Planes in one game playing together).
And yeah, totally indy game devs with more then 100k daily active users each.

Lets take Warthunder from Gaijin, because they even show you current active numbers.
Right now, 18:40 in Germany, start of european high time for evening gaming.

Forum WT ~140 named users and ~800 guests (only reading, could be users who are not logged in, people just reading or crawlers)
The Forum is the international, there is a russian forum too with less people active.
Reddit is a little less populated, Facebook, they don't do that much. Inofficial Discord for everyone is like 100.
There is an official modding website too with lower user numbers than the forum.
Users using the ingame chat system (not in a battle but the general one), 39 for englisch chats (english main got 24). Including the other languages, you could say 100 at best.

Now be very friendly today, 1500.

And for sure, you see the same people again very often at all channels.
Now, sure I'm missing out youtuber comments (usually the same people) steam forum maybe some streamer who is on right now. Doubt it will be the same number again.
And I do leave out the clan discords, those are usually private channels where people who know each other meet each other and from time to time play Warthunder. Its like calling a private party where people start the Wii or Switch with some party game a Nintendo community happening.

Currently active users in the game: 107933.

We do talk about an online game where the only way to progress is either team PvE or team vs team PvP.
We are at, very friendly again, 2 to 3% of the current active playerbase using any kind of open channel to communicate with each other.

Daily active users would should be around 200k to 250k these days. In spring it was more around 130k to 150k users at prime time every day.

And while there are millions of registered accounts for the game, just 354,344 forum users are registered for the official forum. And we got users with several accounts.

Claiming, that the people who use the open channels to communicate are only a minority?
Totally fine and true.


Cryptic.
Star Trek Online is claimed to have roughly 100k daily users, Neverwinter 27k and city of heroes 10k.
Using the Star Trek Online Forum or the reddit, it is like seeing the same 2 dozen people in the forum and the same 2 dozen pople on reddit all the time.
Chat usage is high, for some it is a chat with some graphics attached.
Other stuff, not so much. And to be honest, it won't multiply the numbers of the official forum and reddit...


That is the rate of people being active in the "community" of pure online games or even MMOs.
Those don't get a strong SP part or skrimish (well, Warthunder does to some degree, but you are "online" then).

Now YOU claim, that the majority of the people who bought something is active in the com?
Not at all.
And the same goes for playing MP.


If you want numbers for Steam games, the number of sold copies estimated by external sources are usually close.
Currently active numbers are shown to you.
Just do it yourself.

Tell me you haven't been to Command & Conquer and Age of Empires communities without telling me you haven't been to Command & Conquer and Age of Empries communities.

Correct, they don't do RTSes *and* they do games in which the bulk of communication is done in in-game lobbies anyway. MMO and RTS demographics are not related.

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Also, I'll point you to wh1tepointer's post which you conveniently ignored;

Thanks for confirming what i was fearing, i guess i'll keep my old cd versions of DoW+WA then .