I dislike space games but I adore GalCiv2. So naturally my hopes for GalCiv3 are very high.

Now I'm also pretty concerned because of this two shitty decisions:
-64-bit operating systems only (If more studios begin to practice this then it will be semi-revolutionary and not-so-shitty)
-Steam only (very strange since Stardock was proud about they DRM-free strategy, even if they say in FAQ that there will be no copy protection)

So, please vote here: http://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/galactic_civilizations_3

And GOG, give us us GalCiv2:UE let us us free!

I don't think this will be the case. Stardock will most likely use Steamworks for the mutliplayer. They also want to use the Workshop for mods. I think that requires Steamworks too, but please correct me, if I'm wrong.

If we're lucky, they'll make GalCiv 3 similar to Divinity: Dragon Commander. From what I heard, you can play the Steam-version of that game without having to run Steam.

Not yet. According to the FAQ they want to release the Alpha early next year. Beyond that, however, we don't know.

Edit: Clarified a sentence.
Edit2: Fixed a quote.

That's actually a good decision and it's not the first time they or others have said it. Practically every new PC has at least 4 GB memory and thus requires a 64-bit OS to use it all. Furthermore, the current memory limitations, especially on the last console generation, forced developers into using fewer models, tighter levels, etc. And while strategies are not bound by consoles, they still had to cater to a 32-bit market and hit the upper limit on the memory pretty quickly (not hard for games that deal with hundreds and thousands of individual units). It's going to be interesting to see just how quickly and how massive they can become with the lifted restriction.

You can do that already with GalCiv 2. Just copy the folder out and play without Steam installed at all.

Well, it seems we have official word regarding the question of a non-Steam version. From a post of Frogboy on the forums:

"But there isn't going to a be a non-Steamworks version of GalCiv III because it would require too much time and effort on our part to do that. For starters, it would have to be a non-Multiplayer version of the game, requiring its own installer, requiring the removal of achievements, AI data mining, in-game mod support, etc. In short, it would be crippled."


The FAQ has been updated. It now has a few more questions, and some of the answers have been changed.

The one for multiplayer, for example, now states, that there will be online and hotseat multiplayer, plus some form of asynchronous play.

I guess, that is good news for people who care about MP.

Brad further elaborates on the issue:
http://forums.galciv3.com/449009/page/8/#3410039

"GOG has a number of issues for developers. It doesn't provide retail-time reports. Instead, every quarter we get a report on how many units they say they sold. We just take their word on it that they sold that many since there's no activation or any other way to tell how many copies they sold.

And companies make.."mistakes" on accounting all the time. Atari claimed to have sold only around 1,500 copies of Demigod in Europe back in the day. But because we had activations, we knew we had actually sold around 40,000 copies during that period and made them correct their "error".

Hence, even if we made a non-Steamworks version, there's no universe where we'd put a new game on a service that didn't have some sort of activation if for no other reason that we want to make sure that there weren't any accidental accounting issues."

Gaunathor seems to be offline right now, so I'll take the liberty of answering that question for him, if you do not mind.
Here's a quote from the official FAQ:
"(...)some of the AI learning mechanisms will require access to the Metaverse in order to perform analysis on player strategies. This will be optional and able to be disabled by the player but does require an Internet connection."

I actually don't understand this developer remark. To me it boils down to the point that they do not trust GOG.com as a distribution partner which sounds alarming and seems to be something that should urgently be changed by the management of GOG.com.

How does an activation on Steam actually be more convincing? Does Steam send out a notification to the developer account every time the game is purchased or even every time it is started and played? If so, well GOG.com could easily send out a copy of the receipt that I get when purchasing a game here to the developer as well for every purchase, couldn't they? This way they would be spammed to the end with mails, but at the same time they would quite easily know how much is sold.

This really doesn't seem specifically aimed at GOG. Clearly they've had bad experiences in the past with other retailers, and the simple fact is, that GOG doesn't have any live updating of what's happening. Steam on the other hand probably has "Real-Time" (Imagine that's what he tried to say instead of retail-time) information for the devs whenever they feel like checking up on it (I imagine they can simply log in to see it).

That way the devs can see day to day what's happening with their game, Sales, Achievements, Progress, Users playing, Money earned from Steam cards participation/Market, average time played, Store page Statistics, Forum statistics etc etc. Stuff like that I guess. I've seen it mentioned many times Steam has a ton of information and statistics available for the devs.

Yeah, they only way their argument makes any sense at all is that their games on Steam have third-party DRM, namely their own, that requires activation on their own servers (not only Steam servers) to track it. Even for single-player.

All the other developers/publishers on Steam who don't have their own 3rd party DRM on top of the mere Steam activation have exactly the same problem that they are describing, ie. they have to trust on Valve's reports on how many games have been sold.

So GOG could offer them a real-time online report of how many people have a Stardock game on their GOG account (purchased), if they really feel they can only trust that kind of report, and not a quarterly report.

I have no idea how that is supposed to be any more convincing, but there you go.

And as every Steam user knows already, e.g. the "time played" reports of Steam are quite erratic.

I am sure GOG could even fax them a handwritten tally sheet on the purchases made and the games activated on an GOG-account or do they sell so well on a daily basis? ;-)

Seriously if this is a concern which I believe some other developers might share and a convenient function of Steam for developers, GOG should just send the developers a track list out of the system with purchases at what price made and activation done on GOG for their products offered. Transparency is nothing GOG should fear and from my perspective it should be pretty easy to implement it into the system.

On the other hand, third party DRM and data mining/tracking should make a GOG release impossible of course.

[edit] correcting mistakes

This is actually a very creative reasoning for the need of DRM. I've never heard it before. Avoid accidental accounting issues. :)

But quarterly feedback indeed sounds a bit slow in the pace of modern digital world. Maybe GOG could speed up internally and give daily updates on sales figures.

I wonder however if you could have a short notification home without activation if you want to have some sort of control over accounting issues, i.e. want to have a lower limit. That I would actually be kind of okay with.
That's why I stopped buying Stardock games after GalCiv 2 DA. It's sad to see that they made a 180 degree rotation but of course it's their decision.

That is actually quite understandable, if you know Stardock's history. When they released the first GalCiv for OS/2, they had a huge hit, but never saw any money, because the publisher filed bankruptcy. Same thing happened again with GalCiv 2, and with the retail sales for the Windows version of GalCiv 1. If you get burned by publishers and retailers that many times, you get cautious.

I never understood why this was considered a 180 on their part. As far as I can tell, Stardock is against copy protection and intrusive DRM, not DRM in general. Just take a look at GalCiv 2: DL and DA. If you wanted any patches, you had to register the game. That can already be considered DRM.