Well, it's exactly what it says on the tin.

http://www.strongholdcrusader2.com/?p=769

Why doesn't this surprise me?

Ah, a bargain bin purchase, then.

Sad, but whatever... I didn't really like the first Crusaders.

In fact, the only Stronghold game that I like is here on gog :D

Some of the reasons why developers are choosing to create their titles to be Steam-only might change once GOG makes the GOG Galaxy platform available, as it sounds like it will provide some of the functionality that developers want the distribution platform to provide. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see some Steam-only games expanding and supporting GOG Galaxy at some point in the future, of course only after the service is actually available. The cool thing being that unlike Steam, Galaxy wont require the customer to have the Galaxy client installed or to use any of the Galaxy services.

Of course Galaxy isn't going to convince every publisher to support it either, but it will likely make some titles available to us that otherwise wouldn't be. Hopefully we get some exciting games out of the deal even if it isn't this particular game. :)

this Steam-only stuff isn't just technical. I do worry about that a little bit. anything with enough presence to be considered a marquee game, but that exists outside the realm of big publishers, could be something gog might have trouble with relating for being a Steam exclusive game.

A large part of the reason for using Steamworks of it is to ensure that retail copies remain unresellable, so no, I don't really think that Galaxy will make much of a difference in that regard.

Nice! Just another game which will save my wallet and my time, since it is now erased from my wishlist.

Thanks to that kind of moves, I can think more about my backlog.

I've said this before, but Firefly making SC2 Steamworks only is a huge stab in the back to GOG, after all it was GOG who promoted the HD re-releases of Stronghold, Stronghold Crusader and Space Colony some time back, and this is how they respond.

I'm not quite sure I understand what you mean by that. People buy games from just about everywhere (Steam, Steam resellers, GOG, bundle sites) all the time and resell/gift/trade them all over the Internet. I don't believe Steam offers anything to prevent this although they do have region codes which might mitigate it slightly for some games. Some developers might go Steam exclusive for that perhaps but I rather doubt that's the reason why most of them do. I'm more inclined to believe it is because Steam has a ready to go drop in multiplayer service, achievements, trading cards, social networking features, statistics, optional DRM and other technologies available in Steamworks and their service and a number of other push button ready to use services and technologies that for the most part GOG doesn't have any of and if the developer wants or needs those things they have to implement it entirely themselves from scratch. One example of this is the patch for Postal 2 that showed up on Steam 12 months ago that we still don't have yet but are waiting for which the developer is working on and told us they had to reimplement a number of things custom for the GOG release that they just use Steamworks for on Steam. Most developers just aren't going to do that realistically. If Steam makes this stuff easy for developers then they have a strong value proposition and if they also own 80-90% of the market it is a compelling argument for them to go with Steam either first, or even exclusively. GOG providing as much of the benefits as they can which do not compromise their business fundamentals and values potentially removes the technological gap and presents their service as having a lot of those features available as a big easy-button also. It stands to make the service more attractive for many developers, while I'm sure there will also be many cases where others wont budge from Steam either way (mostly due to their pro-DRM stance than anything).

It's all speculative of course, but we wont really start to get a good picture I don't think until 12 months after Galaxy is available to us end users at least and the market has had time to look at it and consider it. Maybe even 24 months. I hope it draws more here anyway.

I don't believe that GOG games have any resell value once they've been activated either however. Not that I've seen or been aware of anyway. Keys are use once, you own it and it is used, non-transferable to another party post-facto.

I agree with what you say about Steamworks, and that is why I think Galaxy platform is important because it will begin to offer developers some similar value-add although of course Steamworks is a mature product with a huge head start. I'm not at all suggesting developers will pick Galaxy over Steamworks, and I don't think that is a good plan either, rather I'm suggesting that some developers may choose to support both platforms if they're both reasonably easy to integrate the features they care about into their product with little overhead. Right now the difference is disparaging to many developers, Galaxy theoretically can close some of that gap and bring at least some devs to consider supporting it also without much effort - in theory of course. It does not change or alter the DRM versus DRM-free aspect of things however. That is a separate issue developers will consider independently of what Galaxy provides in comparison to Steam. Obviously if a developer is pro-DRM and wont budge on that then the features Galaxy has or doesn't have are irrelevant because the developer is simply not going to budge on the DRM issue and not going to consider GOG at all. Only developers that will definitely, or might consider releasing their games DRM-free will even bother to look at the GOG platform, and only then will Galaxy potentially have any relevance to them for their game. If they do already use Steamworks features (not including DRM) then Galaxy may have enough value for them to consider the platform if the lack of Galaxy would be a straight out "no dice".

I'd have to agree with you there, it's definitely easier to support one platform than 50, but I don't think that side of things is really that huge of a deal on platforms with comparable offerings. From what it sounds like GOG gets the games from devs and then GOG packages it up and prepares everything for their platform. The game devs do have to adapt some things to fit the way GOG does things and do things like conditionalize DRM support, and if they're using Steamworks for other stuff they'd have to conditionalize that too but those are rather minor things to contend with. They can hand GOG keys to other retailers also. The work they have to do isn't that important if it can pay off in positive return on investment for doing so. Right now it is a lot more investment of effort because of the great difference between what Steamworks can offer a developer versus what GOG has to offer. If Galaxy can close that gap, adding Galaxy support to an app is a hell of a lot less than writing it all yourself just for GOG like Postal 2 devs are trying to do at the moment for example. :) Take Windows, Mac and Linux as another example. Supporting only Windows probably accounts for 90-95% of the game's market excluding consoles and other devices, just PC/Mac setups. A developer has to spend some serious amount of effort to also support Mac instead of just Windows, and now additional effort to support Linux.too as many are starting to go ahead and do. They do this just to potentially gain up to 5-8% rough estimate more users at best although probably much less than that in practice. Spending an equal amount of resources to add support for all aspects of supporting the GOG platform if it nets them an equal or higher, or even just similar level of increased revenue is arguably worth the effort.

That's not really a big deal because the majority of cross platform software these days is written with build time conditionalization that already has to handle a number of build time options to customize for different operating systems, CPU architectures, bit widths, endianness, DirectX versus OpenGL and now possibly also Mantle, PC, Xbox 360/One, PS3/4 and a partridge in a pear tree. Adding conditionalization for an alternative distribution service platform that is saving time and effort over writing it yourself and could boost revenue 1-10% or more is potentially worth it, for some games at least. I think the bigger issue that is the problem hump is them accepting DRM-free and then also wanting to stick with that for their next game and the one after that etc. Right now aside from the DRM-free aspect of things, they have huge gaps in functionality between distribution platforms though. Close that gap with an alternative and potentially it is easy to support. Another factor is that GOG could very well provide a Steamworks-like API that makes it easy for devs to retrofit into code that is Steamworks-only right now, or some wrapper library to handle all of it. GOG has mentioned that when Galaxy is added to a game the option for Crossplay support is there, presumably that means the non-GOG versions of the game contain some kind of awareness of Galaxy also or something. It's not clear how that works in the frontend or backend side of things right now other than it sounds like magicsauce. I doubt Galaxy crossplay is going to work with Galaxy enhanced GOG games trying to play with Galaxy unaware games on Steam or elsewhere though because it would have to talk to a wide range of varied services with proprietary protocols and that just isn't going to scale well for them so I doubt that's how it works.


I highly doubt that because Galaxy is not DRM, and GOG customers playing a game that contains Galaxy support will not be required to use the Galaxy services nor to run a Galaxy client. Users of Steam or other platforms aren't going to magically need to run GOG Galaxy or use the service to play the game on Steam either as that would not make any technical sense at all. If a game needs to be linked with any GOG SDKs in order for crossplay to work, it shouldn't affect a Steam gamers experience in any way to know or even care that it is there, and it shouldn't restrict or interfere with their usage of the game, nor require them to create any special accounts or do anything at all that could even remotely be considered DRM, therefore Steam would have no reason to suggest it requires 3rd party DRM. We don't know enough about Galaxy to know how it works, but it working in any way that remotely resembles a form of DRM is not only unviable, it is practically guaranteed to not work that way as it would send the wrong message out there and be a massive failure. GOG Galaxy /has/ to be something transparent and optional, and link to applications like freetype or OpenGL, SDL or any number of other libraries/SDKs out there, providing functionality or optional functionality that does not need to be used and if it is used it doesn't interfere with or restrict ones usage of anything at all.

No need to speculate about that though, it's just common sense. They draw up a set of features and functionalities that they wish to make available, a set of values of fundamental importance (such as "is not any form of DRM, must not interfere with person's ability to play without using this feature or that feature, must not require user to have online account" or whatever else, and then write code that produces that optimal solution. They're not going to design something that people look at it and think "this is going to make us 10 times as much work and give us endless headaches" when their whole point is to do the exact opposite of that. :)

IMHO the best assumptions to make about it are the ones that are logical for it to be a successful thing because they are trying to make it a successful thing and they're intelligent business people, gamers, developers themselves and they have a lot more common sense about what /we/ want compared to other distributors/publishers/developers out there much because they themselves /are/ us, only they're us on steroids because they took it to a new level of making their own company to do the things for gaming that they wanted that didn't exist, where none of us have done that. They're simply trying to evolve that to the next level now.

I think there's some of this going on...

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
Mahatma Gandhi

I used to work somewhere that used that as an internal company motto and we had to deal with that every day. I think GOG to a large degree has to deal with this as well. It's the real innovators out there that are faced with this, and whom find great success by not being jostled by it and ploughing forward full steam (er... no pun intended) ahead. :)

Time for sleep! :) G'nite..

Damn, every one of skeletonbow's posts is like a novel. :P

Agree with you.