Never noticed, but that's annoying if it's the case.

LOL Eu acum locuiesc in Arizona, Statele Unite, dar am lasat Romania pe GOG ca mandrie, sau amintire ca sa stiu de unde am plecat. :D

Galaxy has nothing to do with it. The game already has LAN play. It's that the idiots who made it believe in DRM.

i prefer playing in random open online servers than LAN play , the last thing i want to do is play on lan

That may be you, but lack of something Galaxy-like has nothing to do with TL2 not being on GOG. The DRM does.

Are they still alive at Runic? As successful their games are as poor their communication is.

I don't like Valve, but the Facehuggers and Headcrabs look completely different. And if Runic uses the Headcrab design and name for their game, of course they need to license it from Valve.

What some of you may be failing to realize is that games coming to GOG or not coming to GOG is not solely because of embracing or not embracing DRM. There are plenty of games out there that are perfectly happy to be DRM-free on Steam and not necessarily interested in GOG for reasons that are completely orthagonal to DRM. Even games that /do/ use DRM might embrace DRM-free simultaneously on GOG as well, and there are examples of games that contain DRM on Steam and elsewhere but are DRM-free here. So based on DRM alone there is no evidence that Torchlight II could not show up on GOG because it uses DRM on Steam since there are other games that do this already.

The fact is that Steam offers many advantages to game developers and users alike whether some people choose to believe it or see it themselves, or choose to see the particular things as advantages for /them/. I've talked to some developers and also witnessed developers discussing some of these things in their game forums around the web and some of the things that game developers prefer to deal with Steam for as their primary or even sole distribution method instead of a distributor like GOG are:

- Easy ability to provide updates using an advanced update system that handles deltas, and easily control when updates get pushed. Steam provides the update system so they don't have to write one themselves also.
- Steam provides a built in multiplayer matchmaking service so they don't have to write one themselves and run their own servers.
- Steam provides a built in system that shows how many people actually install the games and how many hours they've been active, which are useful statistics.
- Steam provides a variety of features that can potentially enhance the game experience for users who desire the particular features such as achievements, cloud based save game and configuration storage, in-game voice and chat, screenshot (including cloud uploads) and a variety of other stuff.
- Built in game specific forums/groups and other social features.
- Workshop: A content creation and sharing community/marketplace where users can create and share mods and other game content with each other, directly accessible in-game with many games.

Of course many people reading this will say "I don't want ANY of that crap!" - but the point is that the game /developers/ _do_ want all that "crap", and they want it because their widest audience is comprised of a majority of people that do want it too even if a small number of users don't want it - they don't have to use it, but having these features makes their games that much more interesting to the people who /do/ want these features. A platform that doesn't provide such features ends up just being less attractive to developers that have decided they want these features to be a part of their game experience, and that means a platform like GOG becomes a secondary platform "me too" and for some developers it becomes a "sorry, your platform doesn't offer us features that Steam does that we need and don't want to or don't have the resources to implement ourselves for the smaller market size your platform would provide us with".

People can be angry about that but there's no point to do so really. It's just a hard reality of game companies trying to stay alive in an over crowded highly competitive marketplace where every feature costs money to implement and if someone like Steam can make that easier for them and someone like GOG can't, then more of them are going to gravitate towards Steam either exclusively or with a stronger emphasis.

GOG Galaxy from what little we know about it appears to be aiming to bridge this gap and provide these features that developers want, and that many gamers want as well, but to do it in a way that can be integrated into games as a set of [i]optional[/i] features rather than how they are sometimes mandatory on Steam (depending on the game). Having the update features, achievements, and other features I outlined above as well as many I'm probably forgetting gives developers these options on the GOG platform without having to write it all themselves from scratch and have to test a custom GOG build that differs in all these aspects from their Steam build. For example, Larian had to implement their own custom delta update mechanism for Divinity Dragon Commander just for GOG because GOG's update system is inadequate for the updates for that game. Many other developers feel the same and some discuss it publicly not in terms of complaining or flaming GOG but just stating what their needs are and that GOG's existing platform makes it very difficult to provide the experience to their customers that they'd like without incurring great expenses to do all kinds of extra work themselves which the Steam platform does for them.

Once Galaxy provides these features however then that argument starts to go away and it becomes far easier for them to consider GOG without having to be concerned about resource commitment if GOG's Galaxy platform can step up to the plate with comparable features.

So games like Torchlight II very much do have a higher chance to be considered for GOG in the future if the Runic developers look at the new Galaxy platform and think that it provides them with something they thought was necessary but missing here before, assuming they're willing to embrace DRM-free for the game as well, and we don't know either way whether they would. The thing is that it is possible and it is more likely with Galaxy available than without it. Galaxy doesn't guarantee anything at all, but it is a negotiating tool that will have merits that many developers already publicly state they want from a digital distribution platform.

Whether we get Torchlight II here or not we can't know unless someone official can tell us that. We are however likely to see a lot more newer games that demand modern features from their distribution platforms though and Torchlight II very well could be one of them.

Saying that Galaxy has no effect whatsoever in the equation is overwhelmingly short sighted and IMHO out of touch with what developers expect from a modern gaming platform.

Just had a brief exchange of comments with Running With Scissors developers and mentioned GOG Galaxy to them and got some comments in return to the effect they are very interested in this and talking to GOG about it now. I'm sure many other developers are going to really be interested in that also. Hopefully Runic ends up being one of them.

I was short-sighted on that. I pretty took the "if DRM is the only hold up, then galaxy won't change that" point of view.

I really like the /platform/ aspect of steam, so I'm pretty excited about what Galaxy might bring. I've gone as far as writing a python app to mimic the steam library aspect with my non-steam games. It's pretty rudimentary, so hopefully Galaxy can improve on that.

Indeed, and I think once it has been released and stabilized, went through a few update cycles to fix things and respond to customer feedback and developer feedback it should be well on its way. I think the forums will be rife with cheering and praise that ends up drowning out all the "game clients suck, it's the path to satan blah blah <puke>" :)

+1.

Geez, I had asked other GOGgers a similar question, "Could Galaxy entice devs to release other highly-desired games on GOG?" and the answer was basically "no", but you're giving some good reasons why it could. Hard to know who to believe, but you provide some excellent reasons.

EDIT: Also, if you don't mind me asking, how do you have the patience to write so much? ;) I've just noticed a pattern.

The question to me seems however, why should out of sudden a developer want to use a different launcher than Steam while they would still have to create a different build. Companies that want to focus on Steam will continue to do so without the hassle of supporting different builds.

Could it be that Galaxy uses the same builds as Steam? I don't know much about programming, but I doubt it somehow. With the features announced for Galaxy, I don't see much of an advantage for the developers, but rather for the customer to get all the features "only" Steam offers and still buy a game from GOG and enjoy playing with your friends who bought the game somewhere else. To me it looks as if a developer supports Galaxy it will be even more work for them because they have to implement those otherwise Steam-exclusive features to work on Galaxy as well..

We will have to wait and see.

I've got a lot of experience with community interaction for the last 2 decades, primarily in the open source community but elsewhere as well. I generally write in a manner that expresses my thoughts more completely and hopefully leaving less room for mis-interpretations and mis-assumptions getting it all out in one or two shots rather than a prolonged discussion that can go on for a long time clarifying and reclarifying, etc. Also anticipating what someone's response might be and trying to cover that from the start rather than coming back to it later on. So I tend to write more all at once, but less overall on a given topic taken over time. Basically larger granularity. :)



Creating a different build isn't difficult, it usually amounts to changing a few configuration options in a project's build files and firing off the build and waiting, fixing things that break, repeating and then passing the results through quality testing. The problem is creating the code in the first place that goes into that custom build and the engineering resources that must be committed to it, and any custom maintenance that must occur on that over time. Using a set of ready to use interfaces such as what Steamworks provides and Galaxy alleviates the developer from having to do all of that heavy lifting themselves. They write less code, have less to test, and can get things to market much quicker as a result. It is certainly theoretically possible to have one single build that contains support for both platforms also and conditionally use the right one at runtime. Without Galaxy though, the company has to write all of that functionality that they'd be using Steamworks for - themselves just for the GOG version or leave it out entirely.

Keep in mind also this is not more work for them. If they want to implement a GOG version of their game and leave out features they use on Steam they can do that now and many games do. They're not forced to write the code to have an identical or similar experience on GOG, so it is not forced work on them. But many developers likely do not want their game to be a different experience on Steam than on GOG or somewhere else, rather wanting customers to be able to buy the game anywhere and get as close to the same game with the same features as possible. If GOG doesn't offer those features and they wont consider releasing their game without those features, their only real options are to either write all the code themselves, or to not bother distributing on GOG. As it stands, some choose to write the features themselves (such as the upcoming Postal 2 update where they wrote their own achievement system and other stuff GOG doesn't have), and others choose to not bring their game(s) to GOG instead. Galaxy now gives a third option when it is available, the option to have the features and not have to write it all from scratch, and to give customers a similar experience on multiple platforms. Also, if they use crossplay, to have multiplayer that works between versions of the game sold on different platforms.

Galaxy will save developers time, money and other resources much in the exact same way Steamworks does which makes Steam a very attractive platform especially if a studio is on a tight budget.

I might at times sound like I work for GOG or something, but of course I don't... I am a long time software developer (Linux Systems Engineer previously) and when I study what GOG has announced about Galaxy so far both in videos and print, I just "get it" so to speak from a lot of my own past experience. I can read between the lines to see how Galaxy would appeal to me myself if I were developing a game right now in the same way Steamworks does for so many developers. It's only going to go more and more strongly towards common interfaces like this too in the future so IMHO it is paramount that GOG have something competitive to offer in this space.

Then maybe you should. ;)
GoG badly needs devs that can handle Linux as it seems.