nipsen: And it is the paid DLC route! Let the retroactive sabotaging of the previous versions of the game commence. Because nothing sells more games than being a dick to your customers. Proven fact, I'm afraid.
Technicalfool: Sorry you feel that way.
Though given the game is DRM-free on all storefronts, you can easily keep a copy somewhere else on your machine that your updaters won't touch. Heck, it's been the recommended way to play a modded game since forever. Just don't be giving those copies to anybody else, because the devs would really like to get paid for their work.
So let me explain this to you in detail: I want to use platforms like gog.com or even Steam. I accept and approve of the fact that developers have a legitimate, if paranoid, wish to control how their product is distributed. And that is why I would rather use a deployment system that can give our paranoid distributors and developers some peace of mind.
And why shouldn't I, right, when they can - with complete knowledge of how the copies are used, and what versions are deployed - simply store previous versions. And even allow seameless updates without actually invalidating the entire install in the best Uplay style and Steam encryption bs way. The dev could still have a toolchain that's protected, and everyone would be happy.
But no. What they want is not that you as a customer shall be happy, and that they as a seller of a product to me should be happy. That's just too fucking simple - they need to have the opportunity to invalidate installs, and make all previous versions and assets incompatible with the updated versions. And then, as we saw with Nomanski, like I explained, that the previous patches should also be removed from the deployment system.
Out of no other reason than that the developer and distributor should have control over which specific version you are currently running on your computer. Unless you "hide it" from them by essentially breaking the law and being a pirate.
Which, because that obviously happens, again justifies increased costs, and yet more paranoid bullshit from the distribution link. All the way from the end of the deployment stream, to the start of the compilation toolchain, and of course also the schema the game is put together with.
Does that make sense to you, from any point of view - as a customer who pays too much, as a developer who can't start a project without massive funding (or else be fucked, and have an impossible time to protect the license - in theory, based on nothing else except that you don't have Cinnavia or something along those lines slowing everyone's computer down to a crawl), or as a publisher who has to pay for the startup cost - who benefits from this?
No one.
And yet. This is now the norm. And this is how "business" is done. It's ridiculous. And even when developers turn up who skip all the middlemen - what happens? They get panned by the Sterlings and Crescentes of the gaming world, because they don't give them structured and simple blueprints to create newsitems over, as per following the fact that they don't have "professional publishers" backing them.
Which is, as we see, a sin.
The gaming industry as it is should not exist. It deserves to not exist. And it only does because people put up with paying for it, and indeed want to see small fluffy advertisement blurbs that tickle their fancy in 5 second bursts.
But that industry doesn't deserve to exist. And it really shouldn't, because it does take quite a lot of effort on the user-side for it to keep existing.