As far as I know, the Daily Challenge requires Steam's online service in order to work. I don't think there are any plans to get it working for non-Steam versions, which is a shame. You could always try heading over to the Mossmouth forums and see if you can get an official answer about it though.

I think it would also be kind of against the GOG policy. As far as I know, features which require you to connect to any online services are cut out. This sometimes even include multiplayer itself. However some games give you a key with which you *can* register to an online service. (Unepic for example) Other cames just cut out the features and that's it.

Damn. Almost bought this in the wishes of getting another seed for they daily challenge on PC.

Oh well, waiting for the Vita / PS3 version to go back on sale... (might take a while.)

This was one of the reasons why I waited for a Humble Store release, which would have allowed me to get a drm free version of the game AND the Steam exclusive mode.

Despite that release being promised by the dev and with a total radio silence fro them on that matter, I concluded to just boycott them.

Are daily challenges random levels? There's a tool called Frozlunky that can randomize level seeds or set them to a specific one. If there's a way to get the challenge's seeds, you could even play them.

I wouldn't say the game is treating GOG customers as second class citizens. It's just that the game mode simply requires DRM to function, by design. As the feature is described on Steam... Since you only get one chance to play, their servers need some way to verify whether or not you've played that day's challenge already. Otherwise, players could easily replay the challenge as many times as they wanted, to memorize the level layouts and get a higher score, completely defeating the purpose of the game mode. You can't both want that game mode, and want a game that is not tied to an online account, since the game mode needs that kind of verification to function. It's a similar situation with many multiplayer games, where having an account tied to the purchase allows server admins to more reliably kick or ban players who are cheating, or otherwise misbehaving, allowing those players who stick to the rules to have a better experience.

DRM-free does not necessarily mean there could not be an option to sign in with your game when you want to do the challenges. Things like this existed befotre Steam or the Steam Workshop.

More and more games seem to be tying features exclusively to Steam either because of the ease of piggybacking on the account, or because the Workshop is an existing framework for tools like level editors. This may be good for Steam customers, but it does not seem to be good for anyone who wants to be able to choose where to buy without being cut off from what could be called core features of a game.

Unless there's something that restricts players from making as many free accounts as they want, to get as many trial runs as they need to learn the day's levels for an unfair advantage, this particular game mode is not going to work as intended. The point is to see who does best in a single run, not who is able to top the high score list by spending repeated runs memorizing how everything is laid out. Technically, someone could buy additional copies of the game for a similar effect, but the additional cost involved should help deter that. Having accounts tied to a purchase can also potentially allow for better moderation of the score boards. The entire thing making the Daily Challenge mode different from the normal game is the score ranking, and if that's open to easy manipulation, you'd might as well just be playing the regular game mode, which is otherwise pretty much identical. If Steam makes it easy for developers to make use of an existing secure login system, that can help relieve a burden from small developers that often have a very limited budget to work with. And I'd hardly say that an online high score list is a core feature of the game, since the original never had one. Ultimately though, you do have a choice of where to buy the game. If a game includes extra functionality on a platform like Steam, you can chose to buy it on that platform. Or buy it at any other online store that includes a Steam Key with your purchase. GOG doesn't do that, so if you consider that functionality important to you, perhaps that platform isn't the one you should chose for the game. On the other hand, GOG gets an extra feature lacking in many games released on Steam, and that's having the game be free of any sort of copy-protection. Someone on Steam could likewise say that they're missing out on that feature. It all comes down to which feature-set you prefer.

this may have been true in the past for gog but not anymore. No Man's Sky does online gameplay with gog galaxy, you have to use the game launcher to do it. galaxy now makes gog no different than steam is, so they really need to patch in the option for daily challenges. the console versions of the game have it as well.