I'm looking into buying this game, but apparently there's some issue with other distributers (Steam) getting updated but not GOG. Anyone with information on reasons or updates on the situation please reply.

There hasn't really been any response on this on the game's Steam forum either.

While I'm not completely certain, at a glance it seems that there's different builds between distributions. There has been numerous small/micro-updates on Steam and many of those updates didn't apply a new version number. Some of those issues on Steam also did not apply to the GOG version.

The developers are supposedly hard at work with fixing some of the major issues and implementing new features to quell some complaints on the game's Steam forum. Being that they're a small team, there's a chance that they're holding off on updates for GOG until a big enough update is being pushed out across all distributions (including the Switch).

This is just my guess based on the update history of other games I have on both GOG and Steam.

I'll buy this game in 4 to 5 months from now....
I'm not pointing this studio, but ALL video games nowadays are full of bugs day one....

GOG version been updated. It's recently been updated to 1.1.0b

cool for the early adopters !!

A tad frustrating that OP won't bother marking this reply as 'solution' or w/e.

If it can help, I bought Eastward on GOG today (11/03/2022).

The game installer on Windows is Eastward v1.1.5.
The game installer on Mac is Eastward v1.1.0c.

It's weird, but in game on macOS, it's show ver 1.1.0b.

The game's at v.1.1.5 now, and as far as I can tell, that's the game's latest version.

I was reticent to buy it at first, because of all the negative reviews saying it hadn't been updated in forever, but then it went on sale and decided to buy it, and see that it's been updated beyond v.1.1.0c.

GOG should get rid of those all reviews, so as not to mislead people.

It'd be a shame if this game didn't sell well because of WRONG information.

Runs and plays perfectly.