Pretty much this. It wouldnt even call them a feature. Devs should be putting resources into making a game enjoyable, as bug free as possible (graphics,audio, story, game mechanics). Achievements are a side effect and bonus imho..

Short version: Only game developers can add such features to their games, not GOG, and games generally do not get updated with new features like this years after they were originally released so don't hold your breath on such features ever happening except for newly released games.


TL;DR version: Achievements are something that individual game developers either choose to add to their games or not, and it requires integrating support for GOG Galaxy achievements directly into the game's source code, so only the developer of the game can do this. GOG does not have the source code of the games they sell, nor the authority to modify the games in such a manner.

A large portion of the games in GOG's catalogue are old and mature and no longer receive any form of official patches or updates from the company that produced them. It costs money to pay developers to make any changes to a game at all, and some games are old enough that merely recompiling them may be difficult or even possible depending on whether or not they still even have the code available and systems that are able to compile them. The risk to destabilizing an existing game by adding such features risks having a broken game or having to dedicate additional resources to once again maintaining a game and pouring money into engineering on a title that hasn't seen a developer's hand or eyes in years.

Additionally, GOG Galaxy is technically still not even out of beta although GOG claims it is coming out of beta sometime this month. I would imagine if any game company was to consider adding Galaxy specific features to their older games, the majority of them would wait for the Galaxy APIs and services to not only come out of beta but to become very reliable and get all of the kinks ironed out. The last thing a developer wants to do is add support for a niche feature to a legacy game and be inundated with support request by people saying the latest update broke their game for a feature they don't even care about etc.

Most day-1 new releases here will probably end up having achievements support, at least it's more likely if the game has similar support on Steam for example. For games that are already released here, it is extremely unlikely to see them get updated by their developers to add such features after the fact. The overwhelming majority of video games are developed, bug fix patches get released for a while of anywhere from a few weeks to months or if we're lucky a few years, and then the game goes into legacy mode where it is no longer patched or enhanced any more and is sold as-is with no intentions to ever update it again. This isn't surprising because the majority of a game's profit is made when it is first launched, in the first few weeks of sale and then it tapers off over time after that. To devote additional engineering resources to adding features to a game that is no longer bringing in huge amounts of profit is seen by most companies as a waste of resources that are better spent putting their developers to work on their next game instead.

There will of course be exceptions to these generalizations out there too. There are no hard and fast rules, and any company is free to do whatever they wish really. So for example we see games like Postal 2 which got patches some 10 years after it was released originally, or Titan's Quest which saw an Anniversary release that is under active support by THQ Nordic, or Aliens vs. Predator 2000 that got released with Galaxy multiplayer.

As for "Why doesn't <this specific game> have achievements, and why don't the developers add support for it?" - we can only give speculative hypothetical answers as per above, nobody can give a concrete answer except the developer of the game as they are the only ones with the source code of the game and legal ability to add such a feature to their games, so the developer of the specific game is the correct person to ask. Some are approachable and others generally not. Either way, whenever game developers respond to public questions of this sort they will generally give friendly but useless boilerplate answers like "Thanks for contacting company xyz, your feedback is important to us. We do not currently have plans to add any new features to our game, but we will take your suggestion into consideration for the future."

Remember high-score lists where you could only use three letters for your name? Those represented the achievement of training and becoming better score than the previous top dog. The great thing with those is that you'll get the "good job!" notice every single time you overcome it (I mean, yeah, it usually doesn't pop up in the corner of your screen, but you do get to enter your signature at the top of the score list).

Exactly. Now if only all devs would adhere to that! (especially the second part for me)

?? Is there even a single game where the achievements are not optional?

Yes. Lots of games where you get annoying popups saying 'You got an achievement'

Without being able to switch it off?

Yes. Dragon Age annoyed me with this, for example. No way to disable it. And there were lots of automatic achievements that popped up.

Fair enough.

Anybody who needs achievements to play a video game needs to be gassed.

wtf

dz

The day I feel like I need to have a game pat me on the back for playing it in order to enjoy it is the same day I'll stop gaming.

Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1ZtBCpo0eU

Although I have to admit that sometimes achievements are "nice to have", when they are really meaningful in the way that they are granted for things that are really something special, like finding all secrets, beating a tough boss without taking any damage or completing the game on Nightmare difficulty. But it seems that most "achievements" today are "Hell yeah, you completed level 1!!".

What I really don't want are obtrusive popups and overlays. I have disabled the overlay in Galaxy (also for performance reasons) and just having that list there on the game card updating after exiting the game is for me the best way to handle this.

But in the end you're right, I've completed Doom 1+2 and Final Doom, Duke Nukem, Shadow Warrior and Quake with 100% kills and 100% secrets, Quake even in Nightmare mode, and it didn't need some icon with a clever text to motivate me...

This image describes the answers to this thread perfectly.

A higher percentage of the games here have achievements now and I see no reason why it would not keep increasing in the future.