I only see achievements based on one's game collection as implementable. (E.g. you have 100 GOGs, you have 50 actiong games etc. the way Gamer's Gate does it).

I absolutely totally detest "achievements", from their very name (woot, congratulations, you achieved something) to their manipulatory purpose (good boy, now get a pat on the head and do this again, we'll admire you more and more).

Generally speaking, I don't like when some meta-gaming thing such as giving real money for games is turned into a game itself, with gamey logic, motivation and gratification.

Achievements are good if done right in my opinion, but GOG having some that can be shown online would be only implementable in two ways without DRM, and in both there would be online features for the games added, in which case those downloads should IMO be optional.

a) Games send stats to GOG but otherwise work as always, GOG collects them and shows them on profiles.
b) GOG offers a download client like Steam, but the client remains optional and is also used for the achievements.

The third option would be without GOG, but also nice:
Ingame achievements are added by devs, but not submit online.


I can see myself using such a client as in b, and if only for organising the games.

IIRC SotS: The Pit has achievements, but they're completely offline. I prefer that system to something online because:

A) It's way easier to manage, and
B) It's much less about a digital wank-stick and more geared towards challenging yourself.

how would you manage achievements without a client?
Ask every dev to make gog specific achievements and put them only in the gog version of the game, and then say "you figure out where it gets displayed, dev" ?
Its possible, but it doesnt make any sense if the achievements arent unified in some way, and if you start to unify them it will start to look like a client.
And if you dont use online drm, then theres no way to even begin to ensure the achievements are valid and not cheated in.

Does it really matter if people cheat to get "achievements"? It's not like they have a monetary value or anything.

Code to handle the GOG achievement system would be required regardless of whether the game itself talks to GOG's servers, or merely talks to an external application that talks to GOG's servers, the former would just require more code (either idea would likely be provided by a GOG-made DLL that the game simply calls functions from - but the game would need to load the DLL and call those functions similar to what Steam games do).

Steam-only games like Half-Life 2 and Portal can be played completely offline and completely without the Steam client installed, but only register achievements if you're logged in to the Steam client.

No I mean , a social profile like Facebook and Steam . And much more open . People will communicate via profile's . And see wishlists etc.

Do not want any achievements. Good games don't need achievements to be good, and bad games will be bad even with achievements. The only thing I sometimes want - is counter of in-game time.

Awesome idea. Although we'll need to bus in some girls.

Yeah, I'm sure it won't be too difficult getting some girls to show up at one of our shindigs. :P

Exactly. The games would have to record events into a local encrypted cache that is then fed into the user's GOG account via a client that's loaded at the user's discretion. Alternatively it could be an app that's run directly from the site when you login to your account and press a button to sync achievements of games that are in your account. As mentioned above, the main problem with this method would be the requirement for a robust and secure implementation to protect against abuse and cheating.

Or as I believe DRM-free Steam games do - only record achievements if you're online while playing. Though this can result in interesting situation like not having gotten the "50 enemies killed" badge but having the "100 enemies killed" one if you were online and logged in when reaching the latter but not earlier when you reached the former.

OP is right, i could care less about achievements...

Never understood what's so special about this floating pixel texts

I would say "I couldn't care less", though I suppose it's theoretically possible.