Exactly how I feel. They still release the occasional classic, but I feel it’s just chum for the water, rather than anything they actually care about, if that makes sense. I don’t even remember what the last old title they was. The Close Combat games, maybe?
This isn’t what I am talking about.
To put precise examples: Starship Titanic has been updated regularly on Steam because of its ongoing support by Scummvm, something that GOG doesn’t seem to give a darn about, their own version being still the totally outdated and mostly nonworking original Windows installer (it is published by the same studio on Steam and GOG, obviously).
To be thorough, that issue can happen with recent games too, actually: Stardew Valley’s updates were being ignored by GOG’s staff for the longest time, before they noticed it was worth pushing them, eventually: the first concurrent Steam/GOG patch was this year’s MP final patch.
Also all the Macintosh DOSBox bundled on GOG have been outdated for years (the filters for instance do not work on OS X past 10.9, if memory serves right) something which they haven’t considered ever addressing. Easily fixed by the user, I concur, but it shows a lack of dedication that is quite telling.
They push one now and then. The latest I cared about were SWAT 4 and Stunt Island (sadly they only publish the English version of that one, while my own language’s voice bits were hilarious, I miss them!)
EDIT: nm first part, misread.
I have a hard time believing that’s on GOG (surely they have an automated system for publishing updates, even if it’s not as convenient as Steam?) but if it is that pretty much explains why they’ve been treading water for years.
The instances of this kind of thing I’m aware of were all the publisher/developer not bothering to support the GOG release. I can’t speak to the specific examples you mention, but is there some clear reason to think GOG is the responsible party?
Unless something has changed in recent years, to put an update on GoG, you FTP it to a site and email somebody there to handle it.
As far as I know this isn’t anything to do with GOG but is down to the developers treating GOG as a 2nd class citizen and not bothering to push GOG specific updates.
EDIT:
Oops - I mis-clicked and accidentally deleted this post, luckily there was an undelete option :)
Another example of GOG being treated as second class is the recent Pathfinder Kingmaker. Due to its broken state on launch, it was being patched daily, with GOG patches often slightly delayed, and on at least one occasion, there was a gap in patches that left you stuck (e.g. 1.05 -> 1.06 and 1.07 -> 1.08 existed, but not 1.06 -> 1.07) unless you were on the Galaxy client.
Unless something has changed, the dev may not have control of this. Unlike Steam, you can’t just deploy this stuff - you send it over and email them and it happens when they get to it.
So the delay is on GOG’s end? That should be something they can fix. Also, if they grew to any considerable size it’s probably not something they can manually deploy for everyone anyway.
That would make sense, given the daily (and occasional semi-daily) patching something is liable to get fucked up.
Building automated developer-facing systems for deployment for any game isn’t trivial. This is something that doesn’t exist, not something they need to tweak.
It doesn’t exist for them, but it does exist for Steam, right. Or am I misunderstanding?
Correct. Valve built theirs, GoG hasn’t built one, so it’s still manual. (again, maybe something has changed recently, but not that I’m aware of?)
Right so if they want to compete with Steam they’re going to have to do better, especially if they pick up volume. Now if they’re happy where they’re at, and I guess the devs are fine dealing with a delay like that knowing some players will blame them for treating GOG as an inferior store even though the problem is on the other side, then I guess they don’t have to.
I view GOG as a place to get old legally acquired games that work on new machines. They also have an indie presence and sometimes they get big titles for… reasons. I never got the impression they lined themselves up to compete against Steam and therefore not Epic of Discord. I assumed that’s the position in the market they wanted.
I only brought it up in response to the ‘GoG players are treated like second-class citizens’ comment upthread. Just trying to provide some context for why that might seem that way.
I have seen that almost exact same statement in other places over the years. I didn’t know why that was happening, so I appreciate that, but I feel that ideal is not rare. I think Stardew Valley had a delay there too, and those players were talking about it on the Steam forums.
Apparently via GOG Galaxy, devs can patch their games like they can on steam without GOG’s input:
I just wanted to chime in here quickly.
From what I can see, there was a patch uploaded to GOG Galaxy Pipeline (a system that many developers use, where they can upload new builds and publish them directly to users and GOG) about 2 days ago, however it was uploaded to a testing (internal) branch only and never published to a master (public) one.
Whether this is intentional (like for testing) or some misunderstanding - I do not know. I’ve asked our Product team to investigate further and let you know.
This is from august 2017 so it has been there a while.
Yeah there are a couple of devs that are notorious for not supplying GOG with patches. Can’t think of who they are at the moment though.
I have trouble believing that GOG is just sitting on all these patches that are sent in, but I guess it’s possible…?
Looks like that’s within the last 2 years - We shipped Rebel Galaxy on, uh, Galaxy - but it just automated the download for the player. It wasn’t an automated system for uploading and deploying from the developer at the time. I don’t know how the process functions at this point then.
My understanding is that it’s now as easy to deploy a GOG build directly to customers as it is with Steam. The problem is that it’s still a different pipeline and so requires a separate SKU. This is where the monopoly problem comes into play. As Steam has more customers some developers give the Steam SKU higher priority.
GOG is definitely competing with Steam. They purposely renamed themselves from “Good Old Games” to “GOG.com” (somewhat confusing I know) and now sell modern games provided they are DRM free (and pass curation).