GOG has reportedly cut dozens of jobs recently. Here are new details about the situation at CD Projekt’s subsidiary and the shortcomings of its business strategy.
experienced this with BG3 on gog while my friends had the steam version, when it launched. Patches on gog were delayed by sometime a week, preventing us to play together.
The conspiracist in me wonders if this is intentional as the result of a deal with other publishers. Maybe its just that ‘the devs didnt get around to it’ but honestly with how simple it should be to release things on GOG i more wonder if it isnt suppression.
Are you seriously asking how a piece of computer software might fail to operate correctly? As much as DRM sucks, it isn’t the only thing that can cause something to not work.
No im saying theres no such thing as a “GOG” version afaik. Its just the game files. What features differentiate a ‘GOG’ version from the same game acquired anywhere else? Their whole business model is offering games without any DRM or storefront added features, you dont even need to use their launcher, you can just download the game files directly. Whereas ‘Steam’ versions have all sorts of code added to be compatible with Steam.
You pretty much said it. The Steam version often has all sorts of stuff for Steam integration… and the Steam version is the default version. So various hooks for achievements and networking and mod installation may be different. Messing with any of that could easily break something. Furthermore, GOG does have its own API that some games use (again, for achievements and cloud saves); so if a game has chosen to use those features they may accidentally break something.
But even aside from possible difference between versions; bugs in the game itself still have to be addressed on every platform. Even if they don’t bother testing the new version, they still have to at least push the update - which is still more work than zero work. This is why it is fairly common to see games that are under active development only have their beta version on Steam (or in some cases only Epic), even when they intend to launch on a bunch of platforms.
So for some games (certainly not all, but definitely some), patches come on Steam first and GOG at some point later. Maybe a day later, or a week later, or in some rare cases not at all. Similarly for DLC. And that definitely isn’t GOG’s fault. There isn’t really anything GOG can do about it. It’s just a side-effect of Steam being the far bigger platform.
How would a game “not work” on GOG? isnt their whole thing that they give you just the game files with no DRM or whatever?
experienced this with BG3 on gog while my friends had the steam version, when it launched. Patches on gog were delayed by sometime a week, preventing us to play together.
The conspiracist in me wonders if this is intentional as the result of a deal with other publishers. Maybe its just that ‘the devs didnt get around to it’ but honestly with how simple it should be to release things on GOG i more wonder if it isnt suppression.
Are you seriously asking how a piece of computer software might fail to operate correctly? As much as DRM sucks, it isn’t the only thing that can cause something to not work.
No im saying theres no such thing as a “GOG” version afaik. Its just the game files. What features differentiate a ‘GOG’ version from the same game acquired anywhere else? Their whole business model is offering games without any DRM or storefront added features, you dont even need to use their launcher, you can just download the game files directly. Whereas ‘Steam’ versions have all sorts of code added to be compatible with Steam.
You pretty much said it. The Steam version often has all sorts of stuff for Steam integration… and the Steam version is the default version. So various hooks for achievements and networking and mod installation may be different. Messing with any of that could easily break something. Furthermore, GOG does have its own API that some games use (again, for achievements and cloud saves); so if a game has chosen to use those features they may accidentally break something.
But even aside from possible difference between versions; bugs in the game itself still have to be addressed on every platform. Even if they don’t bother testing the new version, they still have to at least push the update - which is still more work than zero work. This is why it is fairly common to see games that are under active development only have their beta version on Steam (or in some cases only Epic), even when they intend to launch on a bunch of platforms.
So for some games (certainly not all, but definitely some), patches come on Steam first and GOG at some point later. Maybe a day later, or a week later, or in some rare cases not at all. Similarly for DLC. And that definitely isn’t GOG’s fault. There isn’t really anything GOG can do about it. It’s just a side-effect of Steam being the far bigger platform.