fortune_p_dawg: oh, i know. that's what drives me crazy. i hate the idea of dragons dogma or other heavy hitters being delisted because of something so... so... dumb. i wish i could understand the difficulty of maintaining two up-to-date builds versus just one. i'd love to hear from a dev as to why this is so incredibly challenging on their end.
MarkoH01: I am not a dev but I recently read a post mortem from the dev of "Demetrios" (nice guy btw) who told what difficulties he had to experience. One of them was to keed different platforms up to date with different DRM-free builds. I will search for the link to this post-mortem and post it here.
Edit: Found it. It's
here. The interesting part is this (under the DRM-free section):
"The most annoying side of doing DRM-Free is having to manage separate builds and upload full packages for each new version on every DRM Free site... It's just much less practical than having it centralized in one unique place, which also allows to upload only the differences and not the whole thing again. Which is great, especially when you've got bad internet...!"
Just for a reference point, for steam the process works something like this. I build my game as a release build. I test that it's working locally - it calls steam dev stuff that is set up locally, so that any steamworks features can be tested, and I can see that the steam overlay is working right and I see the achievements, or any other features I may be using. If it's good, I run a single command that will upload to steam only the changes from this build and whatever my last build was. If I didn't change much, this may be very very quick - in the realm of megabytes. I mark that build as an update, and then I need to open steam which will update my game (downloading that realm of megabytes again, usually pretty quick) to make sure the update works.
DRM free clearly has a cost in disrupting this process, as evidenced by Demetrios. When I make my local build, I need to make sure it works without the steam stuff. When I upload it, I have to upload the entire thing. When I test the update, I have to download the entire thing. If it is a big game, say 10 gigs, this means the release process just went from something that could take a few minutes (not including testing time) to something that may take multiple hours (not including testing time). (You can offer a patch, but setting those up is even more work, and you still need to upload the whole build for any new players)
If something goes wrong with testing, you have to start over.
if you are uploading to multiple drm-free sources, you have to do this process twice: upload+download the 10 gigs to each place.
If I get a report the next day about something wrong with the update, and it's a very easy/safe fix, I can fix it in minutes with steam, several hours every where else.
Some of this, such as making sure your build can work as a drm-free release, is an artifact of developing for steam first, which is an artifact of steam already being the market leader. I also don't know what other hurdles there may be in gog's release process that could slow things down even further.