paladin181: I understand about growth, as I said. It's hard to watch for a lot of us who felt like GOG cared about not turning to anti-consumer methods like DRM and required online clients. Dress it up however you like, but those notions are both anti-consumer. And they are at least somewhat necessary, I'm not claiming that they are not. But here, they're not supposed to exist. But it is still hard to accept that GOG, who claimed (and still claims) to stand against these practices are turning to them, and that is also a very slippery slope.
When people talk about GOG, Humble, Steam and other platforms, you can generally categorise them into the pioneers of
sales events, which would be
Humble (essentially, the guy who sells you a box of "12 best beers from Bavaria" and you buy it, even though you would love only 2 of these and won't generally buy them, but hey, it's a good angle); pioneers of
customer service, which would be
Steam (you probably saw the last post by Robin, explaining the future, and it's very clear that they want the store to be "the best store for every specific user"); and pioneers of
discovery, which would be GOG that brought back from the dark a bunch of great games that were too old for (then) mainstream retail but with the digital age blossomed since we (players in their 40s or 30s) were happy to overlook the visuals and still play GBA or GOG's 90s mixes.
I see a big problem with GOG losing that edge, and IMHO this is the thing that can kill the platform, eventually making it "one of" the many platforms like Gamers Gate that essentially are a forum with a store attached. Here's the thing: since the big transition from retail to digital, and the following transition to self-publishing (we're in a bundle on Steam with 5 other games, all of which are self-published, and the interaction within the group is very fast, and very direct) there's been one more huge change: transition from communication as PR to communication as community management, thanks to the Early Access approach.
One of the examples of EA ahead of the actual EA is Mount & Blade from TaleWorlds. Recent success stories are Rimworld and Factorio. Now, one of these 2 excellent games is available on GOG, the other is not. The difference is in the size of the team. The larger team out of these two is able to launch the product even pre-Steam, the smaller team simply does not have the manpower to spend their time on this. And as the "pioneers of discovery", I feel that GOG is already taking a step back here. IMHO, if GOG would offer 20 quirky products 2 out of which will score 100+ votes and the others will tank, this would be a better situation than GOG offering the same 2 products without the other 18, but 1 year down the road from the mainstream launch.
In 2007 multiplayer was the big thing. Engines were the big thing. In 2017, we pay a few hundred dollars for a Unity license, and we use software that allows us to be playable online in a matter of months. What this created, is a corresponding change in game design. With Gremlins, Inc. we're seeing 50,000-75,000 trades – just trades – between players on Steam, every month. Our own profit from this is about $50 per month. Players, meanwhile, make many times more. Just recently someone got a rare item and sold it to another user for €50. Amazing! Exciting! (to me, as the developer). Someone bought my game for $15 and made €50 because they got lucky. It's a meta-game around the game.
But more importantly, is the change in our dev mindset. When we work with the online client, there's no such thing as "let's do this and risk all". We can do a change, see the actual player data, and roll back or adjust immediately. Moreover, we have access to the data like session stats, which allows us to spot problems in game mechanics regardless of user complaints. When we introduced character types in the game, with different special abilities, there was a huge discussion on how some were overpowered. So what did we do? We created a chart showing actual winrate by character type by type of game, for
everyone to see. Removing thus any need to explain, or guess, and giving users raw data to make their decisions on. Following that, we made a few adjustments, as everyone saw some of the stats off the expected target.
TL;DR – gamedev is changing. Multiplayer is exciting. Client/Server architecture AND meta-game with in-game items allows for interaction between players, and mechanics outside of the actual game, that are very appealing because they offer new experiences. This is where we're moving, as well a most of the teams we're friends with. Our new game is designed as a single-player experience. But it will have a special mode, Ironman, that will be online-only, because it will offer great new stuff that we designed to enhance the single-player experience. I don't really care about the piracy. I care about offering to players something great that they can have in our game, which wasn't even possible 10 years ago. And I'd love to see GOG evolving to embrace studios like ours, rather than shorten its release list only to the classic franchises.
