Hi everyone, I'm known as vipeout and I work for Destructive Creations. I'm a programmer, but DC is a small studio so I also handle support and communication with players. Some of you may recognize me from the Steam forums. This is my first post here and there's a lot to discuss. As developers, we believe that you deserve an explanation about the entire situation regarding releasing Ancestors Legacy on GOG. I'm leaving this thread open, because I want you to have a place and a chance to ask any questions you may have after reading this post. I do not promise I will be able to answer them all, but I do have a rule of not ignoring people, which I almost always keep.

Let's start with GOG team. Some of you wrote that GOG team has lost your trust due to the insane delay that we're having with Ancestors Legacy. That is unfair. Once they had realized how severe the situation was they offered a lot of help. We consulted with them on what their policies are about many different scenarios. We worked together to achieve desired effects using their libraries. They even implemented features into their SDK specifically requested by us, so we could port the game sooner and better! They shifted their own development timelines and adjusted them to our needs. They solved every problem we had with their libraries and systems which allowed us to speed up porting process and made sure we are able to follow their policies. We were constantly in touch. Their support was incredible and a huge difference from what we always had on Steam. Needles to say – for the better! It was an amazing thing they did for us, we had never experienced something like that before. Huge thanks to GOG!

We hope, that in future, we will have the chance to work with GOG team again. They've been great to us. Helpful. Understood our messy situation. They probably kept at it to satisfy you, those who trust them, but that's just my guess.

Ok, so, having said that, let's get to the most important question everyone's asking. Why was the delay so huge? It boils down to several things:
1. We did not expect we would have to develop the GOG version ourselves. It was not planned in our time budgets. As many of you already know, a 3rd party was supposed to deliver GOG version of our game. As you all know, it didn't. Having been put in that situation we've decided that we cannot let anyone down and we'll deliver the title all by ourselves, despite our already busy plans and absolutely no experience with GOG platform.
2. We could not just abandon all the previously planned expansions, tournaments, patches and bugfixes. Dedicated servers, console release, spectator, heroes. We had to work on all that while simultaneously working on GOG version. Why? Because with no updates, games die much faster. It would be dead before we'd port it.
3. We had to make sure that all this new content and features also properly work on GOG. Each thing we planned to develop for Steam we had to also adjust for GOG build. That quickly piled up a lot of additional work.
4. Ancestors Legacy is our first game on this platform. It's not just “copy the Steam build to GOG and done”, as some of you may think. DRM is not an issue here at all. Low level subsystems are – user verification, online play, cross–play, achievements, leaderboards and adjusting our game to GOG policies are some examples of what we did.
5. When a studio releases a game it's usually the last sprint to a finish line. When you reach the end line and something bad happens forcing you to race for many more long months... it doesn't help.

There were several rumors about the reasons behind the delay. The delay didn't happen because we were afraid that GOG release would hurt Steam sales. Games released on Steam, which use Steam DRM only, are pirated on release day for years now. It didn't happen because we thought that nobody would play on GOG anyway. If we did, we'd never plan a GOG release in the first place. It also didn't happen because we considered you second class customers, although it might've looked that way. Yes, we failed in communication here, on GOG forums. Unfortunately this also is not as simple as it should be. I agree that you should have been warned about the delay before the game's release. You wouldn't get much lead time, but at least something. The delay was known to not be “slight” at the launch date and everybody involved had to know it. Despite what we thought, it was decided by the publisher that such communication with you, was good enough.

Lessons learned? Be hardcore on the 3rd party that works for you. Make sure to communicate with players, regardless of circumstances.

We do realize that some (probably most) of you have decided to refund the game. Still, we have finally managed to deliver with full cross–play support, as promised. With all the content and features that are available on Steam today. We do realize that we've lost a lot of trust and good will from you. This is your first experience with us and we haven't really entered with style, to put it gently. Failing miserably gives more truth to it. We do care about what players think about us and we've really tried our best here.

To apologize for the failure that in reality we're only partially responsible for, the game is 50% off. This is a compensation for the long wait time. We are aware that for many of you this is not enough. However, at this point, it's the only thing we can do.

We are aware that you may feel disappointed, what we aim to achieve is making up and trying to restore our team's image. We also want you to know, that we'll be releasing all the future patches in the same time on both platforms. It's not a wishful thinking or an empty promise. You probably won't believe so easily (and truthfully – you shouldn't after all that mess), but it's a fact – we have to synchronize the builds in order for cross–play, that we worked so hard to implement, to work at all. Desynchronized builds crash :)

We honestly hope, that despite this insane delay followed by radio silence, you'll be able to give us a chance with our next games. That is, if our future games are allowed to appear on GOG after this entire mess. We just hope, that what we're trying to do now, what we've been consistently doing for the past months will be enough for you to give us another chance. We're really sorry.

Destructive Creations Team.

Thank you for the post.
Honestly speaking, knowing that your team are the ones that have delivered the GOG release, I will be much more likely to purchase this title when I am able to.
Thank you all for your work, and I will keep an eye out for future projects from Destructive Creations.

Hello,

Well I'm unfortunently not here to say that I will buy it (I like a lot tactics but it look like too much blood and it seem too violent for me)

But I saw your post and I really appreciated it. It seems that you did a big job to put it on GOG, so I just would like to thank you for bringing it here and allow gog community to enjoy it. More over there is not a lot of tactical game WITH MULTI here so It's really great. The big promo is also extremly nice.

Then just for this "Games released on Steam, which use Steam DRM only, are pirated on release day for years now" AN AWESOME THANK despite it's completly true few people admit it. So thank you for this too, you are really the kind of team that we would like to have more often

Hi vipeout! Thanky ou for the clarification - finally!

Actually I never blamed GOG for the delay of your game. I just thought, you as devs did not care about publishing on GOG until you sold enought copies on Steam. This combined with the fact that there was no official statement up to now mede me think you`d just do not care.

True that Ancestors Legacy is your first game on GOG so you had no chance to get accustomed. Anyhow I would not want GOG to distribute your first title (nor the second) which I regard a slap in the face of everyone who had a highschool massacre around (we just commemorated 10th anniversary of the Amoklauf in Winnenden). Just saying.

But be it as it may. I was intersted in your second game an I am willing to not judge a company by the first impression and the explanation you give in your post makes me think that I clearly underestimated the effort it took (especially for as a small team) to bring you game to GOG.

I wish you all the best an hope, you game will sell good around here, as I allways appreciate it if a company decides to release a GNG (Good New Game) on GOG!

best regards

phila

Thanks for the apology and the honesty. I am also very glad you cleared up the rumors :) It wasn't clear to me when I pre-ordered that the GOG version was being handled by a third party. I learned that after the fact; actually I believe I saw it on a post from the Steam forum, which I went to hoping to see some sort of information on when to expect the game here.

Maybe I am not the target audience but the cross play wasn't a big feature to me. It was more about the singleplayer. I can't imagine I am alone on this. I think that's what was really difficult for some of us who pre-ordered here. The fact that multi was being worked on didn't explain to us why we couldn't just have singleplayer content, with multi arriving later.

Regardless, I look forward to finally diving into this game, and seeing more of your games here on GOG in the future! Props for the great post. I don't feel like a second class citizen now and your company feels more like a legit company for gamers instead of giant AAA corporate slop. Much appreciated.

just stumbled over this and want to express my respects to the developers for that seemingly honest and comprehensive post.
Each one here should know how unique GoG is and how important it is to keep GoG going, esp. with all that user-dependency-increasing attemps from other Gamestores/Plattforms. Too many customers dont have the horizon to see how important customer choice is for their own good (intel-amd / ms win10 anyone?), so its a good thing that a developer explains situations so GoG doesnt take the blame.

I must say your post really surprised me in a very positive way. Decided to buy your game even though I was very much on precipice if I should buy it or not before I saw this post, cause its not quite what I was expecting from it when I saw it in pre-release.

Well, if i hadn't already purchased the game, this post would have convinced me. Some parts of the game don't interest me these days, but i think ill have fun with the singlepayer.

Bought. Thank you. :-)

Thanks for the apology.

Hey, Destructive Creations,

Thank you for the clarification and for not evading the touchy topics (The delay caused by being afraid that GOG release would hurt Steam sales + GOG being blamed for delay), from which the first one I thought was true, because of the radio silence.

I really appreciate the honesty in explaining the situation.
I do hope that future updates for Ancestors Legacy + any other game you would release here would be released with much less trouble and much smoother than this time.

With that said, although I was refunded back then by GOG, I am glad I could buy Ancestors Legacy back, that was an instabuy.

Welcome on board.

"SOLD"

Thanks for explanation and the honesty.

P.S.
Well, yes, maybe I am not a target audience for this option, but I personally prefer to see (as an additional option, not as replacement) the options of LAN play and Direct Connect. As it seems to me, this solves much more problems:
Firstly, it allows MP not to be dependent on a store (the developer can publish the game in any store and the option will work always and everywhere the same and will not have to be redone for each store - this is beneficial both for developers and players).
Secondly, this approach guarantees possibility of store-agnostic crossplay out of the box without any problems.
Thirdly, it is really a DRM-Free mode and it will work even if the Steam / GOG / Whatever servers do not work or are unavailable.
Just my opinions and thoughts about crossplay.

Anyway thanks again.

P.P.S.
I would like to see Hatred here, but I know that the problem is not on your side.

I only bought the game because it appeared on GOG. Heard of it once before it was released and then never actually realised that it WAS released on steam. There are simply too many games on that platform these days. So I couldn‘t care less about the drama and am happy about discovering this now.

One word of advice: the experience you‘ve made by porting a game to gog and allowing for cross-play is probably worth gold. I suggest writing down your experience in a short programming book 50-100 pages and the selling this as well. It would help gog and its users tremendeously I think.

Exactly the same here. I totaly forgot about its release.