I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'same platform, same product'. GOG sells both older DOS games and Windows games, both packaged to work on current versions of Windows.

Having DRM-free 'in writing' is neither here nor there. GOG has had DRM-free 'in writing' and been calling themselves a 'DRM-free store' for many years, whilst simultaneously letting DRM-ed content creep on and allowing their standards to slip. Every game store page says: "Why buy on GOG.com?: DRM-free.". What we need to see at this point is GOG actively removing games from the store that have DRM-ed content and re-focusing on offline installers. We need actions, not more hollow words.

Your third sentence, I 100% agree with. DRM-free is GOG's niche, and they can either double-down on and own it, or they will lose it.

@Time4Tea ... it's time to delete your account no ?

I think the proper term is "leeching", but taken to this level it comes close to stealing.

Modding means investing your free time without being rewarded for it. It always meant that. I modded 15 of my 33 years on this planet, I know what I am saying.

With the advent of Patreon, some modders actually managed to construct a business around their modding efforts, a business that is at best in a legal grey area and mostly ignored by the publishers for now, as long as it is not bad for business or competing with anything (like selling Skins). Note that most of the successful Patreon-mods are for rather old games (like Empire at War) or niche games like (semi-)realiistic military sims.

GoG does not need to compensate the developers of DeusEx NewVision or the Daggerfall Unity in any way, neither legally nor morally. If GoG would do that, they would hurt the modders, a lot by the way. Why? Because these modders would now profit from an intellectual property they do not own.

Honestly, I remember how happy I was when PC Gaming Mags reported on my mods back in the day (mostly Freespace 2 and Warcraft 3), linked to Download pages and similar things. We had one or two requests back in the day when magazine people asked if they could put our installer on their DVDs and we declined every time, because we would have gotten some ugly mail from a lawyer very very fast.

Nowadays, if a store like GoG would agree to distribute my mod with the blessing of the publisher, my brain would probably explode. The fact that Bethesda is okay with "officially" releasing mod-projects based on their games and thus raising awareness is great, it is a win-win-win situation:
- good for the modders, because their work gets more exposure!
- good for the players, because they are made aware of some cool new content for their favorite game, available in a very convenient format
- good for the company, because it strengthens the brand and might generate sales (e.g. for the sequel)

The general negativity in this thread is depressing and not at all warranted. Not everything on this store is absolutely perfect, sometimes things do not work out the way that they were planned (Ancestors Legacy, Quake Remastered, ...), sometimes patches are late (or way too late, in Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak's case), not everything is as DRM-free as one would hope but from reading through this thread, one gets the impression that GoG is a literal hell-in-the-internet, out to get you.

GoG is a wonderful store. It can improve of course but it is in a much better place than many alternatives and I will happily continue to support it.

The trolling in this thread, because what else are many of the messages in here, needs to stop. People are looking for things to hate and post about and I honestly fail to see how these people even have the time for that. Is there nothing more in life, like spending time on the storefront that is apparently so much better than GoG? Or playing some cool video game, the common thing we are all here for?
Composing this message has taken me 15 minutes of my life and I am doing it because I am fed up with all the shit-posting in this thread.

Be constructive instead of de-railing when you got something to say.

A good post, it one correction to the first line. Modding doesn’t necessarily mean any of that, in fact it simply means modifying files or process which you have. How, and why you do it can be as varied as any other tech task. For instance there are paid mods on GOG, Viking one for m&b for instance. Whilst it is in the main like you say, but not always. In fact you could argue that anyone using a framework such as gammaker or unity with prebuilts is modifying existing tools/games.

why do you keep making new accounts?

Trying to get mods to work also means investing your time without reward. I don't see it much different from selling mods for a car.

@Time4Tea I'd like to join the boycott list.

I'm a game developer, and I'm fully planning to release games I make on DRM-encumbered platforms because it is the only way to reach a wide enough audience for the scope of game we're targeting. But I also want to release on smaller platforms that don't require DRM, and GOG was always a centerpiece of that plan. To see how much trust they're losing in the community with this is disheartening, because I really want them to be a consistent, honest place to find DRM-free games. It helps both end users and developers when transparency and honesty are there.

Careful, these are projects born from mods... which show the potential and real-world benefits of modding. You learn stuff. Tons of stuff. And maybe, you go professional. But these are not mods, these are games or DLCs, they have some sort of publisher, they are an intellectual property, a brand.

An unfortunate truth :-(

However, since investing time and money into DRM-systems is a futile thing to do for a small developer anway, I do not fully understand the rest of your post's content. Why exactly does this topic matter to you as a dev? For my consumer-me, the DRM-issue is super important but my dev-me does not care!

Bear with me...

Fact: Your game will get cracked and shared and pirated, unless you invest lots of money into top-tech stuff like an up-to-date Denuvo.
Fact: That will be out of scope for you, no offense.

In short, you are not loosing anything by releasing DRM-free. The choice of store is more important than the DRM-tech, because you need to install base and the (potential of) exposure, which means Steam on PC.
If you do a Steam-release, you may or may not throw the default Steam-DRM onto your game but that system is so easy to remove that is basically just a waste of time for you. You will see your game on Skidrow, Codex and whatnot and it will feel shitty as hell.

Yes, it hurts. But these political discussions about the GoG's policies are really irrelevant to you. My advice is to forget about any license-enforcement-, DRM- or other-protective-measure right away. Instead, put every minute of development time into the game itself and then try to get it onto as many store fronts as possible. A good game, given expore (dare I say luck?), will sell. And will be pirated, but it will also sell.

By the way, I am a big fan of Jeff Vogel and he did a GDC talk a few years back and provided some similar (but not identical) advice, see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stxVBJem3Rs

My favorite schizophrenia support thread <3

I have added you and just updated the list on the first post. Thanks for your support and I very much sympathize with what you say.

I completely understand Steam being the priority for indie developers; however, I think a DRM-free release is very important to have as an option, for those that care about that. Not sure if you've seen it, but Zoom Platform seems to be a good up-and-coming DRM-free alternative to GOG. Great support/community, no client app - worth checking out!

I think you've somewhat misinterpreted what I meant by the quoted statement. I am not suggesting that GOG should compensate modders for including their work on the store. It was a counterpoint to RavenCrowwise's post - I just wanted to make sure they weren't under the impression that GOG is financially supporting the developers/modders of projects like Daggerfall Unity. I agree with your point though that those works being listed on GOG does provide support in a promotional sense.

I agree with you about not trolling or derailing the thread. I think it's perfectly fine for people to disagree. If you like GOG and aren't overly concerned about the issues that are being raised here and want to post your opinion on that - totally fair enough.

What I find harder to understand are those who seek to disrupt and shut down a protest, because they don't personally agree with it. I live in a land of free speech and I have been a paying customer of GOG in the past - I have every right to speak up and be critical if I don't like the way the store is being run. Those who are trying to cynically deny others their right to voice an opinion that they don't agree with are the real trolls.

Zoom has issues of there own.

They keep saying new games will be released soon, but we have not to seen many showing up. Then Zoom released a couple of games that had to be removed right away. The Outforce was released in broken statues. The game was supposed to be fixed in a couple of days. It's been two months now.

Their support is pretty bad. I had one issue I brought up three times with no help from Zoom support. Maybe they ignored me or did my issue get lost in discord. Anyways using discord for full support is a little odd to me.

Let's not forget the fact they have been around for 8 years but have a little over 400 games. Note: Zoom is counting DLC as how many games they have right now. But still, lacking and making mistakes.

25 games have been released on Zoom since the start of the year (which can be seen in their news posts). Yes, The Outforce has had issues, which they are working on, but they care about their quality - they take down games from sale that aren't working and don't put them back up again until they do. The same can't be said about GOG, who have a habit of leaving up broken games (e.g. rumor has it that the videos don't work properly in GOG's newly-released Prince of Qin).

Zoom's customer support is outstanding and vastly better than GOG's. I'm not sure about your particular case, but most people with support issues get responses within a couple of hours. Good luck getting a response from GOG to an issue within two weeks. There is a contact form on the website, but they recommend Discord because the response there is so much faster. Honestly, can you imagine GOG staff being responsive enough to directly reply to customers over Discord?

The ticker on the front page states they have just over 450 games, which seems like a good number that is increasing steadily. Even if they're being included, the number of DLCs is very small - easily < 5%.

Whilst I hate to agree with @Syphon72, their support is not good. The form you mention will not get you help, simply an automated response stating to use discord. Frankly I dispise IM systems (stems from work where we have to use them all the time), and this has also made me think twice before buying from there as well. But support n any store regardless f industry is rubbish, either circular automated systems or chatbots which don’t work.