I'm not bringing up hypotheticals from GOG's perspective, I'm explaining why developers and publishers would never sign a clause demanding updates. It's simply not going to happen unless there are literally no other game stores to sell on. Any demand GOG makes is a barrier to selling here and decreases the people willing to sell here.

If you care so much about this, go complain to the DEVELOPERS. Make the point that their reputations are the ones suffering, and they are the ones who can fix this. Complaining on GOG forums is worse than useless if you actually want the situation to change.

I´m not sure if GOG should be doing this at all. Of course GOG has to keep itself clean but doing this would be just more pressure above the developers.

If you want the support, ask the developers/editors. If you don´t want to beg for keeping up to date the game, leave a negative feedback on their game.

That's kind of an unethical suggestion, and I honestly do not see any sane developer agreeing to such terms.

I have went to developers, but that does not mean GOG is faultless in this situation.

Heh, Abandonware 2.0

GOG can't do anything about it. And that means that yes, they are faultless. This is none of their choosing.

GOG cannot order developers to make business decisions that favor GOG. They cannot order developers to do anything. They can only publish what games are offered. If developers choose to behave badly there is nothing GOG can do, and trying to use a publishing contract to 'force' action will just result in developers not publishing on GOG.
+1

Unethical, illegal, not a standard industry practice (which can be used to excuse the first two) and not really enforceable.

I've not seen a notice on a game's page that said, "THIS GAME IS BROKEN, ABANDONED, AND/OR MISSING CONTENT DUE TO THE DEVELOPERS NEGLECT". There are things GOG could do, they choose not to. Their inaction on the problem just perpetuates it, giving them some of the blame.

Why don't you "GOG Defenders" understand that if we don't hold all parties responsible for their portion of the problem, it will not get fixed

One should ask oneself WHY developers neglect GOG, other than GOG (probably) always generating less revenue. The real issue here is probably that updating games and adding DLC on GOG always means notable extra effort, is comparably awkward compared to Steam and that, unless I'm mistaken, developers can't officially publish beta patches here. Combined with far lower sales it means that many developers don't feel like it's worth the hassle. I'm not defending developers who knowingly screw over a certain portion of their players but it's generally far better to address the hurdles and motivate than to force certain duties upon developers which would only make GOG a FAR less attractive platform to publish on and develop for. Being forced to delay a critical Steam update due to some, among game distributors unheard of, obligation to GOG would only do more harm than good, with some developers, even ones who have been treating GOGers with respect thus far, possibly skipping GOG as a distribution platform in the future altogether.

While GOG could surely largely improve the release and update process, the problem is that most of the improvements would require automation and automation means less quality control by GOG and a larger risk that the installers will be outdated compared to the Galaxy versions (I'm speculating here but that's a few potential reasons I could think of even as a random user). A blue announced automated patches on the forums a while back, I have no idea if that's happened yet, going by the trouble with some titles I presume that it has not, and there's probably a number of serious reasons (other than missing technical know-how on GOG's end, which I'm not implying is an issue here). One needs to understand that ease and speed of updating titles is inherent to the concept of Steam while it's practically contradictory to some of the core values of GOG, who especially in the early days were and to some degree still are about making technically problematic games work on modern systems themselves and taking responsibility for it instead of leaving it to the publishers and developers. To some degree it has to be a trade-off. It's a complex and frustrating situation, not only for GOG users but all parties involved, including the developers. Because extra obligations to a business partner, especially ones other partners do not have, will always be a reason not to get involved with them. Even if you've been paying your phone bill on time thus far and believe that you will be able to continue doing so, you won't sign with a service that will punish you the moment you're late if you can get the service from another party who won't kill your firstborn son the moment you don't pay the bill for whatever reason.

At the very least you have to create a separate package that does not include any proprietary content of the other party (like the Steamworks and Galaxy DLLs) and you still need to do some QA for every update that makes sure that the implementations of both APIs still work well and that the game also works if you're not logged into either Steam nor Galaxy due to GOG's installer versions which must work even in case of a complete absence of either API. And "proper engineering" is extra effort in itself. You can't use ideal cases as an excuse. Shipping a game at all, especially on time, is trouble enough.

So, what do you see as the solution? Personally I'd put up with a smaller selection of games for some REAL "Quality Control".

OH wait I've already made GOG my number 1 place to buy games which means I'm dealing with a smaller selection of games. I'm giving them my support all I'm asking for in return is that they give me a product the same that I could've bought somewhere else, but chose not to.

In GOG's place I'd sacrifice some quality control in favour of a streamlined automated update process, allow optional beta patches on Galaxy and try to minimise the differences in the implementation of both APIs - as a matter of fact I initially hoped that they would be able to even make Galaxy work as a wrapper so that even games that were never intended to support anything other than Steamworks could be made compatible with Galaxy by just replacing the files (and a file that's named "steam.dll" but doesn't include any of Valve's code should even be okay from a legal standpoint). And GOG should try to make sure that all popular engines natively support Galaxy as they already do with Steam.

Not a bad idea, I wonder why GOG doesn't do it?

Well, with some of the automation I can imagine it's both technical difficulties (maybe also security risks) and the other reasons I mentioned like the risk of installer versions receiving too little support. I guess with increased automation for the Galaxy versions the patch and DLC delays would shift from Galaxy versus Steam to GOG installers versus Galaxy. There's probably also a number of other variables at play that only GOG is aware of. Either way, the more I think about it the more I'm under the impression that many problems could be solved by redesigning the Galaxy API and (something I totally forgot about above) improving the documentation of the API. I've seen a number of developers complain about its lacking documentation by now.

As for the lack of native support for Galaxy in popular engines, I'm honestly under the impression that GOG just didn't even think of approaching their developers or at least half-assed this very much.

Well, at least Titan Quest GOG is now getting updates so often that some people even complain GOG is releasing updates too fast, the version they just downloaded is already out-of-date. :)

Hey, Space Rangers HD also seemed to receive update just yesterday, as I saw someone using it as an example of "forgotten" GOG games that don't receive updates.

I'd personally really like to see GOG improve the updates mechanism to do my dishes and laundry, vacuum and make me a sandwich. Oh, and to bring me a pony, definitely a pony!