The recent controversy about Double Dragon Trilogy requiring the GOG Galaxy client (and GOG's server infrastructure) for multiplayer got me thinking. Single-player is nice and everything, but I believe GOG's DRM-FREE mandate should include the clause that a game must be playable in multiplayer even after all servers have gone down.

Basically this means that all games on GOG should support old-fashioned LAN play if they have multiplayer at all. This allows people to build their own 3rd-party services to allow people to find games, like they've been doing for years.

I think the GOG Galaxy server infrastructure is a nice bonus and can streamline the process of finding and joining games a lot, but it shouldn't be required. Though it wouldn't be as bad if you released your server infrastructure code as open-source (*nudge* *nudge*) so people can get it back up if you go out of business.

there is some games like unreal tournament and a lot of other games that support online play without galaxy but a lot more of the newer games and releases of older games being redone will require the galaxy network cause easier to watch over and has steam cross play so they took advantage to sell galaxy and I see this not going away. but hey at least you have the single player drm free without any issue.

I think that this is mostly out of GOG control, unless they are in fact developing games. What they can do is ban the games from their site (not good :/ ).

gog pushes galaxy to game companies showing they have a platform that can work like steams and work with steam for online crossplay so devs run with this now thinking hell this is great for achievements and co op and such other things.

but hey what can you do :p

Terraria, Grim Dawn (even though gog tried to force you not being able to) & no doubt a few other games have the ability to play online without requiring servers or some dodgy client.

Basically, if they don't do a work around when the game is "released" here, they may not when things are older.

Darkspore is all the proof that you should need to never buy a game that requires servers/online play only, that doesn't also give you the option to play via other means.

I was very slow to adopt galaxy(being firmly in the steam-haters camp, still am), but I think for internet-play Galaxy is a very good thing.

A lot of you younger folks probably weren't around, but back in 2000 playing a game like Unreal online was an absolute nightmare. You basically needed to have a background in WAN networking and firewall programming. In most cases, you needed to work with a server hosted by the original publisher. In the rare cases you didn't, best be working in IT.

Its doubtful most of these old games could even be made to do online multiplayer today without a service like Galaxy. I know in at least a few cases, the networking protocols they used don't even exist anymore.

CENSORED BY GOG

So basically, if I'm only interested in the single player part of a game I didn't get to play back when, I shouldn't be able to get it on GOG because the long since dead multiplayer isn't available?
Yeah, no thanks.
Multiplayer is nice and everything, but I would rather have a single player experience and a dead multiplayer than have neither. Unless the game is multiplayer only, in which case I wouldn't really care about it.

So much confusion and misunderstanding around a simple idea. *resurrects thread*

What I'm asking is that the multiplayer, if available at all, should also be DRM-free. Instead of an "anything goes because it's just multiplayer" politic creeping in. The whole idea of getting games on GOG is that you are able to reinstall and play them on your own terms:
- on your future PC or emulator long after servers from whatever company are dead.
- when you're offline or with very restricted internet, such as on a military base.
- on your friend's PC when you're visiting without jumping through "account" and "family sharing" hoops.

The exact same things should be true by default about the multiplayer, and it's not rocket science to make it possible.

Since GOG already control the network infrastructure for newer games, it's trivial for them to let people host their own private Galaxy-based server for a given game on a LAN, or let them have some community-run ones available on the Internet. They should do it now so that newly released multiplayer games can really be called DRM-free.

Anyhingg that requires master servers such as leaderboards, "challenge of the day" and server-based achievements can still work, too. Each community-run server becomes its own "bubble" relative to that. While the officials servers are still up, people will likely keep using them to have the full experience, but the backup alternative needs to be there from the start. Just as DRM is mostly out of GOG control... oh wait, they're still only accepting DRM-free games. Non-DRM-Free games are "banned" - not good, according to you. I guess you want GOG to just be Steam.

Sounds nice. So how will we make this happen?

While that would be ideal, I think it's better to have a game on GOG that requires Galaxy for multiplayer than not having the game at all. Many developers rely on clients for this and other features (such as cloud saving) and I prefer to have them on GOG's catalogue.

I can maybe see it for classic games that used to support LAN, but it's unrealistic to demand it for all new games.