in order for lan to work, or some other networked mode such as plain-old tcp/ip to a dedicated server, it has to be supported in the code. depending on the level of network support in the game, I guess a client, if it were coded to do so, could fake things for the software and make lan happen, but other than something along those lines, a game would have to be explicitly developed with lan support.

it all depends on the way network was implemented and how particularly it has been tuned to the API or client and so on.

this is more a developer side of things. CDP or gog can't make EA or Ubisoft or TakeTwo put LAN in their games. and if gog could theoretically force a lan environment, those other guys wouldn't be too happy.

I would like LAN addressed as well.

I'm not sure how this Galaxy thingamajig will actually relate to the multiplayer functionality, whether GOG will actually host servers, or will it just be a server-browser API, or just fluff... But I think, if the client has a hand in managing the connection, why not give the client itself LAN functionality, and if it finds another client on the network, emulate a client-server system for the game. Of course, since we know practically nothing about Galaxy, there's no way of knowing if any of this is within its scope. Plus, if it comes to speculation, you are the qualified person to be doing it ;)

Yes and no.

On the surface, they are separate concerns, but a comprehensive networking middleware library for games will include components to standardize matchmaking under a variety of architectures (client-server, but also peer-to-peer) and generally include components to abstract away lower level networking details and help negotiate the tradeoffs involved when distributing data across am imperfect network in a user-friendly(ier) way.

its shame, but straight IP connection in multiplayer seems to be heading towards extinction.

Yes, I very much agree.

If not, then developers might be tempted to only support GOG Galaxy, because it would possibly be less work for them, and once GOG Galaxy shuts down in the future, multiplayer will become impossible for these games.

As someone who coop-ed System Shock 2 last year, and who is currently cooping Icewind Dale, I am very glad that these games support open standards for multiplayer.

Let's please maintain this possibility for future games.

Or to put it more bluntly: When the GOGers design Galaxy it is imperative that they always keep in mind that at some point their company will be bankrupt. It may be tomorrow or in 20 years, but it will happen. GOG Galaxy needs to be designed accordingly. Memento mori.

Indie titles seem to acknowledge it, especially those that use multiplayer mode as a selling point (ex: Hammerwatch), but you are probably right about this for the AAA world.

Still, I'm so used to RTS games supporting at least 8 players on a LAN (feels like the game is incomplete if it doesn't provide it), that it seems weird to my sensibilities to play one that doesn't support it. Guess I'm growing old :P.

That would be the proper way of doing it, yes.

Well you dont see the magical LAN word in too many games these days. Usually it even if you go to play in LAN with friends, you will still be connecting over internet to some masterserver god knows where. Personally i blame consoles and THEIR matchmaking philosophy.

That's not really how networked applications work. The network code exists in the application itself to establish sockets to communicate with. On a LAN that would usually be done by either specifying an IP address manually (mid 1990's style) or in modern days by doing a UDP broadcast on the LAN to either announce a server's presence to all local clients or for clients to poll for the existence of a server. Either way, once an IP address is either specified, or auto-discovered as I just mentioned, then the program knows all it needs in order to communicate with the game server hosting the game. Zero third party services are required and no client or other external software is necessary, it is basic gradeschool UDP traffic.

The purpose of today's modern multiplayer online services such as Gamespy, Steamworks and other similar services is to be able to have a central place on the Internet where all of the owners of a given game can connect in order to meet up with other gamers of the same game online and locate games or do matchmaking based on skill or similar and to be able to connect to the other player's computers - whose IP addresses would otherwise be both unknown and unknowable because they are not on the local LAN segment and can not be probed by something as simple as a UDP broadcast. In order for multiplayer games online to work, you pretty much need to either know the IP address of the server yourself (or it's hostname) by knowing the game server operator and manually type in the address to the game to connect, or you need to use some kind of central service ran by somebody that the game inherently knows how to connect to.

The majority of the gaming industry has moved more and more away from giving players the ability to type in an IP address or hostname directly to connect to other players and required the use of some kind of online matchmaking service instead. They do this because a centralized service is both much easier for the average gamer to use, it's pretty much automatic and doesn't require someone to have to type in an IP address or other technical details, plus in most cases it gives the game company some form of centralized control of the game and the ability to require license key based authentication if they wish and potentially can act (and usually does act) as a form of DRM (even though it is possible to do this without any form of DRM).

In order for a game to support such a centralized service, there would be some form of programming interface provided by the central service to game developers, and they would simply add support to their game to use the provided API to connect to the game matchmaking service to find online gamers. The game still establishes the TCP/IP connection to the actual computers either directly or perhaps through some form of wrapped networking API provided as well.

Either way, LAN play and a centralized gaming service are pretty much completely unrelated complementary concepts, and a central gaming service does not provide anything that benefits or makes adding LAN support easier. If a game does not contain LAN support, it is not because it is difficult to do or because the developers need the assistance of Steam or GOG galaxy or some other service. The exact opposite is true. The game developer has explicitly and purposefully chosen to expressly *not* provide LAN support on purpose for their game as a way to force multiplayer games to go through their online service purposefully to act as a form of DRM to restrict players to those who have legitimate license keys.

The only exception to that is where a game itself is ran online such as World of Warcraft or some other MMO type game, where LAN play doesn't even make any sense because the entire game world exists online.

In conclusion, what I'm basically saying is that GOG Galaxy is more or less irrelevant for LAN play. If a game developer actually wants to include LAN play in their game, they would simply do it and it would be trivial to add to any multiplayer game that has network game play already, and in fact the game's source code probably *has* LAN play support built into it expressly for testing during game development, and that probably gets disabled/removed for their official public builds on purpose because it doesn't fit their intended business model. It's the same thing with the whole idea of cloud based save games versus local hard disk based save games. Some people think it takes extra special effort to write code to save games locally for some reason when in reality that's the first way the code would be written to begin with, and every game written since the beginning of time has had local save games. No special gaming service is required for it now any more than it ever was 25 years ago. DItto for LAN play, no special gaming service or API is needed to make a game have LAN play, it's just a matter of the game developer /wanting/ the gamer to be able to play on a LAN or not as a business decision, and most likely purposefully disabling that functionality in their code for the shipping product even though it most likely exists in the code for development testing.

I know if I were developing games with network play, the first many months of network development would be purely LAN based development and testing, and only after that would any central service features be implemented and tested really. It's all part of a program learning to crawl before it walks.

Now, I for one would like to see all multiplayer games have LAN support personally, but if a game doesn't you can rest assured with 99.9% certainty that there is no LAN support on purpose by intentional design of the developer for business reasons and DRM control, and not because it is difficult or they need the assistance of some special gaming service to pull it off.

That may all be true, but it is very well conceivable that the LAN support that the developers implement during the dev phase is very rudimentary and only designed to work in their test setting, and that they are afraid of all the effort to make sure it works everywhere. They then use some conveniently available toolkit (currently Steamworks, later GOG Galaxy) to get the enduser quality network support without work for them. This temptation will be particularly high for indie developers without a lot of testing resources. And we see a lot of indie developers on GOG.

The toolkit may provide a temptation to developers to stop supporting LAN, because they think most players won't care. And indeed I believe this temptation created by Steam is why we dont have IP support anymore in most games. Adding more toolkits will make the tempation even bigger.

The solution would be to make GOG Galaxy into a toolkit that simply always supports direct IP connections, without giving the developers any choice! If they want to sell through GOG they are already forced to omit DRM. Now in addition they will be forced to also offer direct IP play. If they cannot accept this, they cannot sell on GOG. Their loss.

Those developers who do not offer direct IP simply because they are afraid of the additional effort have nothing to fear from such a feature in GOG Galaxy. Those who do not offer direct IP due to the evil practices that you described (a form of DRM) will be hurt, and deserve to be hurt.

And, most importantly, all GOG games' multiplayer mode would be future-proofed. And clearly that is already one of the main motives of people to buy games on GOG, so this would really fit our community.

What's not to like?

It's a nice fantasy but the fact is that game developers decide what their games will or will not support and where they will consider to sell their game or not, and what retailers can provide them with what they need to do so - or not. GOG neither has any power to force developers to do anything they don't want to do with their game, nor does GOG likely want to do that. At any rate a business model that tries to "force" something on the customer or on the developer against their will is a losing proposition.

People are certainly free to wish for whatever features they'd like to wish for, but GOG isn't going to be able to provide any features to any game that the developer doesn't permit them to do so. GOG does not own the majority of the games but licensing agreements to sell them and patch them to make them work, etc.

GOG's business grows by /working together/ with their partners not trying to force them to do something or bind their hands. GOG is the small guy in town and developers can just as easily ignore that GOG even exists and just head straight directly to Steam where their game can use whatever parts of Steamworks it wants to - or not. Anyone who thinks that GOG could or even should try to do something to force game developers hands or bypass their intentions for their game is in the wrong mindset. That's how you lose a partner, and make a bad name for yourself as a game retailer that tries to manipulate companies and are difficult to deal with. Not the message an up and coming company like GOG wants to put out there I'm sure.

A sensible business friendly way of conducting themselves would be to provide a rich API in Galaxy which developers can utilize however they see fit, using whatever features they wish to use or ignoring them entirely. An open flexible framework that makes life easier on the developer and helps to speed up development and make life easy on both the developer and the consumer, a solution where every party gets the best out of it. If a game company for whatever reason chooses to not want to have LAN support in their game that is and should be their own decision to make, it's a free world. I would like to think that most gamers would either appreciate that feature or not care either way, but if someone is hardcore about it, then one can simply not buy any games that refuse to provide LAN support for multiplayer and vote with their wallet, and provide positive communication feedback to the developer requesting LAN support and why, and that they've decided to not buy the game until it has LAN support.

Any kind of thoughts that are of the "I'll do this and that will force their hand and show them!!! Muaahahah!" is no better a way of thinking or being or trying to conduct business than is a game company putting DRM in their games or some other restrictive practice. The way to fight such restrictive/limiting thoughts and processes is not to create a war of other forms of restrictions in return, but to show how providing an open solution without limitations can be a superior way of doing business and leave things up to the developer to decide what they wish to do with their game. GOG should be a neutral middle man in all of this, not one wielding swords at the very companies they wish to bring into their bedroom.

Of course, and if they decide not to sell their games on GOG, because they insist on building them in a broken-by-design way, that is fine with me.

I want GOG to be a premium marketplace where quality is guaranteed. If that means that some inferior products are not available here, fine with me.


Errrm... except that is exactly what they already do when they enforce DRM-freeness. Support of IP-play can be seen as nothing but the extension of DRM-freeness into the multiplayer world.

I sure hope they will in that case.

With all due respect, but that is a pretty absurd statement. It's like saying an organic food store is making a bad name for itself by refusing to sell non-organic food.

That is exactly what we do with these forum threads, except we address GOG as the maker of the toolkit, instead of the developer.


DRM takes away essential consumer rights. The victim is a customer, i.e. a human being.

Telling a company that you don't want their game if it does not meet certain minimum standards is a free decision that GOG could make without damaging anyones rights. It is nothing else than the voting-with-one's-wallet that you advocate above. And the victim is a company, i.e. an abstract legal entity, not a human being.

Comparing the two things makes very, very little sense.

Commenting out or disabling a block of code is quite a bit different than adding new functionality. The former can even be done without having access to the code (crackers to it all the time, and several games on GOG do use such cracks to disable the DRM).

That's up to GOG and the game developer to decide. I think GOG executives have a good balance for making decisions about that sort of thing personally, and I'm happy to leave it up to them (not like any one of us has any individual power about it really anyway). If a game comes here that I want but lacking features I want to see then I may not buy it. I was really excited to see Full Spectrum Warrior show up here and was going to buy it until I found out there is absolutely no multiplayer in the game. I already have it on DVD here which works fine and it has multiplayer so I pondered about it and in the end regrettably decided buying the game wouldn't give me much over what I already have here so I opted not to buy it. I have no negative energy towards GOG or the developers of the game however, quite the opposite - I'm glad they brought the game to GOG and moreso I hope that later on they decide to add GOG Galaxy support to it and re-enable multiplayer mode in the game. If they do, I'll buy it for sure and I know several others who will too just for the multiplayer.

I greatly prefer if a game has multiplayer that it also has LAN support, but if it doesn't it doesn't mean that I wont buy it at all period, it means I will weigh the lack of that feature and how important it actually is to me for that specific title into the decision to buy the game at a given price being offered. If it's a game I only want to play single player, or which online multiplayer is fine for me then I wont avoid it, but if it is one that I really want to add to my LAN party arsenal, I may pass on it depending on various factors.

No general rule, but game by game decision for me.

The DRM-free aspect is the entire root purpose of GOG's business model so that doesn't apply here. GOG does not and never ever has had any core fundamental stating that all games must have LAN multiplayer mode if they have a multiplayer mode at all, and I don't see GOG decision makers stating that they're planning on adding such a rule to their business model at this time, nor hinting at doing it in the future. They certainly could add this as a requirement if they wanted to, but they are very unlikely to do so as it would mean a number of games being rejected by GOG upfront from the catalogue where GOG and GOG's customers are the only ones to lose out, and in a rather self defeating way. The more demands - and they are demands, that GOG puts up as mandatory to game developers, the less games and less companies they are going to have embrace DRM-free gaming and GOG shows no signs of adding additional demands and restrictions on game developers at this point in time at least. So people can speculate how they think it would be better to impose all of these restrictions on game developers and if they don't like it tough luck for them, but that does not match the actual GOG business model that we all observe as titles are added to the catalogue.

Not at all, because GOG is not a "LAN play required" store right now, and so allowing games that have multiplayer without LAN play right now is not at all like an organic food store allowing non-organic food. To use your example, it would be like having an organic-only food store refusing to sell food that contains gluten in it because it isn't gluten-free, when the store's purpose is organic foods and gluten is irrelevant to that.

Here I agree with you, this is the appropriate place for us to all air our concerns. There will be a mixture of people with varied opinions about these things and GOG and game developers have the opportunity to read what everyone has to say and base their decisions on how the big picture takes shape.

I agree with you with regards to DRM completely. And I also agree that games need to meet certain minimum standards in order to be considered for inclusion into the store also. We also agree that LAN multiplayer mode is something that we'd strongly prefer to see in games that show up here as well. Some games never had a LAN multiplayer mode however originally and so don't have it now either and GOG has no policy disallowing games in the catalogue that lack LAN multiplayer and have not only added games that lack it, but they've added games that had a LAN multiplayer mode but without any multiplayer option present because the online multiplayer mode of the game shut down some years ago and is no longer available. Presumably that is the developer's decision. I am ok with that because the game is DRM-free and I'm not selfish. I understand that many players out there want DRM-free games and don't care at all whatsoever about multiplayer of any kind and having the game in the store here allows those players to purchase another DRM-free game and enjoy it. The rest of us have the option to look at that DRM-free title in the store and decide that we still would like to buy it for single-player only, or whatever options and features it /does/ have and decide if it is worth it for the price for the features it comes with or not, and if we do not like the offering we simply do not have to buy it and can spend our money on something else.

I didn't end up buying Full Spectrum Warrior games in the end because the multiplayer was important to me to spend the money at the price the game was offered, but if it goes on sale for even cheaper in the future I might pick it up for $1 or so perhaps, but I'm happy to see that the game is here DRM-free regardless so that others can enjoy the single player game if they choose to do so, and I'm glad that the company embraced DRM-free for their game here. Hopefully the sales of that game and any other games they list here will do well for them and encourage them to perhaps update the games with functionality in the future such as GOG Galaxy support.

This is neither right or wrong, just my opinion about the matter and your opinion is equally relevant. I encourage others to express how they feel about the matter as well as our feedback is hopefully helpful to GOG deciding what titles should be added to the catalogue and what kind of expectations gamers have at large rather than any one person's singular opinion (including mine).