We all know about the many missing updates on GOG (If not just take a look at the link below):
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_that_treat_gog_customers_as_second_class_citizens_v2

and we all know how tiresome it is for the paying customer to hunt for updates because GOG unfortunately does not really help in such cases. In fact they are still selling outdated games without even mentioning this unimportant little fact.

Just recently I talked to a dev because the game was not up to date with the Steam release. I knew about the possibility to use the Galaxy Backend to let devs update their games the same as on Steam. This was one reason why Galaxy even was created years ago and it also was one of the big selling points of Galaxy. GOG promised us and the devs faster updates - nearly the same as on Steam. So I was wondering why the game from this dev was not up to date and the dev told me that he did not get access to the possibility to update the game by himself yet. He would have to upload the files to GOG and they would have to check them.

When I heard this I almost punched against a wall. We (the paying customers) are constantly begging GOG to bring their games up to date since years but GOG obviously is preventing devs to simply update their games by themselves? Newsflash GOG: You guys are good but extremely slow and everybody knows this - especially when it comes to updates. Also you are absolutely not without mistakes - in fact you are doing quite a lot of them and quite often games updated by GOG are faulty BECAUSE of GOG and not because of the dev. So you really should change your policy here and grant devs access as fast as possible so that they can update their games immediately. There's absolutely NO reason not to trust them. If they introduce a bug they can fix the bug as well ... devs are doing this on Steam since ages ... in fact they probably are the only one who can (I just have to think about the many support tickets I created which simply have been forwarded to product ... and never been fixed because according to GOG the dev has to do this ...).

All these years I thoght that the devs are guilty for all those missing updates here in GOG. It really hit me when I heard that obviously GOG is guilty as well. And yes @GOG staff feel free to give us some feedback. Stop "listening" to our feedback only and provide one as well - I am all ears. What you are doing here is all kinds of wrong so the very least we can get is a reasonable reply why you would prevent any dev to update their game as fast as possible. Especially in the time of a pandemic.

I guess it's another of these "low priority" things. Makes one wonder what the top priority is...

Adding social media things nobody wants to Galaxy, I guess.

Perhaps it's just a matter of no clear strategy, no reasonable priorities and noone to think about their processes and future?

What was an adventage years ago, when they had 500 games in catalogue, is no longer possible, if you're trying to maintain 4k titles * 2 versions (Galaxy/offline) * 3 platforms (Win/Mac/Linux) * x language versions (if separate files). They just need to re-think their processes and make some changes, invest time and money to adjust them to changing reality. Considering how GOG evolve, there is no control over the evolution, there's no such thinking in GOG, they just make things the same way as always, because it worked x years ago.

Just look at this forum software. No matter how big is technological debt and how bad is this tool's architecture – how much effort or money do you need to fix tags? Their own employees need to do a lot of additional manual job just to fix their own posts after forum breaks them every time. And they do that for years.

I thought we'd known this for quite some time?

It's hard to know exactly how GOG's back-end works these days. On the one hand we've heard the old system was "difficult" in developers had to wait for GOG to double-check (which worked for 400 games but clearly isn't working for 4,000 games...) and yet on the other hand we've also heard that GOG has changed some things a while back to automate the procedure (The Galaxy Backend) and yet developers seem either unable or unaware of how to use it (a serious communication problem). This is partly what all the endless stream of "Internal Update - updated internal installer structure, no changes to game files" non-update updates on offline installers were a while back when they moved from the old naming system of, eg, name_of_game_2.0.0.1.exe to the new one of name_of_game_version_number (xxxxx) with 5 digits in brackets. Unpacking the old installer with InnoExtract revealed a normal "as installed" folder structure. Unpacking the new ones with InnoExtract, reveals what can be described as a "Galaxy stream" consisting of hundreds of obfuscated named files & folders that the installer has to reconstruct via metadata, as described here:-
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/adamhms_linux_wine_wrappers_news_faq_discussion/post127

Whatever it is, it definitely needs sorting as it's bizarre beyond belief that the internal structure of GOG's offline installers have already been "Galaxified" for +2 years now, and yet has had no positive impact on offline installer update frequency (that or whomever is in charge of updating offline installers just can't seem to find their own a**hole even with both hands and a map...) This stuff should have long been automated when GOG hit the 1,000 game catalogue size mark (and if it is automated, then something's clearly broken).

Yeah, the problem with GOG is they are bad with decisions.

Like, why the hell they should even consider maintaining new games that are supported by devs. They should let devs manage updates, GOG shouldn't bother to check new games, they should olny react if suppirt receives a lot of 'not working' tickets.

They should focus on old games, which are not suported by devs or needed some tweaks from GOG to work. In such cases, GOG should be careful to allow updates by someone else but they team.

They are wasting their resources on things noone cares.

If I am not mistaken, offline installer will also be created automatically from the files that have been submitted via Gaalxy update. Sometimes this does not happen though (I guess it was a missing flag but I am not sure) and then GOG has to do this manually. At least that is the last information I do remember - of course it might be outdated as well).

However in this case I did not even talk about a missing offline installer update only but a missing update in general., and the reason it is missing was simply because the dev did not get the possibility to update the game immediately without GOG validating the files first. Imo we have enough devs who don't WANT to update their games because ... it is work and they already have our money, so GOG should make it as easy as possible for those devs who actually WANT their games updated on GOG not matter the time or the day.

I find that strange, one of the reason why Galaxy has the "rollback" feature was supposed to be because, as they didn't control the quality of the patches, to give the user the possibility to rollback to a previous version in case a buggy update was pushed by the devs.

I wonder if either the dev misunderstood the question or if maybe Gog don't give the "direct access" to every devs. But didn't we have sometime ago a devs confirming that he/she has direct access to upload new versions ?

We knew games are outdated here but it was news for me that the devs can't just simply get access to the Galaxy Backend and therefore update their game immediately. That was - like I said - one of the core reasons Galaxy even was invented. Before I heard this I simply thought that devs don't WANT to use the Backend so in this case it would have been THEIR decision ... but apparently it is GOGs decision as well - which makes them guity in such cases.

They will get this access eventually but not immediately that is the problem. Obviously GOG wants to be really sure that they can trust the dev. Regarding the rollback feature, I see it the same way. If something would go wrong they only would need to use this feature... at least in Galaxy. Would not help those who already archived the new offline installer (deleting the old one) though.

I'd already heard various reports that devs hadn't been given access so it wasn't news to me. Of course when a dev claimed this I always took it with a pinch of salt because it could just be an excuse.

Something that might be possible, depending of what backend Gog are using, is that it takes some time to create the repository and create the credentials for the devs and that in the mean time they have to handle things manually. In a Covid situation it could take a couple of days, weeks at the very most but definitely not months. (Unless it's using the same software than the forum :) )

There's nothing stopping devs from making their own off line patches as it was in the past.

Who gets the blame when some indie dev uploads malware in a game update?