Posted August 20, 2016
Now the distribution network is a part of the patch/support chain of the product and as such it behooves the distribution platform (in this case GOG) to negotiate to get equal levels of support for it's customers. As such a failure for equal support falls to both GOG and the developer.
At any rate at least we are getting the Official patches at a similar rate.
GOG/Steam etc. may distribute the patches for games now, but the onus is no more on them for the patches to be written than it was for Walmart to 15 years ago. If a game has gotten an official update from the developer and it has been made available anywhere at all, and not on GOG then I wholeheartedly agree that GOG should go after the developers, first with kindness and understanding, and if they do not get results in an acceptable time frame they should lean on them harder. They should even have contractual requirements that to sell a game through GOG you must provide patches within a specific window of time of supplying patches through any other platform or mechanism. Give them say... 2 weeks max. Failure to provide patches in that timeframe gets a bad mark against the publishers name. Doing it twice has the game temporarily removed from sales until the patches materialize. If the patches do materialize, then if it happens again the game is pulled temporarily again until patches materialize. If they do it a third time then the game is pulled from the store completely and the publisher is in probationary status. Do that process with two games and you're no longer welcome to sell your games on GOG.com. Vary the number of times, the grace period and other factors to what makes the most sense and balance and make it a part of the contracts.
Ideally the "second class citizens" thread SHOULD become obsolete and unnecessary. It is very sad that GOG *customer* have to keep track of what games, and developers are trying to RIP THEM OFF.
Another scenario is where a game has serious game breaking bugs or other serious issues and the developer never creates a patch to fix the issue(s) ever anywhere period, they just throw the game over the fence and try to sell it with no plans to support it at all. GOG should just remove such games as a manner of policy of having a high quality catalogue. It would have to be decided on a game by game basis on what makes the best sense however as it would be too hard to generalize that into a specific set of hard rules that some game out there might need an exception for.
So yeah, I'd like to see GOG take responsibility as far as that at least, but other than them applying some pressure on developers at the end of the day all GOG can do is either wait for a response and patch, or pull the game from the store temporarily or permanently and I don't get the impression that GOG is willing to actually pull a game from the store due to being buggy or having less than good support policies from the publisher/developer or there are a dozen or more games that would have been nuked already. :)