StingingVelvet: Yes, I've said this forever about Galaxy. People see any client as a betrayal, as replacing the downloader with Galaxy offline backup downloads as a betrayal, but there simply isn't any other store anywhere promising those offline versions at all. GOG could double their library of higher selling AA and AAA games if they stopped providing offline installers, but they keep doing it when no one else is. Using their app to download them is an incredibly small price to pay, and is not DRM.

This issue is obviously more sketchy, though I still feel like I don't know the game well enough to say exactly how sketchy. Like you say, and like with Deus Ex 4 not long ago, I'll wait to see what GOG do before condemning them. But the same logic still applies... some option items bound to online play is far, far different from an activation requirement to play the game, and no one but GOG is going to fight to give you that completely offline experience in 2020, even if they slip up here and there.

AB2012: On the other hand having spoken to several devs via e-mail suggesting they consider a GOG release, the one thing a lot of them consistently don't like is having to recode Steam achievements to Galaxy specific ones, ie, it's Galaxy itself that's become the root cause of increasing developer workload of releasing new games on GOG that's putting them off a lot more than GOG offering zero-workload offline installers ever did...

tfishell: That's weird because I thought one of the main reasons GOG started developing Galaxy was because developers wanted to have feature parity across platforms. :-/

Do they think the work is pointless because GOG sales are so much smaller than Steam's?

tfishell: That's weird because I thought one of the main reasons GOG started developing Galaxy was because developers wanted to have feature parity across platforms. :-/

tfishell: Do they think the work is pointless because GOG sales are so much smaller than Steam's?

lazydog: A divide is being manufactured on purpose.

sanscript: Everything done by humans is manufactured on purpose no matter the agenda, even if you agree/disagree with the agenda, nothing new there...

And believe me, many are against Galaxy but this isn't a thread about Galaxy so naturally you won't see many arguments for/against it. Did you really expect it to be given the thread title?

Grargar: The real message continues to be "GOG is not big enough for us to spend time and/or money".

AB2012: When I e-mailed him, by "all that extra work" he specifically mentioned Galaxy integration work on top of 1% of sales in general not being worth feeding a second lot of patches / updates / a second billing system, etc. But it's also clear how many devs who are here on GOG have figured out that Galaxy is more GOG's selling point than theirs. Hence that above list is the sheer size that it is.

Gersen: I don't think it was mentioned in this thread, but you can actually enable the "online only" content while being 100% offline by simply modifying two lines in the save file, quicksilver, living ship, daily missions and co.

A dumb decision on HG part, yes, the Gog version should do that automatically, but it's not exactly the end of the world either IMHO.

Now concerning the whole drama, personally I consider that the SP part should be fully playable offline and DRM-free, period.

But I can make some exception depending of what actually is said online "content" if it's something "useless" like some optional skins, for example the paint job in X4, of if it's some quests directly linked to MP like reaching some score in MP, etc... I don't really care as long as the "core" of the game is 100% online.

For NMS, if there was no way to have this content offline, I would have been torn, on one way 99.99% of the game is available offline, the online is some extra stuff that was added, also it is worth mentioning that 99% of the stuff you can purchase with Quicksilver in the game are purely "cosmetic" and have absolutely no game play impact what so ever, again very similar to the skin from X4, the only thing that has some game play impact is the void egg that is needed to trigger the mission with the living ship.

So in conclusion, while I agree that having SP stuff locked down to offline player is a very dangerous slippery slope, in the case of NMS it's pretty minor and a fix is easily available to unlock everything while offline.

Do I think that HG or Gog should enable those features by default without peoples having to change two lines in their save ? yes, definitely and I hope Gog will contact HG about it, but do I think it's work delisting the game or anything of the sort ? no.

lazydog: Clearly nothing to worry about then.

toxicTom: Yeah, well, as I wrote, I can write off the Living Ship as "online content only". The game is massive enough as it is, and it's not like something really essential is missing if you play offline. If they had never released it, people wouldn't miss it at all. It's of course not a nice situation, esp. for people like me who are online, and thus actually see the things from other players, but refuse to be coerced to take part in the "community". People with pure offline play won't even see any mention of the thing, and someone who never heard of it would probably wonder what we're talking about here.

And that's the reason I find calls of delisting excessive, especially since HG, after the messy release, has been a paragon of a dev caring about their game and the players. I've seen it evolve from release, and it's simply magnificent what they did here. Other companies would have taken the money after release and run (we've seen it all, I guess). Others would have asked money for some or all of the massive upgrades (plenty of examples here on GOG too). Actually I can't name a single studio, not even CDPR, which has put as much effort in their game for free after it was released. And all on par on GOG and Steam, with at most a day, most of the time only a few hours between Steam and GOG. And people want to declare this company "the enemy", for a (IMO!) minor thing. How does this make us all look, as the GOG community? A bunch of ungrateful, grumpy old-timer with anger issues? As HG I would wonder if I should bring my next game here at all. Well done, folks.
If someone wants to make a thread "Games that treat offline players as second class citizens" and list NMS there - feel free to do so. I'm curious what other games people will come up with, I'm pretty sure there's more - and worse - offenders. Of course the rules for a thread like this would probably lead to a heated discussion - see our disagreement about "single player content".

Breja: Do you really not see it's quite the opposite? If the issue is so easy to fix, this becomes solely the matter of GOG choosing not to fix it (or insist the devs fix it), and use it to push Galaxy and set another precedent for bending their own rules instead. It's therefore far more worrying, not less. This is like saying easily available cracks would make GOG going full DRM nothing to worry about.

lazydog: Trust me Breja, I am well aware it is quite the opposite,

Unfortunately, my attempt at sarcasm on the previous post did not come over quite as well as I intended.