which is also off course illegal, so gOg will be sued and loose monies, as well as losing credibility and faith with the publishers, making it even harder to convince them to sell their games here.

Good plan, lets get it implemented ASAP.

Uh, which law do you think would prevent GOG from making a contract like this?

selling others product. DD stores do not buy and sell own stock, but the product they sell are owned by a third party (the publishers). That monies (the 70% of the sale) legally belongs to the third party (the publisher), and gOg can not withhold it when a sale has already gone through. They can refuse to sell more, yes, but not refuse to pay what legally belongs to the third party.

in any case, if gOg did start to enforce such a rule like this (even though they can not) there is not a publisher that want to publish their games on this store.

Is that what they call a law in the UK? Where can I read it? No, it may or may not belong to the third party depending on what the contract between the two looks like. And as far as I know, nothing prevents businesses from accounting for additional fees such as refund or support costs in b2b contracts.

The gaming industry is now very rooted in games as a service style delivery systems, and forcing devs to do otherwise will always be pulling teeth.

The games I regularly play and enjoy most are rarely more than a month out of date -- and even most of the time they're *hours* if at all. Sometimes they'll even hit GOG before the other platforms.

It all depends on the developers. Better developers are better about it. Sometimes you do have to nag the developers (as I had to in the case with Craft the World that was missing a DLC here -- emailed them and a week later it appeared here).

Examples all kept up-to-date: Stardew Valley, Grim Dawn, Fell Seal, Rimworld, Galactic Civilzations 3, Megaquarium, Monster Prom, Stars in Shadow, Cultist Simulator, Overcooked...

I agree it should be contractually mandated. "GOG withholds your payments in escrow for as long as you withhold timely updates." Or "promising timely updates gets you a better cut by a couple percentage points and tardy updates revert to the standard cut". I'd "timely/tardy" would need to be defined, but within-a-month is reasonable. I actually enjoy, Fell Seal, for instance, wasn't giving me the daily minor updates since the DLC came out (the 1.3.X updates), but gave the next major (once it hit 1.4.0) all at once after a couple weeks, since none of the small ones were major items.

I think a more adult way of doing it (if and when GOG finds out some GOG game is seriously out of date or lacking important content) would be to contact the publisher and discuss with them how to solve the situation, e.g. whether the publisher can release the missing content or updates to the GOG version, or whether the publisher should remove the game from the store. That has happened before, many times. The main problem is that how and when GOG finds out some game is out of date or lacking content, as I am not expecting GOG to go through the whole store library daily or weekly cross-checking whether everything is here that other stores have too. Too much work, no other store is doing such cross-checking either.

Anyway, with my question I was more after "when" than "what", like would the enforcement be applied as soon as a game is missing an update which appeared on Steam yesterday, or should it be applied also if the missing update is quite unimportant. Where should GOG draw the exact line. I am sure the potential publisher would like to know to which kind of cases it would be applied, for instance if they release store-specific content both to the Steam and GOG versions (then GOG would be missing the Steam-specific content (even though it would have its own content as well, e.g. a Steam/GOG themed hat on the player character)), so would that count as "missing content" on the GOG version and the enforcement would be applied? Or if the GOG version has less achievements than the Steam version, would GOG withhold all payments from thereafter?

Wait, Supraland is gone?? And it's because people whined about updates? I'm conflicted about that. On one hand, it's the principle. On the other hand... if there are bugs left in GOG version, I didn't encounter any, and I played it to nearly 100% of achivements. Now we lost a good game, and I think I can forget about buying the sequel here.

how very droll

no, that's not how, it works. both support and refund fees are part of operating costs, and the only part that can be in the contract is how those costs are split between the income of the store (their 30%) and the income of the third party (the 70% of the publisher), and who pays what. You can not suddenly withhold the full amount of the third parties monies as a penalty, in which case you will get sued to pay which is owned. if this happens, gOg will most likely lose the case, and will need to pay damages on top.

and, as I keep saying and you keep ignoring - no sane publisher will ever agree to such a contract. so yes, even if it get implemented, gOg will have nothing to sell, and get a very bad rep among publishers. (they already got s rep for being a bit finicky, something like this will not help at all)

Supraland was a case of an arrogant, lazy developer who actively decided to remove his game from GOG rather than to put his DLC here.

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/supraland_delisting

Usually the lack of updates correlates with the lack of sales, so this wouldn't really be much of a threat to the IP holders even if their contract with GOG would somehow allow it.

Absolutely

If it eases your mind, the developer would probably have not released the sequel on GOG anyway. He said, before pulling the first game from the store, something akin "I wouldn't do it again." (as in, releasing Supraland on GOG). The reason was that in his view the GOG version sold so poorly (in his words, like 1% of the Steam sales; maybe he was exaggerating, I don't know)..

Well, not quite. The developer was dismayed by the poor sales of the GOG version and felt it doesn't make sense to work (=update) on the version that "no one" seems to be buying, and he pulled the game from the store after it was pointed out to him in the Steam forums that he shouldn't sell the game on the GOG store if he is not going to support it.

Since he promised a free Steam key OR a refund to any GOG customer that might want it, I can't really blame the developer.

Too bad if the GOG version really sold that poorly, I hadn't even noticed it on the store before (seeing it on any sales etc.). Somehow it apparently went under my and many others' radars for some reason. It did seem like a game I might have enjoyed.

Oh well.