Thanks to every who has contributed, +1 to all for sharing thoughts.
I'm convinced now that achievements are a detriment to DRM-free after further info gathering
as per the 'It seems like GOG is unable to retain even their long supporting developers now' thread. Below is a summary of that post, so skip if you've read it already:
---
In general, unless their game runs on Unity, Unreal Engine 4, CryEngine, Visionaire Studio, Defold, Game Maker Studio 2, Godot, and Amazon Lumberyard, the incremental work to implement achievements is non-trivial. Currently, there are too many game engines that are incompatible with Galaxy without extra work on both the GOG DevPortal staff working on the Steam Wrapper (Beta) SDK as it is now and developers' part to add even if it's shown to be possible like The Witcher 2 on REDengine and Slay the Princess on Ren'Py.
GOG will usually lie in between 0-10% of revenue compared to Steam in the foreseeable future and that's being generous. I've calculated before that GOG has a range of 0.12-0.30% market share of the
entire PC gaming market based on Newzoo's estimates. I'll leave it to the devs to decide if the incremental revenue is worth putting effort into servicing the segment of customers that need achievements. Though any smart developers will keep in mind that any time not spent on working their upcoming game means less revenue compared to customer service. And those asking for it don't have the leverage of Steam's mass market, so they have to rely on emotional appeal by asking and/or shaming. And as discussed above and in other threads, shaming isn't as productive as asking for it.
Lastly, as previously mentioned, users will have to keep an eye out on the use of achievements as soft DRM.
As per the Steamworks DRM page:
We suggest enhancing the value of legitimate copies of your game by using Steamworks features which won't work on non-legitimate copies (e.g. online multiplayer, achievements, leaderboards, trading cards, etc.).
And the case example we're looking at that religiously follows Valve's suggestion is
Champions of Breakfast's implementation malicious achievements as substitute DRM:
And if you look at this, we have 160 achievements for it. And all of them are very simple. The way that I did this is quite funny. I tried to find a way so that our game wouldn't get pirated because it would be easy to pirate it. We knew that you could break Steam DRM very quickly.
[Achievements are] your save file. When you first start the game up, it actually checks what achievements you have and it unlocks powers based on your achievements. This is actually the save file for the character so you can't pirate it because you can never use the achievements. It made it unpirateable, which is deeply hilarious to me.
If Steam or GOG servers ever shut down, a game like this would have no savefile - only good for single sittings or speedruns. The very fact that achievements can allow such a malicious exploit that perverts DRM-free means that we must keep a vigilant eye on upcoming games that do this. If there are more games adopting this soft-DRM model, we should do everything we can to stamp it out the mass adoption of this model could result in greater difficulty securing games for GOG due to how finicky achievement exporting from Steam is with its current state, decreased technical quality compared to a cracked game without the bloat, and ultimately defies game preservation.
And if one prioritizes achievements over DRM-free/game preservation after all of this, I have to ask them - why are they here to over-complicate its distribution, pile on the maintenance upkeep of GOG builds, and actively erode pillars of game preservation when Steam is a much better fit for them?
EDIT: Champions of Breakfast, not Heartbound. Both by the same dev. Thank you, 저기.