The CEO of indie games label TinyBuild Alex Nichiporchik has taken to Redditto set the record straight about why some of its titles see rather delayed updates on GOG.com.
Asked on Discord recently why games like the Party Hard series weren't seeing updates on the DRM-free storefront later than platforms like Steam, one of TinyBuild's community managers said that this was due to concerns of games being pirated the moment they are put on a platform without digital rights management tech in place.
Nichiporchik said that this isn't the case and that this message isn't indicative of TinyBuild's views, going on to say that the label didn't train its community managers well enough on the subject of DRM.
"I personally grew up in the pre-DRM era, and love having all my games and OSTs available anywhere, not requiring an online connection or a launcher," he wrote.
"GOG has always been a great partner to work with, and in our intake for community managers we simply didn't touch upon the incredibly important subject of DRM-free builds for partners and how they're supported. This is completely on us, and first thing next week I'm gathering the whole team to brief them on our position and how to handle situations like these."
Furthermore, the CEO says that the main reason why platforms like GOG receive updates later than Steam is that some games are just built with Valve's storefront in mind much of the time for features like level editors.
"It has everything to do with platform-specific dependencies," he wrote.
"For example, most level editors are tied to online storage platforms (they handle storage, user profiles, often the GUI as an overlay), they're designed to integrate directly with things like Steamworks or console-specific systems. Making all of that work offline means designing local systems which most smaller teams don't have the capacity to do. This doesn't explain DLC/OST missing though -- it's something we're in the process of fixing starting with Party Hard. First thing Monday we'll go through all builds on GOG and update them where possible. I also want to figure out a more transparent way of communicating which build exactly you're getting to avoid confusion on store listings for DRM-free builds."
