Lack of updates also bothers me a lot. This is probably the most serious criticism I have of GOG. Nevertheless, I would rather accept this than buy a game with DRM.

Of course, I always try to find out if the games in question are patched here and therefore I very rarely buy games when they are released, but usually wait a few months. If necessary, I then practice abstinence and do not reward the developer/publisher with a purchase. In the best case, I then buy such a game with an 80% discount.

On the other hand, I would also like to say that we customers can also exert a little influence. Many games were patched after a short time following my friendly request. Most recently, I managed to do this with Dome Keeper. It is not really our customers' job, but I personally still see it as my hobby and some people are happy to pay a little more for it. :)

Of course, you can see it completely differently, just my 2 cents.

Indeed, what you describe was the good old gaming world, where the same (vanilla) game version has been sold everywhere (and had to be tested only once). On fault are not the developers, but todays shops which all have their own proprietary extensions. There is not one tag, one build environment anymore. You have to adjust and test your changes against steamworks, galaxy and probably other crappy, proprietary shop platforms.

Build your game against galaxy and test the result, a lot of additional work to support a minor platform, compared to steam.

What much more concerns me and drives me away from GOG is the refusal, lack of support and sometimes complete ignorance of game versions for the only, theoretically supported, DRM-free OS. Also the missing localizations / language support of games.

Why? Just replace the real Steam dll with GOG's crack. Done.

They still have to test it. And the build environment probably also is different.

Maybe they do test, maybe they don't.

No. There is no different build. That's the whole point of the thing. Just replace one file in the completed build.