I'm going to disagree with this until I see otherwise, and they've specifically *not* mentioned otherwise so far. In fact, the only thing they said when it came to multiplayer was 'Well, when you want to play online, you have to be online anyway (so...)".

They've very much focused on Galaxy being optional for Single player which I have no doubt it will be. But so far, the only thing I've seen when it comes to multiplayer (and we're talking games that use GOG Matchmaking here), is that you need to be online anyway (which comes with a heavy implication that at the very least you'll need to sign into an account, possibly even the client)

The current atmosphere on Steam is that even games that start with a simple launcher asking you to log in to a 3rd party site should be listed as DRM. If, and I do stress if since we haven't gotten a straight answer yet, an account/client is going to be involved when it comes to multiplayer, then it is quite possible it'll show up as DRM on other sites in the long run.

Then again, Age of Wonders III uses Steamworks for that exact same reason, yet we still got it here.

Sure, there are a lot of things we would like to have more information about and more clarification of about all of this. WIth regard to the statement about being online, it seemed pretty clear to me that if you're playing offline you should never need to have an active Internet connection regardless of what or how you're playing offline - that would or should include single player games, LAN multiplayer for example. But if you are playing an online game, then you obviously need to be online because you can't send multiplayer packets over the Internet from one computer to another if you are offline. Now, if someone wants to call that DRM because a computer needs to be connected to the Internet in order to communicate over the Internet that's just silly. I'm not suggesting you are saying that of course, just stating an opinion about it.

Right now most games do matchmaking/game finding through one or more centralized online services, whether it is Steam, Gamespy (now defunct), a game company specific service (Rockstar Social Club, Runic, etc.) and such central services are probably the easiest possible way for anyone to initiate an online multiplayer game. All games made roughly after Halflife one and many before it had some form of central game company ran service for this purpose and it totally made sense for them to provide such services then and now. The problem of course to us gamers is what we're supposed to do if and when the game company goes defunkt or for some other reason they decide to or have to shut those servers down and the game can no longer connect to the central service anymore. There is however nothing inherently evil in the concept of a centralized service like that, nor is such a service automatically a form of DRM simply because it exists. I'd argue that a centralized service for matchmaking is not only a convenient thing to have but that it is a rather mandatory and expected thing for games to have available to them in modern times and for well over a decade now, and that someone somewhere needs to be providing that service. I also believe that there needs to be at least one or more "official" central servers which are declared official by some means built into the games themselves, which might be as simple as making it the default online connection method option.

Preferrably the responsible party running and maintaining the servers and service will have the greatest longevity too and I personally believe that game distributors like Valve/Steam have more prospect of Longevity than the thousands of individual developers/publishers that sell games on their Steam service. Likewise, I think GOG has the prospect to have greater longevity to run such a service also, at least for some if not most of the games they sell. Many games in the GOG catalogue use Gamespy or some other similar thing to provide that function because that is what the game developer used when they created the game. That is quite suboptimal to our GOG gaming experience compared to what we'd like it to be arguably, as is having to punch in game license keys on some of them.

If GOG can provide their own central service that is an alternative to more proprietary restrictive systems like Gamespy and Steam which they themselves operate and control, this is a huge win for us in my eyes as they can tweak it to best suit their customer's needs and expectations and it will almost certainly be a hell of a lot more flexible than Steam or Gamespy are in this regard. Even if the service operated almost identically to Gamespy it is a win for it to be in GOG's control rather than some 3rd party that could die at any moment such as... oh, Gamespy which is now dead. :)

I'll feel better with Galaxy just for that reason alone without knowing the rest of the details. But how it will actually work as a matchmaking service we just do not know the details of yet. I will be shocked if it is not less restrictive and not more open and more consumer friendly than any other option we have available to us for all of these games right now. Will we need to log into their servers to access this type of multiplayer option? That is not clear but I don't really see anything wrong with that personally. Online services need a way to identify people for numerous reasons that are not all evil or restrictive in nature. It provides us with our digital identity on many services such as Facebook, Steam, our bank, other social networks etc.

Hopefully it will have options for direct host to host connection that do not require connecting to a central service also, and as many have stated - LAN support for games too and I want those options as well. I think if GOG can legally and technically provide such to us that they will probably make every reasonable effort to do so, however individual game developers will likely have a huge say in whether they wish for their games to provide these options just like they always have and how they do right now in every single game in the catalogue.

Transferring what we already have that is controlled by 3rd parties that GOG has no control over or say in whatsoever to their own services is a huge win for them and for us even if nothing else changes, but they've indicated there will be other changes to our benefit also and I take them for their word on it personally although I know many others do not. I don't personally care if someone wants to call that DRM or not, it is a better solution than having to use Gamespy or Runic or $companymultiplayerservicethatisnotgog on any game bought from GOG and I'll take that 100 times over what we have now any day of the week, and 10 times on Sunday and I will take it whether GOG allows 1000 pirates to play the game through their service completely anonymously without any restrictions or limitations, or whether I have to log into the service when initiating a connection to their Galaxy servers using my GOG login creditentials. Either way it blows away what we have right now in many games.

What features such as directIP, LAN, or anythign else they provide above and beyond that is just varying levels of icing on the cake to me. It makes gaming better on GOG no matter what, better than what it is right now no matter what label someone wants to put on it or how they want to characterize it.

It makes me think some people should just download all the abandonware games from archive.org, lock themselves in a room with a 486 and a bunch of floppy disks, no network connections and play their games friendless for the rest of their lives while being fed with a food tube so they can be happy. ;oP

Me, I'll take GOG Galaxy, although the food tube idea does sound kind of neat too. :)

Crossing my fingers that Galaxy delivers.

While I appreciate the insight into why you think online services are the way they are right now, that you think that's good in a way (I agree), and that you think it's great if GOG would be the one doing that rather than other services, the point is that just like those other services, such a service would be a form of 3rd party DRM on other retailers, and thus classified as such. This is still assuming that it's going to work that way of course.

As for the LAN people bring up sometimes. While I think it'd be a great addition, I wouldn't be surprised if adding it or not is going to be left 'Up to the developers', same as regional pricing is now. If it becomes a requirement though it would be a good way to get around needing to use the Galaxy service of course, allowing people to use the internet as a 'LAN'.

What you're suggesting may be the case does not really match up with how GOG described Crossplay though even though they were lax on any kind of underlying details. Games bought on Steam for example that mandatorily require and use GOG Galaxy as their one and only source of multiplayer connectivity not only would not make sense for a game being released on Steam but seems very unlikely. Additionally I can't see how that would amount to anything being called "Crossplay" either because it would not be behind the scenes interconnectivity between two different services but rather their one service essentially being a new Gamespy which is not at all how they appear to have characterized it.

The impression I got from the presentation is that games on Steam implement Steamworks, games on Origin implement Originworks or whatever it is called there, games on Uplay implment Ubipotatoworks or whatever and people who use those services continue to use them as they do now and always have. GOG's servers would perhaps communicate with Steam on the backend to pool gameplay matchmaking data from Steam and collate the lists, sharing it bidirectionally with both platforms transparently with the clients of both (or other platforms) and in a way that is transparent to the gamers of both platforms. They did not say all of this, but that is the impression I got from what they did say and things that have been posted publicly by GOG employees since then. I've not gotten any impression whatsoever that GOG Galaxy is going to require developers that decide to release their games on GOG.com are going to mandatorily have to imlement GOG Galaxy into their Steam games also and require Steam users to create Galaxy accounts in order to play the games they buy on Steam.

There are other ways they could do this as well, but the way they characterized it is that it would be an optional feature available to GOG customers and that it would have the ability to transparently play games with people on other distribution platforms that do not use GOG. Making Steam users require a GOG Login and that being considered DRM and being labelled as such in Steam store does not line up with that expectation so I believe that is not the way it works at all personally.

Hopefully they will provide us with a lot more information soon as there is way too much speculation going in different directions and none of us (myself included) know for sure but we definitely would like to know more and I think everyone would agree with that. A high level "how does Crossplay work?" that explains how things happen from a GOG customer end on the GOG platform plus how things work for the person who buys the game on Steam who has nothing to do with GOG etc. Personally I'm also interested a bit in how it is implemented and the communication links behind the scenes as well as how things get authenticated if they do and where and how it works. I imagine those materials will be made available to game developers and that they'll have some kind of publicly available SDK tha twill provide enough technical details to satisfy developers such as myself. I'm comfy waiting it out personally but there are a lot of others more antsy about it so the sooner the info is out there the better I suppose. :)

Their service does not just sound like a clone of anything else that is out there though, it sounds like a fresh idea to me that moves things a step in a better direction for everyone. But... details details details...

It's June... "fall" isn't until Sept 21 so there are at least 3 months of grueling wait presumably and perhaps longer. :)

What we do know about this (http://www.gog.com/forum/general/introducing_gog_galaxy/post447), is that the games making use of cross-play have to be "galaxy powered". At the moment, the only game that is confirmed to be so is the new withcher thingy. this does indicate that it will work much in the same way as Gamespy, i.e. it need to be coded in to each game and crossplay is not capable of direct communication with, for example, Steamworks.

This

It's Botanicula all over again

Sure, it ultimately is up to the game developer, and while GOG wont really budge on the DRM-free requirement, they don't want to add new restrictions on game developers that aren't already present on the platform as that just makes it less likely to get more games on the platform from an already difficult proposition to overcome. Existing games here are missing LAN play and while that sucks, developers should not be forced to provide or allow GOG to provide it outside of the game either. It could even violate the laws of some countries for them to add such a feature without the developer's blessing. So it is technically possible and doable, but not something they should or likely would do behind the backs of the companies that they partner with as they can just pull their games immediately if GOG does something they don't want. If a developer is ok with having LAN mode, then they could and probably would or will implement it themselves directly into the game, or through an interface GOG supplies without GOG having to try to override their desires somehow.

Old games are a bit of a special case because the source code might not be available, and implementing the functionality might be complex nowadays to retrofit into an old game. Doing it through an external proxy or wrapper is potentially feasible if they have the legal approval/right to do so.

People can use 3rd party software such as Hamachi or Tunngle or other similar VPNs to play LAN games over the Internet thus adding a form of direct IP play to a game that has LAN support built in. Any game that has built in direct IP support should already be able to be played over a LAN as well even if it does not have any form of broadcast based server/client auto-detection. A game that only has multiplayer ability through a central server that is hard coded would pretty much need to hijack DNS lookups and point them to localhost running a replacement service compatible with the service protocols the game already understands. That could be legally problematic as well. I highly doubt that they could easily hijack connections to say Gamespy and replace that easily solely using client side libraries that implement everything and turn it into LAN play and/or turn the game server into its own gamespy server (or some other service). Too much effort and many things are game specific. Nice idea, but totally wouldn't scale either.

Also it's not the easiest way to add support for these things to games IMHO. The easy way to add missing LAN support to a game is to spend a few hours/days editing the source code for the game and recompiling it, or second to that hacking the binary as they do already with many games to fix bugs, remove old copy protection or fix compatibility issues in a game. They could just as easily add GOG galaxy support perhaps doing that too.

But a game that only knows how to do multiplayer through a specific proprietary service using a particular protocol built and hard coded into the game binary, isn't going to magically be convertible into direct IP-IP or LAN play, it just isn't the way these things work. There needs to be two way communication between the game and the server it expects to be communicating with, and that requires fully emulating the entire server and every aspect of it that the game is going to twiddle with. Essentially reimplementing the entire server in a separate binary outside fo the game for every single game service for every single game. Not terribly cost effective use of limited developer resources for the small amount of people who would theoretically use and benefit from it.

Highly doubt they're going to do that. I don't think they even once mentioned anything about LAN play at all in anything they've said to date about Galaxy, we're all just doing a lot of wishlisting and speculation and fantasizing about that. Don't get me wrong, if something could be done to add that functionality to games easily and generically I'd be all for it. But I'm a developer myself with networking experience and I don't see how it is remotely easy to add that kind of functionality to up to 700 or so games outside of the game executables of which probably a huge majority of them no source code is available presumably and just to add functionality that an overwhelming majority of the customers probably don't care about and would never even use. It would just be for us propellerheads mostly and high cost to develop with low payoff in return, and dedication of developer resources that could be much more effectively used devleoping the website, the rest of the new service, getting Linux support up and flying and other more big impact things than our pipe dreams of gaming utopia. :)

What happened with Botanicula?

On GOG's release date, the developers put Botanicula on a Humble Bundle which you could get for a mere $0.01 for DRM-Free or $5 for a Steam key along with the game's full soundtrack in both cases, whereas in GOG the preorder saved you a mere $1 (for a final $9 price) and you didn't get the full soundtrack (neither do you now).

Wow, nice treatment.

I should also note that...I gave the developers on the official forums a piece of my mind what I think about them

some people did not like the way I expressed myself but I didn't hold anything back and it was my honest opinion

It's good to be honest sometimes :D

Who would think in feature a brand new game in a bundle?