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Comment by ivegotnoaccount | Hacker News Reader

The question may be silly, but how does GOG handle multiplayer ?

- Are players that bought the game on GOG able to play with those that bought it on steam/Uplay/other when lobbies are involved

- Are there DRMs for online play that have lobbies ? If so, how are they handled ?

Also, their list is sadly quite limited it seems, for the games many play. No GTA V, no God of War, no Red Dead Redemption, no Call of Duty, no battlefield V, which seem to be some of most selling games of past years.

I know it's not their fault but because of it, it won't fit a huge chunk of the users' needs.

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> The question may be silly, but how does GOG handle multiplayer ?

It depends: some games implement multiplayer through their publisher's private servers (e.g. Paradox games) so users can play together regardless of the shop they bought the game from. Some others (e.g. Dying Light) reimplement multiplayer replacing Steam facilities with GOG Galaxy. In that case interoperability is not possible maily because GOG Galaxy doesn't implement the same anticheat system. Finally some other games whose multiplayer is based on Steam, had the multiplayer removed in the version sold on GOG (e.g. modern XCOM games).

> Also, their list is sadly quite limited it seems, for the games many play.

Nowadays the game market offers more than just AAA games and for people like me who stopped buying DRM-protected games and are not interested in multiplayer there are still many good games to enjoy. Some AA and AAA games are also published on GOG after a while, so it's just matter to wait and support GOG's business model if you don't like DRM.

I'm not saying the model is bad or there are no AAA games, only that this currently limits the games that could be played.

I have bought games from GOG, just not multiplayer ones (or ones that don't have DRMs anyway such as Factorio)

I also don't play much AAA games. But I'll have a hard time convincing anyone when the game they want isn't there. Not that it is GOG's fault but stil...

It really depends on implementation in-game. I think GOG has worked on API for crossplay with Steam for any game developers who are interested.

In general, if the developer wants DRM, the developer gets DRM, so the options on GOG will probably always be years behind other platforms and usually not include multiplayer experiences, in terms of AAA games, that is.

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