I don't know if this has come up before (I may have missed it in a search) and it seems like a thing that has likely been considered and rejected before, but perhaps, 10 years into this game's existence, it might be time to consider it anew even if so. This is not a big AAA game. It's not selling at a huge premium and it's not being pirated left and right. In fact, I believe it's the kind of at least still mostly indie-ish game that people like to support. These days there are some pretty good options for DRM-free sales. GOG immediately comes to mind as a pretty big one and I think Empyrion would do just great there. There are a lot of advantages for us end users. One big one for me is that I would like to have a stable copy that does not update and works offline without launchers. I like having the latest stuff and this game definitely gets a lot with updates, but I also want a stable copy for use with mods that won't break or change over time. Earlier I couldn't even run the game even though I kept it up to date because my connection was down yet Steam apparently was aware of an update to a workshop item. (Apparently these don't show up in the downloads list until you actually try to run the game, so you can't update them ahead of time because I never even saw it show up until I tried to run the game and then it said "downloading workshop 0% and stayed there the whole time, refusing to run the game.") Putting that aside, sometimes updates can break mods and it can be nice in some cases potentially to even just have multiple copies of the game where you can be sure one Just Works(tm) while the other can be updated frequently for all the latest features. I also get tired of running stuff through the sheer bulk that is launchers like Steam and sometimes want to be able to just... run them. GOG may offer a launcher, but it is not required by any means and even if one likes using it to keep the games updated, they only have to run it when doing so. I realize this would probably mean some limitations. Some online functions might not work like connecting to people directly rather than to a dedicated server with open ports. (I think maybe GOG offers a service similar to Steam's online options, but I'm not sure.) I certainly would be willing to make concessions like needing an open port for a server, but even so, it wouldn't be an either or thing since people could always just stick to the Steam or Epic version if they need those services. I bought this game (and the DLC) on Steam already and I have very few funds to spend on anything that isn't absolutely essential, yet despite this, if it was put up on GOG, I would find a way to purchase the game and DLC both again on GOG. I suspect I'm not alone in this. I'd be a bit leery about it if it was, say, put up on Eleon's site itself since that means giving personal info and trusting them to store it safely in this age of almost daily hacks/leaks, but I'd still probably try to find a way anyway.
As far as I'm aware, Empyrion does not have any online DRM. I can run it offline just fine, even running it from the exe file directly works. You can just setup a second game install using SteamCMD and run it there without it ever updating that copy again. There's literally no need to put it on GoG, and in fact the game is already available on Epic but that has no Steam Workshop access so it's just a worse experience.
I admit I didn't know it would run without the Steam API. However, I get graphical glitches and crashes if I start without allowing Steam to run. I still get the graphical glitches if I remove the Steam DLL. There must be something it's doing through Steam even if it's not officially a literal DRM. Also, I'm not even seeing the DLC show up at all without Steam. You can download workshop stuff via SteamCMD (though I think this now requires you to actually own the game in question to do so) or even just copy out of the Steam folder for workshop items (though that definitely requires you to own it on Steam.) But if "it's just a worse experience" was enough, then that would be an argument to stop even selling it through Epic. Some mods -- such as Reforged Eden 2 -- offer external downloads for use with the Epic version. Those would work the same with the GOG version. You... surely must already know this though... Selling through GOG in addition to Steam and Epic harms no one, so I'm actually unclear why you're quite so against it in what sounds an awful lot like just an "I don't like it" sort of way. I didn't know if perhaps the publisher might be against it or anything like that, but it absolutely does not harm any users if it's just simply available on another platform...
If I try to start the game without Steam it just gives me a "Steam authentication failed" and doesn't let me load into the game. I am curious though why would you need to start the game without Steam? If it's an internet issue you can set Steam to offline mode and play just fine (obviously excluding MP and workshop items, of course). If you're wanting to preserve play on an older version of the game I already mentioned how you can do so. If you are boycotting Steam for some reason you can already purchase the game on Epic and play on there. Based on my understand of how the game works (which could be wrong but I don't think it is), RE2 would not be compatible with a copy of Empyrion sold outside of either Steam or Epic without the developers making changes to the game to make it possible, and that would also depend on how GoG manages user names for games purchased on their platform so it might not be possible. Has nothing to do with DRM but rather the architecture of the player ID and modding API and such. Now if they could change that, sure, but that's asking for a lot more work than just setting it on GoG and calling it a day. Development work I would personally rather be spent on fixing the game's bugs and polishing its content.
There are a number of reasons. 1. Steam takes up a lot of resources. 2. Offline mode still requires a form of authentication. I'm not sure what all the limitations are (you used to have to be online to go offline ironically, but at least they fixed that) but I'll lay down good money on a bet that it does not work indefinitely. 3. You can't keep it constantly in offline mode anyway because it can break a lot of other things. (For example, some games won't even allow LAN/direct connect play if they start in offline mode.) 4. Account issues can happen and then you can lose access to everything potentially. (Yes this can happen with DRM-free services too, but at least anything you downloaded before it happened will continue to work indefinitely. From what I've seen they're a lot less inclined to disable/ban accounts anyway.) 5. If Steam is aware of an update waiting, it holds it up even in offline mode apparently. This is problematic for those of us who don't want to leave it constantly running and constantly automatically updating stuff (potentially breaking other things when it suddenly grabs a whole bunch of bandwidth.) 6. Expanding on 4, game updates are automatic by default, but apparently workshop updates only happen when you run the game. So it can become aware of a workshop item update waiting but it won't actually update it, thus when you try to run the game it holds the startup until it can go online again. Not all of us have super reliable connections or keep Steam running 24/7. In the case of the example above, I actually properly had made sure to make sure the game was up to date and the list of updates waiting in the downloads section was empty, but when I tried to run it, because Steam knew there was an update to some mod (probably RE2 even,) it just wouldn't let me run the game, blocking until I could go online again. (Later on I may sit down and try to test specifically where 2 might be a problem. My bet is that it sets a token that expires at some point and the question is when it expires. But Steam will probably get in a huff on me for messing with my system time and make me log back in and stuff when I do, so I'm not in a hurry to test this.) Epic is the same thing as Steam for all intents and purposes except probably worse in each way really. I'm not boycotting, but I sure as heck would rather make purchases in better places in addition to the above things. Care to elaborate? As far as I know mods have absolutely no way whatsoever of even knowing what sort of copy of the game you have. In the case of RE2, the installation for the files uploaded for use with the Epic version basically just consists of "Extract the contents of the zip file to your Empyrion - Galactic Survival/Content/Scenarios folder." If somehow mods can actually be dependent on how the game is installed, this is a potential break point (even for mods that are only in the Steam workshop!) and this should be corrected because minor changes could break mods down the road anyway. BTW RE2 for Epic (or shall I say non-Steam?) is hosted on NexusMods. Not that I particularly like that service, but the point is that the Steam Workshop is not the only resource. (I'd like to see something like NexusMods, but less evil, but the point here is just that Steam Workshop is not the only existing thing for this.) Heck, they could just throw the mod files on some generic file host really. It doesn't have to be complicated. Again though, all this aside, if they sold a DRM-free copy on something such as GOG IT LITERALLY HURTS NO ONE! So I'm still confused why you're so incredibly against the very concept. The only pushback I expect was something like "the publisher insists on DRM" or maybe having to convince devs to give up the idea that without DRM the game would be pirated left and right or something like that, not what really sounds an awful lot like "I personally don't like it, so no one else should have it." If they also sold the game on GOG or whatever, it would not mean Steam versions would stop working or lose anything. GOG does not require that a game not be sold on Steam too (many are on both!) Your own copy is fine. Don't worry. If they ever did actually release on something like GOG neither you nor anyone else loses a single thing. They don't have to shift focus away from design or anything like that. Actually, I think GOG and some of those others even take lower percentages on each sale? Epic and Valve take a pretty decent chunk of the profit on sales I'm given to understand. So it's kind of a win-win for them if they could do it. PS: I'm not specifying specifically GOG. It's just the most obvious example. There are other good services as well, I just am less familiar with most of them. I do personally think GOG is the best and certainly the most fitting for something like Empyrion, but, hey, if there's something wrong with it, I'm not adverse to another. Or many.
Again, you can launch a copy of the game via the exe file and Steam won't even try to check for any updates. You'll still need Steam running but it won't try to update the game. Not sure about workshop items but I imagine it's the same for those too. As for steam taking up system resources, I'm looking at it right now and it's using up about 500mb of memory and 0.1% CPU. Discord is using almost twice the memory and Chrome even more, so that's not really out of the ordinary. If you're so short on memory that you cannot run the game with Steam then you're probably below the 10gb minimum specs for the game to run anyway. Much of the game relies on the Steam64 ID of the player. For Epic players this ID numerical value is automatically generated from the player's Epic ID (I don't know the details of how this works but I assume it was something the devs had to program in). I don't know exactly how this might break the default game experience, but I do know in RE2 this would break most of our dialogue. So you wouldn't be able to do any missions, use any factory traders, use things like the industrial water extractor or the new jump gates. You wouldn't be able to interact with nearly anything in RE2 or any other scenario that uses the dialogue system. It would break the entire scenario in unfixable and unplayable ways. Again, this is assuming that the rest of the game could even still function without a player ID which I also doubt. So if they sold it on GoG they'd need to program in a way to generate a unique player ID from their GoG account name which doesn't sound easy and wouldn't even work like it sounds like you're wanting it to work. It would hurt the players who purchase the game on GoG and harm Eleon's reputation by willingly selling a lower quality, single player only version of the game on a 3rd platform. It would mislead potential new players because they wouldn't be getting the game they thought they were paying for. As I'm aware Empyrion does not use DRM as I can still launch and play the game while offline, so I am wondering why you are so focused on a DRM-free version of a game that doesn't have online DRM? And again, to be clear because you seem to keep missing this, I am not against selling Empyrion on other platforms. I am saying that it's not going to be as simple as the devs just placing it on the GoG store and calling it a day. It will require more work from them and I am also concerned about why the game needs to be on even more platforms when Steam is the best and only one with workshop support which is a huge part of the game.
Maybe I just don't like wasting processing power, having things running in the background doing various things all the time, etc etc. You'd be surprised how much better a system runs if you cut down all the clutter. And yes, sometimes I even close my browsers when playing games. (I also don't keep lots of tabs open in the first place.) And I don't use Discord, but back when I did I didn't use an app. It's not always about making things work on the absolute minimum. Sometimes it's just about having less completely unnecessary waste. You don't need a separate app for everything and that's not always good. I didn't say I wanted player IDs to work any particular way. You did. However, you're willfully making a mountain out of a molehill again here. You can generate unique IDs via numerous ways and it almost doesn't even make sense to use an online-only mechanism of doing so. For example, a hash of various identifying computer components (like the NIC) is sufficient to produce enough entropy that large corporations generally consider this good enough to treat as unique. If you're worried about clashes, that's just as likely with such a method as it is with Epic IDs clashing with Steam IDs. In fact, the fundamental issue there is the mixing in the first place. If they all used a method like said localized hash, the chances of cross-platform clashes goes down. Cross-platform issues aren't unheard of as a thing in general, but there are always ways that can deal with it. No Man's Sky has absolutely no problem connecting Steam and GOG users together for example, yet it also works perfectly fine 100% offline with no connection to GOG Galaxy. (NMS is using their own centralized server and I'm not arguing for usage of such a thing, just saying that they have no issues with generating IDs with players playing together on the same said server.) As much as I love Empyrion and as much as I'd like people to recognize it as better than NMS (because it is in every possible way,) I have to paused and admit here that it has significantly more players, so if they can pull it off with a centralized server, Empyrion can pull it off exponentially easier... Making it require the user ID for dialog definitely sounds like a troublesome design choice. For example, what if the API later stops providing the user's ID to mods? This seems like potentially a privacy issue or maybe even a security one, so I could imagine that being removed at some point. Mods really shouldn't be aware of the user's Steam/whatever ID... It makes more sense to use something simpler (such as character name? Or don't servers/saves even have a completely separate in-game ID for each player anyway?) There definitely has to be a better way, regardless. This one may be a matter of planning ahead there... That said, any method of ID generation would be transparent to mods. They'd still see a ID and they wouldn't even know the difference. Any method for producing an ID of any kind (even if not unique!) would be transparent to mods and they'd work the same. How do they know that oh, say 91949191981238461 is not a valid Steam user? (Before you try to look that up, it's not a hash or anything generated, I just pounded some keys until I had the right length.) Again you've argued that they should stop selling it on Epic. It offers the same experience. Do you think GOG is some little nobody selling stuff out of their basement or something? But we'll have to agree to disagree here. I find no harm in an experience that involves just downloading from sites like Nexusmods instead of the Steam workshop. A decade or more of Skyrim players seem to feel like the experience of using mod sites isn't so bad either. (Some in Skyrim may even have an addiction...) No, I think it's safe to assume the GOG page for the game would not in any way say "access to the Steam workshop is guaranteed." Anyone buying it there will assume they don't have access to the Steam workshop. No one will be mislead into assuming if the game is sold on GOG it would have access to the Steam workshop. You are trying VERY VERY HARD to make sure that any attempts to even get it considered are shot down as hard as possible as fast as possible, nitpicking at every single thing you possibly could. You're even utilizing arguments that are almost more against Epic than against the idea of using GOG. If you're not against the idea of them selling on other platforms, then I sure don't know what you are for here. Let's say you are right about it being a "worse experience" (and we'll ignore that Epic is the same experience in regard to every single argument you've brought up except the IDs.) Let's just say that it is for argument's sake. So what? People don't expect the same experience when buying a game on GOG versus Steam. Sometimes games do have issues (though I can't agree with any of the above being any more applicable here than they are with Epic.) That doesn't drive people away and people choose that over Steam/Epic anyway for reasons such as those above. Heck, GOG's DOSBox packages of DOS games could be an example of a "worse experience" by many definitions. They don't preconfigure them for General MIDI with a soundfont or anything like that (it's always AdLib/SB FM in their packages.) People buy them to own them legally and advanced users can take the files and move them to DOSBox-Staging and reconfigure better themselves. But even the basic experience is still better than nothing. Other than the ID thing you haven't shown any way it would affect their workload at all. I'm not a developer by any means, but there is no way you can convince me that the ID thing would take even days, much less weeks or months from game development. (I'll accept hours.) Again you're arguing they need to take it off of Epic too and lose those sales... They're not going to agree to that. Look, clearly you love the Steam workshop. I get it. I'm not telling you to personally stop using it. But you need to remember other options do exist and that relying solely on one service for the entirety of everything also means you have all your eggs in one basket -- and if anything happens to that basket, you've lost them all. If you insist on that, it's your business, but don't insist no one else should have the right to use a different basket. Anyway, I'm walking away at this point. I just wanted to suggest something that I thought would be nice for a lot of people and even possibly increase sales along the way as a small bonus.
The only reason people got it on the Epic platform was because it was free. Otherwise buying it off Steam offers a much better experience due to having access to the almost 10 years of workshop blueprints and different scenarios. In fact many players who got it for free on Epic actually did go on to buy the game on Steam because it offered them access to the workshop. GoG would not be the same because, presumably, it would not be given away for free on there. Maybe you should listen to someone who is at least somewhat familiar with how the game works. Obviously the developers themselves would know more than either of us, but from my understanding of how Empyrion works from *seven years* of making a scenario for it, it's probably not as simple as you're making it sound. What you're suggesting is more complicated than you think it is and the fact you think it would only be a few hours of work is most likely wildly inaccurate.
