GOG have opened up refunds for anyone who owns fluffy animal strategy game Armello on the digital distribution platform. This follows a recent wave of controversy linked to the developer’s decision to abandon the GOG version and only update the Steam edition.
There are plenty of good old games in our list of classics.
In a Steam post, the developers of Armello cited technical reasons for not putting the DLC on GOG, batting away suggestions that it was anything to do with piracy. “This decision has nothing to do with piracy,” said League of Geeks co-founder Trent Kusters in a Steam post. “Piracy isn’t a concern of ours. We’ve never considered it one and we don’t see it being one in the future.”
As for the actual reasoning, Kusters points at a technical issue, though he never lays out exactly what that is. We’ve reached out to the team to clarify, but for now here’s the quote from that Steam post: “Just because another studio or game has DLC on DRM Free, doesn’t mean it’s immediately a possibility for us or Armello,” Kusters explained. “Assuming as much is incredibly naive. Every team’s processes, resources, and games are innumerably different.
“Almost every single piece of conjecture about ways we could have or should roll out our DLC on DRM Free have either been wildly off course or avenues we’ve already investigated.
“Now, of course it’s theoretically possible to have DLC on DRM Free, I mean, there’s a robot taking selfies on Mars right now. So sure, given infinite resources and time we could undertake the task of rewriting the underlying architecture at the core of this decision, but that’s straight up not feasible for a vast number of reasons that are unique to LoG, Armello, where we’re standing right now and where we see Armello’s future.”
Reading between the lines there, it sounds like perhaps it’s just not cost effective to do it for GOG. No doubt there will be far fewer players when compared to Steam.
Either way, GOG have reacted to the overwhelmingly negative reaction to this decision, telling their customers to contact customer support if they’re not satisfied with the game. It might be a year after release, but people are arguing that at the time of purchasing they didn’t know it would be an unsupported, inferior version, with the game now even relabelled to Armello: DRM-Free Edition on GOG.
“Due to changes to the GOG.com version of Armello and the fact that some online functionalities and future content for the game will not be available on GOG.com, we want to make sure all prior owners have a choice,” said GOG in an announcement. “If you feel that the current version of Armello is not something you wished for back when you bought the game – please contact our support team for a refund.”