There are too many games that don't have achievements. I don't know why its such a huge number of games that don't have achievements. For example. why doesn't The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings have achievements? ITS BY THE SAME COMPANY. 90% of games on Steam have achievements but GOG Galaxy is so selective with games and achievements its sad. It just makes other clients shine more. Achievements should not be such a tough thing to accomplish for a game service client. If you want more people to come use GOG Galaxly (which you should) you can't be not offering simple features like this.

Please do something about the achievements. Its too simple of a feature to not be on every sinfle one of your games!

Best Wishes,
shaikhyerbooty


EDIT: Also, what I can't understand is games on both clients have achievements on steam and not galaxy. I never said the games were not playable or buyable. I am just saying if GOG Galaxy wants to be a serious competitor to Steam or even a flourishing digital distribution platform, simple features such as Achievements should not even be a question. I am loving GOG Galaxly but the lack of achievements is just a nuisance not a serious problem. At the end of the day what really keeps me at GOG Galaxy is that it is developed and ran by CD Projekt RED and I love them. They will forever be my favorite gaming comapany.

Achievements must be implemented by the developers, directly. Cloud Saves and Overlay, from my understanding, require some technical work but can be added by GOG staff itself. For the game to unlock galaxy achievements, it needs to have the "achievements calls" within the code. If it doesn't, because the developer didn't bother to add them, GOG can't do anything about it.

Also, achievements may be useful to you, but to customers like me they cannot be accessed. I do not use the Galaxy client, which is how the achievements are rewarded. So adding achievements to "every game" would not impress me a jot. But don't despair! More and more developers will add them, no doubt, as word of their magical appeal percolates through the Interwebs.

Hm...wait a second, do you mean they have to recode the game multiples times for each platform ? That's why so many games have achievements on Steam but not here ?

All I know is that the galaxy achievements need to be present within the game code in order to work. How much work that requires is unknown, and it probably depends on the game. Anyway yes, they're not just a "on/off switch", they require additional work from the developers, and that's why they're often only on Steam, especially for games that do not get released here on day1 and indie games in general.

Alright. I always thought it was solely Galaxy's fault since it initially didn't support achievements. Even those for Witcher 3 were patched in later. Now that the app does support them, I'm not sure I like the idea of dev not treating Gog's games like they do on Steam.

Well, I don't know anything about game dev, so I'll leave it to that but I'd be curious to know more.

I'm not a diehard fan of achievements (while, for example, I greatly appreciate the support for cloud saves) but I agree: all platforms should be treated equally, and if you can't then just focus on the ones you'll treat fairly.

Think what an achievement is: a toggle within the game that a player has met. Because the achievement can be anything (length of time playing, killing a big bad, having the best defence and still being hit by an opponent, etc.) there needs to be a way for these to be plugged into whatever client displays them. So, yeah, the game developer has to use a trigger to serve the achievement; whatever client of choice then needs to be able to do something with this information passed from the game. An achievement from Batman may pass the same value (a single bit), but its completely different from an achievement in, say, Homeworld.

I don't despise achievements like a lot of people, but I will NEVER understand people who seem to think they are imperative, like a game is literally completely unplayable without them

I guess I'm just too stupid to get it.

I would much rather a game released here without achievements than not at all.

It is obvious that not many deem the amount of work that would require not worth the investment. And I don't blame them. Any additional dev work costs a LOT of money. They would have to integrate with GOG API and modify their code to make the game call to a different backend (GOG's instead of Steam's). It is not just some universal switch you flip on and it's done. They would have to basically code the achievements all over again.

I guess I'm lucky I put 0 weight in whether or not a game has achievements. But I agree that games that release on GOG day 1 should have them.

Ah, I think I start to get the gist of it.

I don't want to go off-opic but I've read in some threads here people complaining about games ported from Steam and having the same exact files ? Or still having files that uses Steam ? (Well, I couldn't find any threads like that in the first 55 pages of General discussion, might have misunderstood something). Since I have absolutely no clue on the matter I can't blame any of you for not understanding what I say but, if every files are the same and are working through Galaxy as they do on Steam, then the only part a dev "should" modify are Galaxy related functions such as achievements, overlay, screenshots ? And what am I supposed to do in a game if there's no achievements to guide me ? Uh ?

OH GOD! You've ripped a hole in the space time continuum.

That still doesn't let GOG off the hook for letting multitudes of its games not have Achievements even though the same identical games on Steam do have Achievements.

GOG could, for example, easily insist that all devs who sell on their platform must implement Galaxy Achievements if those exact same games do have Steam Achievements.

So my point is: both the devs who treat GOG customers like second-class citizens by skipping Achievements on GOG are to blame, and so is GOG equally as much for letting those devs get away with it and doing nothing about it.

As others have said, the achievements must be implemented by the developers themselves because they require integration with the GOG Galaxy API.

The main problem is that GOG Galaxy and the functionality of the achievements is relatively recent, so all games released on GOG before its completion have no achievements, and very often the developers are not going to resume old games.

Fortunately the situation now seems to be improving, because actually there are few excuses to not include them from the beginning.

I suggest however to contact directly the developers of the video game you're interested in (through the email you find on their official website, discord, twitter) because it's possible to change their mind if they notice that it's a very popular feature.

For example THQ Nordic was extremely reluctant to introduce achievements in its games, but now with Darksiders III they seem to have changed attitude.
Double Fine, inXile, Beamdog, Raw Fury, Zachtronics and Devolver Digital games are also almost always without achievements and more pressure should be put on.

Each program is written by someone for to do something (specific). Just because two programs are called clients, doesn't mean they do the same thing, let alone do it the same way. (Reverse engineering is when someone takes the work of another device/algorithm and creates something that reproduces the result, not necessarily by doing the same thing.)
What you quoted is probably quite common; if the game triggers an achievement it will send a message to where it thinks the STEAM client will be listening, and then probably carry on regardless. Hence it doesn't matter if the achievement is recorded by the STEAM client or ignored by the Galaxy one (for example).

It is also possible that the game might wait for confirmation from the (STEAM) client that the achievement was registered. (Depends on the design of the developer.) In this case, all sorts of unexpected things might happen, like the game might hang or even spam the (nonexistent) client, clobbering local traffic, etc.

The Y2K hype included just this amount of uncertainty; because most programmers used a two-digit representation of a year for a date, there was no way of telling how a particular code sequence would act when the date flipped to 2000, or zero as it would be recorded in two digits.