Why don't you do a feature request. It's pretty clear from a lot of my questions that I don't know all the in's and out's as to what it would take to make LAN play work with a lot of these games, but we all seem to agree that it's a feature that we'd all be pumped about. I looked through the Galaxy feature requests and no one has posted this. I intended to post it myself; but like I said, I don't have a full grasp on what I'm asking for. As far as being concerned over whether it's feasible or not, who cares. We could ask for the moon if we wanted to. It's doesn't have to happen. If there's people asking for Portal to come to GOG then we can ask for LAN support.

There are games here that I have specifically avoided buying because their multiplayer support did not include good LAN play. To GOG's credit, although the store page does not document this weakness as clearly as I would like, the store pages disclose the problem, so a careful reading can save you from buying a game that will end up being effectively single player only. In the case of Battletech < https://www.gog.com/game/battletech_game >, GOG notes:

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BATTLETECH uses Paradox Accounts. You don't need an account to play the campaign or single-player skirmish modes. However, you do need a Paradox Account to challenge other players in 1v1 multiplayer matches and to redeem unlock codes for Kickstarter Backer or Pre-Order DLC.
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I would prefer that the disclosure be more prominent, and that the game search capability be able to exclude games with such disclaimers. However, the disclosure is bluntly worded, and having read it, there's no question what you're not getting.

It's kind of weird to ask a publisher to release on GOG but only if they implement a multiplayer design they never had in mind in the first place.

Seriously guys, if the game comes out designed for multiplayer via a client, then you should expect Galaxy to be that client when on GOG. It's the same when on other platforms/clients, third-party or not.

Quite frankly we're lucky enough that GOG is offering client-free Single Player gaming, and that's what we should hold them to account over: the game should be playable by our lonesome without an internet connection. If we want to play with others, then we use a client if the game is designed that way - if it isn't designed in that fashion then LAN capability would be great.

And yet you feel comfortable stating things like:

I don't think I was explaining the ins and outs of how LAN support implementation would work. That's also the first post which was meant to start conversation. No need to be rude

I disagree with the premise that this is all down to the devs not implementing it. We're talking GOG galaxy multiplayer here. This is GOG, actively promoting developers to use a multiplayer matchmaking solution *they* created.

They could've included/focused on a LAN/Direct connect implementation that's easy for devs to implement with it. They didn't. Sure, not every dev likely would've used it. Make it optional or something, that'll give the pops here something to complain about if they don't use it. At least they would've tried.

It wasn't my intention to be rude, I just thought it was rather silly to write that GOG should demand all developers include LAN support without knowing how much of an undertaking that would actually be.

Direct connect is as easy as it can be to implement; there's very little GOG could do to make it any easier.

What would it be? A GOG-proprietary wrapper over the well known and documented socket APIs that have been around for decades and taught in every course about network programming?

Of course, if GOG offers a proprietary transport layer then it's on them to make sure it can do a direct connection (so devs who build on GOG's API won't need two separate network backends in their game engine). I don't know what GOG's APIs look like so I can't comment.

Believe it or not, you don't need VPN to connect computers.. you just need this thing called the Internet.

If you implement any networking that isn't artificially restricted to work with some specific client, then it'll work on the Internet and on LAN all the same as long as you use the internet protocol (and there's little reason to use anything else). Your application doesn't know -- and doesn't need to know -- whether some host is on LAN or not. It's just another IP address, and it's up to the operating system to route packets towards it.

And i can use the internet to say, play MS-DOS Doom multiplayer that uses IPX?

Not everything uses TCP/IP. Light weight protocols only burst out packets with 1-2 bounces, and expect high response times.

No. I'm talking about games and Galaxy in 2020. IPX hasn't been relevant since 1995 or so, and the games that supported it afterwards did only because Microsoft's DirectPlay had an IPX backend. Those games supported other transport protocols too. Yeah we use UDP for that today.

Which is why you might need a VPN.... that would let you use such traffic...