I played all of the single player campaigns. Both WA campaigns are short (only 12 missions in total across both campaigns) but at least you get to play as the other factions that are not space marines. DC and SS campaigns are boring RISK clones. They are pretty bare-minimum effort from the devs, honestly, basically an afterthought. I didn't find them fun and I don't know too many players that did. I'm sure there is a small group out there, but I was involved in some of the biggest communities around the game at the time of its heyday (on RelicNews and DOWReplays) and the vast majority of people hated the single player of DC and SS. And this wasn't just those involved in the competitive community, but also those who were just 40k fans that didn't have a desire to play multiplayer, or at least competitive multiplayer (quickstart 3v3 was also a popular mode amongst casuals).

While yeah the communities, as big as they were, still would have represented just a small fraction of the total user base, the sample size was still large enough that I think it's still a pretty good indicator as the ratios wouldn't have changed much with a bigger group. As I said, there's no doubt people who liked the campaigns, but they would be in the minority. If you liked them, fair play to you.

Without a sustainable multiplayer experience built into the game out of the box, there's little appeal in this. A community mod is nice and all but it's not a replacement for a proper solution, nor is it an excuse to not implement one. The attitude of "buy the game anyway and just use a mod for multiplayer" is sending the wrong message, it's telling GOG and the publisher "hey it's okay to release a half-arsed version of the game cause the community will buy it anyway and just fix things themselves with mods". And that's wrong.

The Unification mod has a setting to enable persistent bases for the Soulstorm campaign. Tbh, I don't think there's a perfect solution to how to handle the repeat map battles. Either bases are non-persistent, which can get repetitive playing the same maps more than once; or bases are persistent, which makes those battles trivial.

I very much disagree with this. Support for a community-based MP solution is far better and more sustainable/preservable than a DRM-ed option, reliant on a server controlled by the developers or a third-party (Steam), which will inevitably be taken down at some point in the future.

Again, this is a DRM-free game store, and imo that should include multiplayer.

Perhaps there might be a way to have both options, but truly DRM-free multiplayer absolutely should not be neglected.

You're totally okay with paying money for a half-arsed solution as long as there are unofficial community mods that fix the issues? Are you for real? Put aside the multiplayer thing for a moment and consider if this happened to some other aspect of the game.

I'm not saying community solutions shouldn't exist, heck even in the game's heyday there were community-run servers to play with various community made mods like DoWPro (cause you couldn't use them on Gamespy). But the issue is, they are not the default option, so that's not where the majority of players are going to be.

And community servers can just as easily be taken down as official ones. Someone needs to be paying money and upkeep on those at the end of the day.

I understand your stance on the DRM-free store and extending that DRM-free thing to multiplayer as well, but ultimately, they aren't going to sell a product that's promoting community-run servers that are completely independent and that they have no control over, because who knows what could happen with them. Maybe they get taken down, maybe they get hacked, maybe someone makes inappropriate content accessible. I know that's unlikely, but if it did, that would reflect pretty badly on them.

The game needs to have a solution built-in that maximises the playerbase, and the way to do that is to support crossplay with an already existing and established community. Other games have done it. Perhaps, in addition to this, they can also support a community solution should players want to use it, but it shouldn't be the default.

As it stands, the already small community for this game is going to be split into 3 even smaller communities: those playing on Steam, those playing on GOG, and those playing on dowonline. And that's not going to be good for the health of the game.

First of all I will buy this again on GoG despite having the physical collection box at home and the Steam version because Relic gifted me Keys so I could still play MP after GameSpy died.
The reason I want to buy it on GoG is the hope GoG version is comming with the option of giving me the german version of Dark Crusade as it seems DC is only DoW game that is censored in Germany (though do not ask my what or why) and so despite because I am from Austria I only got on Steam the uncensored international version without german translation because my IP adress is not germany.
I do not interest myself for MP I just want to play Campaign and skrimish again and not always having to search for my cd-box when I get the craving.

About MP so far as an MP noob I see only two options.
One game runs over gameclient which if it is Steam gives you likely a long live for it despite needing Steam for it.
The other one doing it like Blood Bowl II. Game does not need shopclient but instead you create an account for it and so play even without the storeclient you bought it from but the risk the gamesserver goes down.

If there are more options for MP I have nothing against getting enlighted.