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This.
did you know that dosbox is freeware?
only think that gog doing is configuring dosbox for each game. which you can do aswell for your old dos retails
one answer that immediately comes to mind is the promotion and increased awareness of titles through steam's community structure. x number of friends will see what y number of players are playing and n number of players might ask about it or have their nostalgia triggered by mere recognition of the game title. steam really helps gog expand their business.
arguably and probably factually, steam just has numbers of customers and players well above the numbers gog would enjoy. when gog or an affiliate put their title's (licensed in many cases) on steam it promotion for both the title and gog itself and gives more options and convenience for library management, especially for people with hundreds or thousands of titles in their libraries.
in less cases yet still of importance are the circumstances when steam api would allow certain gog released titles to benefit from steam exclusive features that are not possible by simply adding a non-steam game to your library.
if steam and gog both were to be granted the same license to a title then by all means share your opinion of the better version and list advantages but unfortunately when some people do this they needlessly take to bashing either steam or gog depending on which version is the better deal; in their minds the lesser deal translates into it being garbage and the outlet/publisher that released it is a big-bad and ultra suspicious for the evil way it treats its customers. check out the system shock 2 threads if the examples there haven't already been deleted.
but that wasn't the question. the question was hypothetical and indeed asked in a certain ignorance which you pointed out. i was answering within the context of that asker's ignorance. if you would like the original question quoted...
no big deal but this person seemed curious about gog/steam dynamic.
Legally speaking that would only be true if GOG was hired by Interplay to perform the work. If you give me license to sell your product, and I put in the time to tweak that product to perform better for my customers, you do not have the right to take my work for your own. You'd still have the right to sell your product (the game, unless there was an exclusivity clause), but not whatever tweaks were made unless you had paid for those tweaks to be made.
Imagine a car dealer developing some super duper new turbo charger doohickey for some car they sold for Ford. Now imagine Ford mass producing and selling that "super duper new turbo charger doohickey" that another company developed. You think "we made the car so anything you make for it is automatically ours" would be a legal defense against the oncoming lawsuit?
All that being said, the game is Interplay's and Dosbox is free, the only thing being taken is a configuration file that anyone could do up, so meh. The fact it's still labled as GOG is fairly tacky though.
For DOS games like Descent they just package it with DosBox and do some minor legwork to ensure it has a DosBox config file that the game will work with. In several instances it's not even the "best" configuration for the game, it's just a default one with maybe one or two minimum changes needed to get the game running correctly - most of which has been figured out by fans and posted to the DosBox compatibility pages.
In the cases of more troublesome early Windows games, they mostly just hunt down community fixes that technically inclined fans have made and apply them to the game. I'm not aware of them ever taking a game that no one else could get to work and making it work.
Now there's certainly something to be said for them performing that legwork and wrapping it up in a nice package for other users, but let's not give them too much undue credit here. Mostly they just track down the work of fans and make it easier for other people to consume it.
But then you have this line of logic which is flawless.
Is there anyone who has purchased this on Steam already & can attest to the multiplayer connectivity?
You really are only paying for the textures, models, and levels. Support GOG, they are better than steam. And the goodies are awesome. You can add non-steam games to steam and launch from the same place. WIth no achievements or trading cards, why buy from steam?