[BUG] Steam DLC Purchases Have Only One Parent

[Hyperventilator]

I think this is just an artifact within Steam. I don’t believe it impacts your use of the product in any way. If it does, please let us know and we can forward it up to Valve to investigate.

I'm not saying it impacts my use of the product (I did say as much in the original post). I am reporting this for two reasons:

a) According to previous information from SmiteWorks, the Steam library is not intended to work this way; instead, the DLC should have both game versions as their parent. It's looks like a bug, so I reported it.

b) If SmiteWorks discontinues FGC some day, and removes it from Steam, then Steam will not recognize that a FGU user has bought DLC that was associated only with FGC. That affects bundle completion at least and might cause some users to buy already owned DLC for a second time at worst.

[Trenloe]

Is that not intended for users who bought the game on the FantasyGrounds site?

Yes it is. Sorry, it wasn't obvious from your initial post if you'd bought your FG license on Steam - a lot of people don't, and then subsequently buy DLC from Steam.

[Mikalye]

Has this progressed at all? I am aware this is thread necromancy, where long dead threads are animated to rise again, and that thread necromancy is generally wrong.

That being said, at the time that this was raised in 2020, the official answer was that it doesn't matter, and it is only cosmetic, and it would only matter if at some point Smiteworks were to stop selling FG Classic on Steam. However, that is certainly a much more realistic prospect than it was a year ago.

I have 141 DLC items registered to FGC and a much smaller number registered to FGU, and I really hope that there will at some future date be a way to migrate them from one to another.

[Zacchaeus]

DLC is registered to your Smiteworks account, so as long as you have synced your steam and Smiteworks accounts all the DLC from whatever source will be available in FGU. You should be seeing this when you update FGU. If you aren’t then try desyncing accounts and then resync them and update FGU.

[Mikalye]

Oh, I am seeing that. Which is why the previous answer (in 2020) is that this is a purely cosmetic issue. I also fully accept that this is entirely an issue on the Steam side. It is that the Steam DLC can only have one parent. So I have 141 DLC registered to FGC. To date this has not been an issue. When I connect to FG, my accounts sync and I get ALL of the DLC, regardless of parent.

At present it does make the Steam store somewhat less functional, in that when I look at the Steam store to purchase additional content, it shows the content as unowned in FGU (because I own it in FGC), but since I own both in Steam, it is easy enough (if slightly more cumbersome) to check. The main issue arises if at some point, Smiteworks suddenly stops selling/supporting FG Classic on Steam. At that point, my 141 FGC disappears from the Steam Store. Now, as you correctly point out, it will still be available in FGU, but it makes the Steam store non-functional. If I am looking for (say) D&D books that I do not yet own, then books that I own will be shown as unowned. It makes browsing the store a pain in the tail. Once you get above (say) 250 additional FG add-ons, I simply cannot always remember if I bought a random adventure or not.

So the ask was for Smiteworks to work with Valve so that before Smiteworks decides to stop selling FG Classic on Steam (whenever in the future that may be), there will be a mechanism for migrating over the FGC DLC to become FCU DLC, provided a customer has both. That is the only requirement. I suspect that there would be plenty of folks like me, who would ideally like this feature sooner than this, but at the moment it is annoying, but a workaround exists. Once FGC disappears, then that workaround will no longer exist.

I have no instinctive feel for the timeline around Smiteworks stopping selling FGC on Steam. However, it is no longer unforeseeable, the way it was when this issue was first raised.