rjbuffchix: I would also like you to substitute "curation"(or equivalent phrases) in your comment here with "Galaxy, including social media features like achievements". It seems to me that vastly more resources go into Galaxy than curation. Achievements certainly aren't as important as DRM-free and iirc from other topics it was the push for achievements/needing to comply with the Galaxy client that caused us to miss out on Axiom Verge here.
The statement that GOG has wasted tons of money on Galaxy is correct, but that
isn't because of Achievements. GOG doesn't even pay to implement Achievements on Galaxy, so it's no costs to them when GOG games offer that (other than the bandwidth costs for the players' systems communicating a tiny bit of data to GOG's servers when Achievements unlock).
Rather, the massive amounts of wasted money started because GOG decided to go all-in on their horrible "Galaxy 2.0" idea, and started dumping all their spare money (or so it seems, at least) into
overly marketing & developing for the "all your games in one place" concept, which no one cares about.
That is,
unless that "one place" is Steam, which is something people
do care about having all of their games in
that particular one place.
But contrary to GOG's very misguided beliefs, they can never be 'converted' to start wanting that one place to become Galaxy instead.
So, my point being: GOG having a Galaxy client in a
basic form (i.e. like Galaxy 1.2 was/is) which offers good features like Achievements, Cloud Saves, playtime tracking, easy installation/uninstallation and launching of games, etc...with that kind of basic implementation, Galaxy isn't a problem in and of itself, and Galaxy helps GOG, not hurts GOG.
On the other hand, when they take things
too far with Galaxy (i.e. like Galaxy 2.0 does), then
that's when Galaxy suddenly starts to become a big problem for GOG.
But a lot of posts in this thread are asserting that Galaxy is inherently bad no matter what, regardless of any way that it could possibly be implemented. But that isn't so.
With no Galaxy client at all, then GOG would be probably be driving off many potential customers because GOG would have no ability to offer Cloud Saves, which is a vital feature in our modern day.
As for Axiom Verge, that didn't come to GOG because the dev wanted to be lazy and not give GOG customers an equal version of the game if he were to release it here. Him at least being ethical enough not to give GOG customers a gimped version is something he deserves credit for, and us being 'deprived' of having a gimped version here is a win for us, not a loss.
Leaving Achievements out of GOG games will please a certain segment of GOG's customers who hate Achievements, but on the other hand, it will also simultaneously alienate another segment of GOG's customers (like me) who resent being treated like second class citizens and receiving gimped, feature-removed versions of games, and who won't buy games that do that.
Whereas, giving all customers on all platforms equal treatment makes
everyone happy, because even people who don't like Achievements won't be upset if a game includes them (especially since anyone who doesn't want them always has the choice never to use them), and they also won't refuse to buy any game due to them being included.