hedwards: You're being obtuse. The issue isn't trolling, the issue is that you'd have the current culture completely buried by people with no interest or respect for classic gaming or the current forum culture.

Having a unified log in does not mean that it's the same site. By your logic all those various sites over the years that took MS Passport log ins or currently use Facebook are all the same, despite the widely varied people that go to them.

By having a different set of fora and a different website you can at least ensure that there's some divide between the sites rather than everybody cramming their posts into the same crowded forum.

In the long run, I hope I'm not wrong, but let's be honest, this sort of move pretty much never works and there's little to no reason to believe that this time is going to be any difference. They've got something good here and they're just going to piss it away for little to no advantage.

At the end of the day anybody who can't cope with the added "complexity" of the sister site situation is probably not going to cope well when one of the games isn't compatible with their particular hardware.

Sorrowshade89: the value of making old titles functional on a modern OS really shouldn't be understated.

orcishgamer: I'm not being obtuse at all, the single sign on is would just be one, tiny integration point that would need to happen, just like Netflix/Qwikster. You would have to handle user reviews, game shelves, migrating games from one site to another, and a whole host of other issues. By the time you've added all those integration points, it amounts to nearly the same website (since the core functionality of both websites is the exact same thing).

You're arguing that all that's needed is single sign on to make going between the 2 sites not suck ass and that quite simply isn't true. Most of the GOG userbase will use this new feature, spinning it off into a separate site makes no sense whatsoever when the functionality of the two sites remain the same.

I see why you're concerned about the community here, it's a great community, but 1) you're jumping the gun and making a lot of assumptions, and 2) you're proposed remedy simply amounts to poor usability and poor usability is always bad for business.

hedwards: You're completely missing the point. If you're going to argue that you're not being obtuse it would be nice if you could at least accurately summarize my position.

And no, I'm not jumping the gun on this one. People who ignore my predictions tend to live to regret it. I'm not an oracle and I'm not perfect, but there's a hell of a lot of downside to this, far more than any small upside could possible bring.

Poor usability is one thing, having a unified log in is hardly poor usability, if that were the case you wouldn't see it popping up pretty much everywhere. Moreover people wouldn't be requesting that sites be added to the system. In this case, most people are probably not even going to notice that there's a separate store. And they won't notice because they're not interested in retro gaming or they aren't interested in new games.

When it comes down to it, having a site that's chocked full of titles isn't good for usability either. If you've ever read up on behavioral economics you'd know exactly what I mean. You can very easily wind up with the Parodox of Choice where sales actually go down because the consumers have too many options.

Plus, by separating the sites you don't have to worry as much about discount fatigue or having promotions that coincide with each other.

Anamon: And on the topic of "new", many of you might be overestimating how much this really changes things. In GOG terms a game is considered old if it is 3+ years old. This is still pretty new for anyone who isn't keeping up with all the newest releases all the time. I haven't bothered to keep up-to-date for a long time, and some games that would already have been eligible for GOG unter the old rules still feel like they were just released to me.

gamebin: This is awesome news. I cannot wait to play many newer games I have avoided buying because of restrictive DRM.

hedwards: People who ignore my predictions tend to live to regret it.

isisprince: Focusing on newer games means less focus on older games. We already have tons of digital providers of new games. What makes you different?

isisprince: Focusing on newer games means less focus on older games. We already have tons of digital providers of new games. What makes you different?

orcishgamer: And you miss out on all the synergy that goes with having them together, including leveraging GOG's current position to make the new game sales a massive success and forcing publishers' hands into accepting the GOG way of doing things (just as Amazon.com managed to do with the big music labels, even forcing the king of digital music sales, iTunes to change its tune).

Sorrowshade89: While I don't object to the sale of newer games, I am inclined to take some issue about the claim that the core values are being 'DRM-free and with goodies' and downplaying the focus on older titles. While a DRM-free policy is thoroughly commendable thing (especially with the ridiculous levels some publishers have been pushing DRM in the last few years) I do think that this is underplaying what I consider to be the more important side of GOG's work.

Platform/OS compatibility is a massive problem for videogames as a medium, far more so any other medium. Most libraries will usually stock books written over a hundred years ago and it's probably quicker to list the films made since the advent of sound that are not available in a format that can be watched today. With games though, it can take a lot of effort to get games from as little as 15 years ago to run on PCs, and it may not even be possible to get them stable at all on some machines, assuming you can even find copies of these older games. In effect, this makes it very difficult for modern gamers to access games from more than a couple of generations prior to the current one. Not only is this a great disservice to gamers, but it can potentially have negative consequences on game development as well since it restricts the range of games that a designer can draw influence from.
The main reason I first joined this sight, way back in the early days, was because it was first time I'd seen that someone was actually trying to do something about this problem (and it is a problem). That the games were DRM-free and had extras was a nice bonus, but the main reason I've supported it was because it makes older games available to a modern audience. As someone who grew-up in a mac-only household until my late teens, I've personally benefited a lot from finally being able to play games I'd missed-out on, as would anyone else who was not able to play these games back when they were out.


Now, as I said earlier, I have no problem with GOG.com stocking newer games as well and lord knows any step against the increasingly insane DRM-policies infecting the industry (which includes Steam, however many nice utilities it adds) is a good one in my book, but the value of making old titles functional on a modern OS really shouldn't be understated. While I very much doubt GOG would stop doing this, I would hate to see it get relegated to a lower priority.



Apologies if I'm just bringing-up something that's already been said and done with, but this thread is so long now I don't really have time to read through it all at the moment.