my measure of success is probably different to yours.

there's various metrics i could use to measure it, but none of these are probably "shareholder metrics" which are the only measures you [and the shareholders] would care about. and that's sort of problematic for the long term for gog.

for shareholders [and you, i imagine], gog must ALWAYS grow. but that's crazy [as you've talked about yourself.] - there's only SO MANY users in the world, and it's likely [as per some of your assertations] that gog has already reached it's high-bar audience level.

shareholders [and you, most likely] can only see that one metric, but there's others, too:

if gog were to stay drm free for the long haul, one measure of "success" would be how many other companies do that with them. [this could be how many developers they court or how many publishers buy into that model.]

one measure of success might be how people engage with the games - do they tell their friends about them? do they spread the word on twitter [and other social media platforms] - are there videos made of those games via youtube, etc?

all that stuff could count as outreach, but that's not something gog seems terribly keen on [beyond their very wonky streaming setup.]

so there's lots of ways to think about the store that isn't just "how much money does it bring in?" [although, and again, for shareholders [and you], that's likely the ONLY metric that matters.] - it's sad and sort of silly. growth uber alles isn't a [long term] sustainable strategy, and yet everyone pines for that particular setup come hell or high water.

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in an ideal world, i'd want the old users and the new users to get something - both - for their trouble. ie: hitman COULD be on the store. but in that ideal world, i'd want hitman to function in a manner that works for folks who prefer their games drm-free. that is: what's available to them online should also be available offline.

from that perspective, an "old user" got what they wanted and a "new user" got what they wanted.

in an ideal world, i'd want gog to be comfortable. and by "comfortable" i mean that i don't expect or need them to keep growing at all costs. it's fine to be a niche store. unfortunately, investors [and others] have given up on "sustainability" and only care for growth.

[by which i mean that if the store is doing well and at a comfortable point, growth shouldn't be pursued at the risk of destabilizing the store.]

which is exactly what's happening here.

gog is chasing steam, but gog can't [ever] win at that game. steam is too entrenched and has better features at this point. all gog can do is ride their coat tails and hope for the best [which won't turn out well for gog.]

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tl;dr: i strongly believe that being a niche store with a niche set of users is actually ok. it's not something the shareholders would care for [which is dumb, by the by], but gog COULD HAVE carved out a niche for themselves and slowly expanded. instead, here, they're just throwing their one selling point away to chase dollars.

it probably won't end well for gog.

"But havent' they catered to the old guard all these years?" --- No, they haven't.

"It's been DRM-free for a decade now" --- No, it hasn't.

Rather, GOG has been bungling their way through a never-ending series of debacles, and doing things that are counter-productive to their own well-being, both of which things this very thread is itself a token example of.

One of such types of debacles is the DRM-creep which has been infesting GOG for many years now. It didn't appear all of a sudden, out of nowhere. Rather, it has been building up, gradually, over long periods of time.

That quoted post makes it sound like GOG has been doing a pristine job offering a DRM-free experience in as perfect of a way as any DRM-free store could possibly do. Yet that is a very far cry from the actual truth.

In reality, GOG has been offering a highly tainted version of a DRM-free store, and in addition to DRM-creep (which is itself a major problem), it also has many other problems as well (i.e. lack of feature parity, only offering the latest version of the offline installers even if they are bugged and/or censored and customers want the earlier unbugged & uncensored versions, etc.).

You do have halfway of a good point, in that a large part of GOG's problems are due to the fact that most consumers do not care one iota about DRM or DRM-free, unless it's in regards to highly intrusive forms of DRM like Denuvo...but any DRM that is less than that, and they don't care. GOG can't do anything about that.

Likewise, most big companies don't care about offering DRM-free games. To some extent, GOG can't do anything about that either. Except that when GOG does things that alienate its customers, it lowers the numbers in its customer base and also the number of sales it might make...which in turn, decreases the potential influence that GOG might have in convincing big companies to sell their games on GOG.

But on the other hand, GOG still bears much responsibility for the large amounts of things that they can control and that they have the power to do well, yet instead of actually doing them well, they bungle those things, and make asinine decisions that defy common sense, and make their customers angry for no good reason and totally unnecessarily (the Cyberpunk 2077 DRM is a great example of that...it does far more damage to GOG's and CDPR's reputations than it has any positive upside whatsoever for either of them).

So, my point being, through GOG's bad decisions and the endless debacles that emerge from them, GOG has muddied the waters, and made quite unclear, as to what is the correct answer to the question of: how much of GOG's financial problems are GOG's own fault, and how much are simply because DRM-free is not a popular concept in our modern times?

Definitely both factors are big ones. It's very possible that had GOG done its part in an ideal way, at least most of the time, that it might have been thriving by now, despite most consumers not caring about DRM-free.

As for your idea that GOG should forget about the "old guard" and instead cater to the "new guard:" the problem with that idea, is that GOG doesn't actually have any "new guard" customers. And GOG also doesn't have any viable means by which it might recruit "new guard" customers either.

Customers who don't care about DRM-free buy from Steam and/or EGS, not GOG.

Other than for DRM-free, any potential "new guard" customer would have no reason to come to GOG, since aside from DRM-free, the other stores do literally everything way better than GOG does.

You can be a niche store if you have little competition so you can sell the product with a higher markup. You can't be a niche store by selling the same product that is already available on all other game stores. What is your added value that customers are willing to pay this higher markup for?
And that is all assuming that current GOG customers are even willing to pay a higher markup.

The only metric that a company can look is the income vs expenses. How are they supposed to pay out salaries? I don't know if there is lot of workers who would be satisfied by being paid in "user engagement".
Selling 10 games from 10 developers required marketing team to reach out to dozens of companies, which resulted in a deal with 10 developers who created these 10 games. Contracts needed to be arranged. They also needed to prepare marketing materials for all 10 games and prepare their support team to handle 10 games from 10 different developers. Support team also needs to support those 10 developers in their installer submission process.

There is a lot more work to set up a shop for 10 games than it is to set up a shop for one game which will get you the same amount of revenue.

I strongly disagree with this. I would be happy to pay more for games so that a company doesn't feel it needs to fallback on sleazy marketing strategies. Once you start rationalizing predatory practices, customers are just marks to be exploited, which is not something I want to support.

I'm more upset by GOG's dishonesty than I am by their wanting to broaden their focus and do things they haven't done before, because I don't trust people who are dishonest, and without trust I'm not willing to further invest in this company. Trust can't be established/regained with PR. The fact that GOG keeps resorting to PR, IMO, only serves to reinforce their untrustworthiness. Honesty is how you build trust. GOG seems incapable of learning this fundamental truth.

The answers given by blues in this thread don't really fill me with reassurance that DRM-free is important to GOG.

It's unclear whether the hidden message is "nothing is changing; everything stays just the way it has been lately" or "screw it, we're going to increase the amount of DRM we accept from now on" . I will maintain my boycott but I won't ditch Gog until I get confirmation that it is the latter.

I recommend everyone who cares that Gog continue DRM-free to do the same or start boycotting until it becomes clear they haven't sunk even deeper. I find it very unlikely that they made a post only to say that nothing has changed, but I wish that this is what they meant.

I hope they get the message. Apparently the Hitman backlash wasn't obvious enough for whatever thickhead at the helm to understand that we don't want DRM in here.

You can disagree all you want, but expecting that GOG could raise prices and be more expensive while selling the small subset of games being sold on other stores is not very realistic.

It would depend entirely on how and to whom it was pitched. Nothing is impossible. As for probability, just because something isn't easy doesn't mean it can't be done.

I agree, I am happy to pay a 'DRM-free premium', if that is what it takes to convince publishers to release games DRM-free and support a 100% DRM-free store. If something has to give, I would rather see games being released DRM-free for a 'gougey' price, than not being released DRM-free at all.

DRM-free isn't supposed to be about cheap, it's supposed to be about DRM-free. I'd rather they were price-gouging us than resorting to sleazy tactics and trying to convince us that DRM isn't DRM.

Thirded. The added value of the DRM-free gaming is right there in the phrase...it's the effective ownership the user has over the game. Other added value can come in the form of extras (which mostly preceded my time here but it would have been a clear advantage to shopping on GOG) and security. By security I mean several aspects such as ensuring the game works without having to fiddle around yourself, as well as lack of viruses or malware. These are key advantages one could use when offering DRM-free games, and imo they are all great positives that stand out. Unfortunately, this particular storefront has content locked behind client/online requirements, extras are generally sold separately, and while not actual defined recognized malware, has a client that is arguably intrusive and was pushed on people using what I would deem "malware-like" tactics which imo may as well have said "Are you sure you want to not not use Galaxy? CLICK HERE".

I'd have no issue with that, either, assuming it's within reason.

It's really not all that different from paying extra for quality shoes that won't break apart mid-walk after a year of use because of some planned obsolescence garbage.

Apple and oranges, it a fallacy as the two situation are different. The whole regional pricing thing has been discussed to death and was unavoidable for them to be able to sell recent games; did they screw up the communication ? of course, would have been better to keep Gog exclusively for old games and have another side for newer games having different rules ? maybe.


Here they didn't say that they are ok with DRM simply that as long as the single player part of the game is fully playable offline and without DRMs, they don't care if there is a bunch of optional cosmetic / minor content, not part of the base game, and potentially requiring some specific requirement to be unlocked. (e.g. registering a mailing list, using Galaxy, etc... )

It's nothing new, has been like that for five or more years now, the only difference with this post is that from now one they will mention it on the game page, something they should have done since the beginning.

Well easy :

Cyberpunk : the elephant in the room

Battletech : some insignia / decoration are only available while online.

Dying Light : some novelty weapons are unlocked after reaching some milestone during multi-player; once unlocked they are available offline.

Stronghold: Warlords : Some skins for your warlords needs to be unlocked online by registering on the dev site. But there is an official workaround to manually unlock them by editing a file as apparently the automatic unlock doesn't always work.

Synthetik: Legion Rising : I included this one to be "nice", but it is a stretch. Basically everything is unlockable offline but you have some cheat codes that allows you to unlock stuff immediately and those cheat code needs to be inputted in the global chat while being online.

Tales of Maj'Eyal : Another "stretch" case. The game on Gog is complete but the game , which is open source by the way, has an active community and new cosmetic / events are often added and to unlock those you need to be online.

Thank you.

Likewise, If there was any one hoop I'd be willing to jump through to guarantee I was actually getting a product free of DRM, it would be this one.

They stated the OPPOSITE. That they don't care if it's fully playable offline DRM-free. They've stated in the thread they're OK with DRM, even in single-player experiences. Take a look at the joke-of-a-product Absolver still being listed. Now with "new and improved" DRM disclosures.

Agreed. These store page 'disclosures' to clarify how much single-player locked content a game contains wouldn't be necessary if these games were genuinely 100% DRM-free. It's as obvious a sign of slipping standards as you could possibly imagine.