The question is where you draw the line ? For example you have a games like Modern Warfare where the SP campaign is often around 2 or 3 hours, not to mention that we have here games like Unreal Tournament which don't even have a SP campaign just some bot for the multi.

It's not really a question of being fashionable but simply a question of not being wanted anymore. Some say that it was some sort of hidden DRM conspiracy, but in reality it is simply that most peoples wanted multiplayer to be "plug-and-play", select a friend from you friend list and play with him/her without worrying about how to connect, which port to open, which IP to use, etc... it is the same thing with auto-update. If you remember before Galaxy there was nearly daily threads about how DRM-free was worse than Steam because the lack of auto-update, lack of easy multi-player, etc...

Exactly, that's why it is often important to be pragmatic IMHO, something that some peoples have a lot of trouble with. Would it be better if the game was self contained and didn't had some stupid arbitrary "rewards" requiring some online connection, yes definitely! But on the other side when you have a game that can be played offline from beginning to end, is it really worth to not sell the game or remove it because of some silly cosmetics bonuses that have no / very limited impact on the game play ? Personally I think no, and Gog seems to thing the same.

And despite some peoples think I consider that Gog has always being in the "pragmatic" rather than on the "integrist" side, as showed on the "lax" stance on multiplayer they had since he beginning.

I simply think it was a tough call to make, and their "we release it" "or not, sorry" stumbling around with the stupid "many gamers" excuse just shows that somewhere in GOG HQ shit hit fans...

Devotion would have been an important game for GOG, it got (afaik) several awards, it's well beloved in China (except for with the Xinnieh fans) which is probably why they probably announced it on Weibo. I don't know how well known it is in the West (I only learned about it from the "scandal"), but Steam reviews before the Chinese review bombing must have been raving.

So canceling the release of a very good, award-winning game as a GOG exclusive must have had rather pressing reasons, most of which we probably don't know about since GOG won't share their "big picture". Somebody made that decision, and I don't envy them. And anyone who ever has held responsibility for a company, employees and the likes and had to make a "damn if you do, damn if you don't" decision for which their are held accountable can probably relate.
I brought up families, because that is something a least a few people can relate to - will you "do the right thing" if that means losing your employment that feeds your wife and kids? Most people won't, that why hierarchies work, why wars can be fought, why corps can walk over thousands and millions of human lives without much resistance.

Speaking for myself, ever since I have a family to care for, I've become a lot less rebellious. That's maybe kind of sad, but responsibility means picking your battles in a way that the potential good outweighs the risk of harm done by a great deal. And family, co-workers are a lot closer to me than other things.

Their current leader is clearly not as capable (for various reasons, ego being one of them) as his predecessor which is quite unfortunate.

Either way, I'm not convinced Western-style democracy would work well for them (different culture), but we are talking about roughly 1 billion people with the amount of geniuses among their rank that this shear number implies.

We are witnessing an increasing flow of Chinese contributors in open-source projects (ex: VueJs). So...

I believe that despite the best efforts of their current leader and their detractors abroad, they will gradually integrate with the rest of the world. Its a matter of time.

Personally, I put more stock in direct democracy, but good luck with that.

There is a difference between understanding and defending, you have China that is one of the fastest growing market as far as PC games are concerned, if not the fastest growing, with hundreds million of potential customers, you have all your major competitor investing heavily in this market, you have Gwent that is pretty popular over and is distributed officially, you have Cyberpunk that, at least at one time, had the majority of it's pre-order taking place in China and for which CDPR invested to have it fully dubbed in Chinese.

And you expect CDP risking losing / negatively impacting all of that for an Indy game that, before the whole controversy, only a minority of peoples heard about it ?

Yes having principle is nice, but when those principle won't change anything in the grand scheme of things but will result in your company potentially losing millions in current and future business, it's not an easy decision to make and to justify, not only in front of your shareholders but also in front of your employees.

Yes personally I think that the way they handled that was very bad, announcing the game, backpedaling with their tail between their legs two hours later (it's a dick move toward the devs, and shooting yourself in the foot from a PR point of view), but at the end of the day I understand why they did it.

I find the notion that Gog's existence is endangered if they lose access to the China market rather fanciful tbh, even if it's an important market, it's hardly their main business; imo it's just about hopes for even more profit and future expansion.
I think it would have been acceptable if they had offered to region-lock Devotion for mainland China. Or if they really didn't want to publish it, they could at least have been honest and said "We don't want to get involved in the political controversy around this game". That would undoubtedly have generated criticism as well, but not nearly as much as this bs "We've listened to gamers" and subsequent total silence, which just indicates to me they think their customers are mindless consumers who'll accept anything.
But obviously we've got different perspectives on this issue, so we'll just have to agree to disagree.

>"I'm going to boycott GOG!"
>keeps coming back to the GOG forums every day to state how disappointed he is and making threads about it instead of backing up his games, deleting his account and never coming back

I understand your frustration but you're acting like GOG owes you when it doesn't. They handled the whole Devotion situation rather poorly but I understand their decision not to sell the game. As I said, if you really wanted to make a point you'd backup your games, delete your account and never come back but something tells me you won't do it.

Why the heck should one delete one's account, losing all access to possible updates for games one has already paid for? Or for grabbing future free games from Gog? The point of a boycott isn't to throw some childish tantrum, but to hurt Gog financially so they'll reconsider all their dubious actions over the past years. And telling them *why* one's boycotting them is also obviously essential (though this forum might not be the best avenue, since Gog clearly doesn't care about it and the commenters posting here).

Even if you stop spending money here as long as you're using their service you're still their customer. GOG is clearly playing the waiting game when it comes to their recent decisions and making hundreds of threads every day stating how disappointed you are with them won't change anything. As you said, I doubt they even check the forums that much if at all. Still, it's good that most people here are voicing their opinion on the matter. I've noticed that it's something that's absent in other communities. Personally, I couldn't care less about Devotion so I'm not doing any boycotting. GOG have to do something far worse than that to make me reconsider using their service.

I can understand that since there are no really equivalent alternatives for now, but I think for many the Devotion issue was only a final straw after many prior disappointments. The big fear is that Gog will eventually make their client mandatory and remove offline installers, because they've gotten away with so much else before. Now maybe you think that's paranoid, but who can know for sure?
Anyway, I better be off, I've already written all I can think of on the issue anyway.

I don't actually think GOG's existence depends on the Chinese market. It's simply a huge and important market. Getting cut of from it would be a heavy blow for the future. The risk losing potential millions of customers over a single game, just because "it's the right thing to do"? I don't think the shareholders would agree to that...

Another thing is that GOG has one big advantage on the Chinese market right now: And it's their own USP: DRM-free. For Chinese customers it's the safest bet, because even if GOG gets blacklisted in China, as long as they have their backups, they can still play their games.
Of course I suspect GOG is not really able to play that card right... their PR is bad to nonexistant, and they have to tread lightly there with being "unlicensed" and all.

I guess that could have worked if they had kept silent about it. But announcing the game on Weibo... an understandable blunder, since the game has many fans in "mainland". But that maneuvered them in the spotlight of the Xinnieh followers... It's a borked situation.

I sometimes think no PR is better than GOG PR... I'm pretty sure GOG are very aware of their customers being a (tiny) bit less mindless than the usual... why else care about DRM-free?
The radio silence I blame on simple helplessness/awkwardness, the situation exploded in their face, CP2077 release went shit, Corona pandemic, lockdowns, home office... and actually I can't think of much they could do or say now to fix this, and not make it worse. So I guess they'll stay in the bunker and weather it out.

Yeah, I guess. :-)

Should they ever do that, I think they'd have to backtrack, because that decision would blow up in their face (as in, the bulk of their paying user-base would drop).

A proportionately dwindling collection of DOS-area games (there are only so many) and DRM-free installers are their main differentiating elements from Steam.

But I think they are market-savvy enough to realise this.

I think the Galaxy-thing achieves two things for them:
- Appeal to users who won't go onboard without the extra convenience of a client to manage their games for them
- Support dependant networked features (leaderboards, save backups, network play for games that won't implement their own matchmaking via LAN, etc)

And also, if they were actually getting subjected to pressure from someone higher up on the ladder, what could they say?: The Chinese government asked us to take the game down, so we did not to lose the Chinese market.

Customer Base: Outrage
Chinese Government: Boycott

I don't think that'll happen anytime soon "for good". But non-client users will probably become more and more of second-class-citizens, left with outdated installers and locked out from bonus content, as CP2077 has already shown.

"A death by inches", to quote Darkest Dungeon.

Sure, but imo there have been many legitimate criticisms of the way Gog promotes Galaxy. iirc at one point they even bundled it with all offline installers, leading to bloated file sizes. And in that and other cases they only backtracked after massive criticism. But instead of learning from that, their communication with their customers seems to get worse and worse (at least judging from this forum, I don't know how it is via other channels). So imo it's not surprising that there's increasingly distrust about what they might do in the future.

Good point, I was only gaming on Linux at the time so I wasn't privy to that. I'm glad they backtracked away on that one.

Not really, actually. The absolute majority of users never enter the forums, journalists and media personalities generally see forum users in a negative light in general (grognards bad, casual users good) and GOG can make their messages disappear making this entire diatribe pretty hard to document. I don't think anyone would care, tbh.

I love a conspiracy theory. They did have a perfectly hellish December, so bad it's baffling. If it was just the decision to release the biggest game of the year in a broken, unfinished state, we could chalk that up to bad management and greed. But the Devotion situation happening simultaneously does raise an eyebrow, because it was a completely unforced error.

If later this year we hear news of an impending acquisition, or somehow CDPR Group becoming privately owned, well...


That's incredibly rude. Borderline racist even, considering you are targeting my nationality. Not surprising since it's coming from an entitled manchild.