My problems with Galaxy have nothing to do with my enjoyment, or lack thereof. As a Linux user, I've never been able to actually use Galaxy. I don't know if I enjoy it or not.

To the folks who feel like second class citizens because they want to use the offline installers - welcome to the club. Linux users have always been second class citizens here.

I loved that feature! I bought so many games I didn't have time to play because they looked so good in a custom arrangement on the shelf.

Tags are nice but don't scratch the same itch.

So once again
Is it possible that my games will disappear?
if I have to download my entire collection I'll have to buy an external hard disk and it will still take ages to download my entire library (even with a script).

I'll qualify this post by saying that I may be reading the charts wrong. Please feel free to correct me.

To me it looks like GOG is not doing that poorly at all profit-wise when you compare the gross profit for 2020 vs 2021. Their gross profit is only around 10% lower than it was last year, but one has to consider that there were far more pandemic lockdowns in 2020 than 2021 which meant more people were buying games. (And maybe Cyberpunk preorders should be considered, but I couldn't determine how these charts handled Cyberpunk figures.) So it looks like the demand from customers and what they're willing to pay for GOG's service is generally unchanged. This seems like it should generally be considered a good thing.

Where it looks like GOG has really missed the mark this year is in operating costs. In 2020, they posted an operating profit (...somehow...), but in 2021 they posted an operating loss that was more than their 2020 operating profit. That seems like a really extreme turnaround and that is specifically what they need to fix. It also seems strange that over half of that operating loss was in Q3 of this year. Where is that money going?

If it's simply due to the GOG side of the business bearing the burden of Gwent infrastructure development, then it should be an easy fix to move the Gwent team over the CDPR's side of their operations (and realistically Gwent shouldn't have ever been GOG's financial responsibility anyway). I also see some speculation that it could be Galaxy development costs, but it seems like those costs should be similar to the 2020 amounts unless Galaxy had a development blitz in 2021 (which doesn't seem to be the case to me at least). It could be Cyberpunk-related support costs which should be mostly a non-issue in 2022. Or maybe there's another factor that I'm unaware of. Maybe they were investing in some new internal project in hopes of further boosting profits?

I guess my thoughts are that GOG's money supply seems to be mostly constant at the moment, but they are recklessly spending that money on some operating costs that weren't present in 2020. With this in mind, it doesn't sound like a problem with GOG as a storefront as much as it seems like a internal management issue. So I'm not too concerned about GOG's future right now, but someone at GOG needs to pay attention to what they're spending their money on and figure out how to eliminate these new expenses.

So I feel like a lot of the doom and gloom that the press is reporting is a bit overblown. This loss feels like it was self-inflicted and possibly calculated in hopes to boost profits at some later time.

The unfortunate truth is it is possible, though I think still unlikely for the foreseeable future. I'd like to think CDP would be gracious enough to keep our accounts up for a long time even after the store closes, but I don't know. Consider prioritizing downloading your most important games.

No nothing will disappear.... GOG will be around for years to come...But you should always backup you games when you can. That is the purpose of drm free games....I love how some people bring the catastrophe for no reason...They still want the store to sell their own games and make 100% of the profit...Also cyberpunk expansions will come. Plus their next game (I assume witcher 4) that will probably sell a lot of copies

And I am definitely not referring to you as your criticism is entirely a fair one, unlike many of the criticisms on here.

Don't forget the dozens of offline installers with Galaxy.dll breaking compatibility on WinXP (which will probably affect Win7 users soon given that Galaxy now requires Win8+). There is now a workaround, but that had to be provided by affected users not GOG - who are presumably quite happy to see their longest-serving customers losing paid-for content instead.
This viewpoint needs to be reminded of GOG's Stupid Marketing Stunt in 2010, which resulted in paid-for content being unavailable for abut a week.

If you haven't downloaded (and taken backups) of offline installers, you should treat them as content you're willing to lose. External multi-terabyte hard drives are cheap insurance nowadays.

It's doubtful that that quoted statement is accurate, given that the sales on GOG are very small when compared vs. Steam and/or EGS, so 100% of a small piece of pie doesn't necessarily mean it's a good thing to keep 100%, as opposed to taking a smaller share of a much larger pie, but which still amounts to a much higher financial return.

If CDPR really had confidence in the premise of that quoted statement, then they would have made Cyberpunk 2077 be a GOG exclusive for all-time.

The only reason why they didn't do that is because they don't have any confidence in their GOG store to draw in legions of new, non-regular-GOG-customers, and they believe that they are incapable of accomplishing that, even with what was one of the most-hyped & highly-anticipated games of all-time.

The witcher 3 on gog sold almost half as on steam (Inc. Phys copies that have a gog code) so that means that about 13 million copies on PC the 5-7 million are from gog...so that means that they probably made more than 120 million that goes straight into their pockets...Let alone all those gwent lootboxes...If you think that is not worth for keeping gog running then I don't know... Their staff expenses are probably less than 1 million.

I still don't get why some users this that shelving Galaxy will do any good for GOG? Many players now think that client is a standard, not an option. They do not want to work with installers which need to be started manually. They do not want to manually backup their saved games. They really like achievements. So, keeping Galaxy as an optional client in addition to offline installers is a great idea.

The problem is: Galaxy has some problems which aren't been fixed for a long time. For example, why Steam version of Witcher 2 has achievements and the Galaxy version is not? Why issues with the achievements of Wolfenstein New Order isn't fixed for more than a year?

they are very old people and as their lives fading away they vehemently cling to what little memory they retain from their childhood
so everything back then was perfect and any change is blasphemy and obviously wrong
therefor launchers are wrong
achievements clearly wrong
not manually do something in command line is not okay
graphics where you can clearly read the text is wrong

You should really stop belittling people partecipating in discussions every time, just because they have a different opinion..
And I say this as one who uses Galaxy, likes achievs and prefers GUIs if possible.

I really wish gogers here could realize that other gogers could exist who have different desires and wishes than them. I want offline installers to work, but there's no doubt the majority of gamers (including myself) enjoys not having to deal with offline installers and that the client provides added competitive value. Here's where I think they went wrong:

- They shouldn't have developed their own client from scratch. If you want to support all stores, there's already a product that does that called Playnite. They could have forked it and just added the bits they needed to support the store as a first class citizen. But you get the free development this way that playnite enjoys.
- The should *definitely* not have developed proprietary Galaxy APIs. Want to have a networking API? Copy Steam's API shamelessly. Want an achievement API? Same. When you're the small fish, you need to be scrappy and agile, and that sometimes means *not* developing your own standards that devs will need to implement. You want to lure devs over, so why not make their job of porting features over from steam as easy as possible?

Here's what I think happened: some manager at GOG presented this vision of combining services (which is a decent vision since it's a real market need), and then the engineering team came up with this grand design instead of thinking "wait a minute, we're GOG. We have a terrible track record of long term support. We can't even update our site and forums. What makes us think we can do this massive thing and support it long term?" They should have been humble. They should have said to themselves "how do we minimize the amount of effort we have to put in over time so we can support our systems long term and have the best chance of luring devs over?" But they didn't do that.

And the concept of curating a small set of titles is insane and wrong. When I find a title I like on Steam, I first check to see if I can buy it on gog instead. The possibility of it *not being* on gog because some worker decided it *didn't match GOG's standards* is just shooting themselves in the foot. All games that want to be here should be here. GOG needs to make sure they have the tools for us to find the good stuff.

Probably the opposite..