If GOG were to be an alternative for people fed up of the BS of the industry, GOG shouldn't have embraced that same BS.

They are burning money and calling that a strategy is just the nonsense established by a tech-industry which has told fairy tales of future profitability to please investors for a decade. Anyone can outpace a lot of things if they operate at a loss. A lot of the people collecting free games don't become customers at all.
It also implies that they only way they could ever justify the money they burn in the long run is by squeezing customers, those producing games or both if they ever became a monopolist.

this makes no sense at all
everything requires investment before it can start dripping back the investment
squeezing customers , oh no they surely squeeze with 12% margin compared to 20-30% steam and gog takes ...
think before post pls

Man... like... read the post...
They are certainly not squeezing anyone now, but it's the big fear for any platform that if they monopolize successfully, they would start to become more aggressive in squeezing out money. It's equally the big fear and hope for that industry, with companies like doordash operating at a loss to create future dependencies. Amazon for example puts out generic copycat products if they see something trending, making it near impossible to release innovative products on the platform.
Of course companies need investments, but platforms and some tech-companies just subordinate absolutely everything to pursue aggressive growth, but they do so by burning money and without a real exit strategy.
Companies like Uber have seen their first slightly profitable year like last year after being a huge waste of money for a decade and still only merely get by, by externalizing costs and circumventing regulation.
Companies like WeWork have shown just how bs the concept is.

I'm not sure about that. I never liked RPG or any game in third person where you go with a weapon. I'm more into grand-strategy or (real) simulation games (like Falcon 4 or IL1946).

I understand a big amount of people would be annoyed because the release of CP77 or some game cancel, but that the same problem I always see to GOG: lack of games. I'd love having games like Wolfpack or CMANO here, but sometimes the companies are pretty reluctant to sell outside Steam, specially when they use the steam dlls.

I want to believe GOG is trying to do an effort to bring here all decent games they can, but it's always an agreement between two parts.

I think they should focus in the website, it's outdated and bugged, and that doesn't help at all. It's also the first feature a potential new customer see.

I think the ultimate lesson here is:

Back up what you can, if you can back up everything! Cool.
If you cannot, back up what games you treasure or what you can.

and sadly we will have to wait and see, sometimes changes to your structure of a business (which is what it seems what GOG's recent losses are from) will take time to manifest and hopefully this also put a desire in GOG to fix the shortcomings that have driving down the site for years, like updating the site, fixing various issues, and streamlining processes and more timely updates, some of these will have to be done after the pandemic ends (if it ever does, but that is another discussion for another time in another place) and some can be done now.

Time will tell.

so in short.
back up what you can,
wait and see.

that is my two cents after a few days of thinking, please ignore previous posts of mine where I appeared to be losing sanity.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk have a good weekend everyone.

Do other businesses really get talked about in those type of terms? If I opine that the fries at McDonald's suck compared to Wendy's, and explain why I feel that way, is it honest to characterize my complaint as "raging"? Isn't the business supposed to provide something the customer wants?

I agree the niche is people fed up with DRM, which, unknown to many folks, includes launchers at least in the way that Galaxy functions on this site given that modes and features are gated behind it. The issue to iron out is to phase out Galaxy, that is what their "hands" should be doing, lol.

They phased out other popular features before and iirc even a supposedly "non-negotiable" feature in auto-playing videos. What should make Galaxy any different? An inordinate amount of energy goes into this thing and for what. A fragmented audience and even CDPR flagship game content locked behind it.

Galaxy is the sunk cost fallacy.

Well for auto-install, auto-updates, achievements support and most of the time multiplayer, you might not care about any of that but I am pretty sure that a majority of Gog customers does one way or another. Peoples tend to forget that Galaxy didn't appeared out of thin air, for years peoples complained against Gog because they were less convenient than Steam, updates were slower, how because of that DRM-free sucked and DRM was better, etc... Galaxy was mainly an answer to that.

Yes...and it has proven across numerous examples to be a DRMed answer. I'm glad these DRM-loving people got what they wanted; after all, they were an infinitesimal minority compared to all the DRM-free games and DRM-free stores everywhere making it hard for them to buy anything. Oh wait, turns out that's not the case, and that it is in fact the DRMed experience that is everywhere! Oh wait, they have also spent years buying on Scheme so they have no compelling reason to come here for the Scheme equivalent no matter how good it is. And, while I wasn't here years ago, I would've been against Galaxy then and telling the people who wanted it then that I thought they were wrong. *shrugs^

Nope it has nothing to do with DRM and that was the point having DRM-free games without having to renounce to the convenience that other DRM using stores were providing. And even if there is a couple of edge cases for the 99% of games released here that's how it works.

That's catch - I think there are lots of GOG's customers who aren't happy.

why not?

Well, FCKDRM.com is now defunct and I can never seem to attach the screenshot that compares/contrasts DRMed content versus DRM-free content, but it seems pretty obvious to me that when Galaxy requirements have been present they violated every single one of those criteria that were laid out on that site (i.e., would mean Galaxy was in the DRMed section, which surely was not the intention of the site).

"Edge cases" is a very generous phrasing considering that even one instance of DRM means something is not DRM-free as a whole. Any inconsistency is confusing to the customer. "This store is DRM-free" is coherent. "This store is DRM-free, well, but now that you mention it there is this one edge case that requires the client to access content, and oh there is another one that requires third party accounts to play multiplayer, and..." is incoherent.

GOG should be looking to be coherent and clear to customers. Not trying to have their cake and eat it too, while spreading themselves too thin. Galaxy had what, 5 or 6 years to bring in all these wonderful casual Scheme users who would use GOG if only a client was there. The results weren't good enough. If the argument back in the day was that old games/DRM-free alone didn't attract enough users, then how can one defend Galaxy given the results?

In fact, I would think GOG Galaxy 2.0 was a sort of long shot to try and bring in more people, so it is hard to justify the original Galaxy as attracting enough.

As a much broader point that will hopefully sidestep some unnecessary back-and-forth, my position is that a client, yes, even one without any requirements to play game content, is inherently opposed to DRM-free offline gaming. This is because the very nature of a client is that it is online and thus the goal is to have people stay on it and interacting with it online. In terms of resource expenditure, whatever goes to a client is not going to offline gaming.

Written form, 2 columns were used left side DRM-FREE right side DRM only the bottom one was DRM Here is the examples they give: That said no offline download will ever "stop working" from GOG.com they are and will always install and work as long as you are running windows. Even then you can emulate and extract them. They are inefficient as hell but they will work. And even if you are banned from the forums or chatting you can still buy and download games and use Galaxy on GOG. This goes very much against Epic, Ubi, Steam, and Origin as they will cut your account and access from you.

Lot's of different reasons. Galaxy. Regional Pricing. DRM in single player games that shouldn't have DRM. Poor / non-existent support.