The same thing they've always done, ever since the time it was a very small company, fighting alone against the Steam Titan.
It will keep selling its games, while Epic, EA and others fight against VALVE to be the "Kingpin" of the digital market.

But if you're so worried about EPIC, why don't you just leave GOG and buy your games there?
You don't even buy games on GOG's store, anyway.

Oh my god you're right! He really has only one game in his account. It always felt that he was a troll account but i forgot to check his profile (still getting used to those new profiles that we have). Thanks for pointing that out. I was about to continue replying to him but now i will just ignore him.

I gotta admit, the design of their store (EPIC) is pleasing to my eyes.

Really? All these rectangular tiles that everyone does these days kind of annoy me. The best for me is still the old GOG shop when it started. A single image wheel at the top, some tabs with infos below and a game shelf with wooden optic. Unfortunately I cannot find a nicely rendered version, the versions of GOG from the past on archive.org are somehow broken. [url=https://web.archive.org/web/20111231171505/http://www.gog.com:80]https://web.archive.org/web/20111231171505/http://www.gog.com:80[/url]/

So i had a look, and hate the look (large flat panel 'windows 8' like GUI look).

But then i saw they are offering Subnautica for free (why has this never been on GOG?) from the 14th Dec to the 27th Dec.

Will this be DRM free? Or will it require i always run the Epic launcher or always be connected somehow? I could not find this info on the epic website for the game.

I understand the platform can do DRM free (as well as DRM) so it woud be nice if this info was clearly obvious with each game on their page. Anyone know the situation for Subnautica?

To be honest, instead of people being worried about the number or durability of digital game stores, they should rather be worried about the dismal state of recent videogames.
Bugs, lootboxes, more bugs, half-finished games (indie & AAA), recycled concepts of games from 10 years ago... etc etc


One good trick for GOG to survive is to reinforce its market of old games. There are still plenty of very good unpublished old games out there.

And 90% of new games are complete crap or mediocre at best.

But what is the reason? Saturation of the market? Customers not willing to spent money on quality? Creative crisis of the developers? Collective management failure (big)? Too high expectations?

Programming and selling a video game never was easier than now. So what is the limiting thing now?

Anyway, also in the past there was a lot of crap. The few classics that stood the test of time are not representative of what was on offer in the past. I would guess that the level of crap was quite a bit higher than we think it was.

I don't know how old you are. I've been playing videogames for more than 35 years. And I've followed the industry almost since its beginnings.

And even though we had far less videogames when I was a kid (and we had plenty of crap as well) I can assure that at least 70% of new releases were playable or rather enjoyable.

No internet then. No way to upload patches. No early access.
Or your game was solid and 100% playable from the beggining or it was "Game Over" for the dev.

But I won't comment anymore on such things. Being an old guy has taught me that Time is the ultimate judge.
I suspect that the videogame industry is quickly heading for a videogame crash, similar to the one in 1983.

I'm not that young either and probably can look back to 30 years of video game playing. I immensely enjoyed video games in the 90s and early 00s but still there were thousands of games coming out each year back then and I did not play them all, nor did I like all that I played. There is a filtering effect. Not many talk about the flops of 10 years ago.

The programming and artistic tools and frameworks have improved a lot, the hardware capabilities have improved a lot. Just reprogramming the games from back then would require only a fraction of the effort now (I guess).

At the same time, the market has increased (with mobile platforms literally making billions of customers available) and distribution of video games as digital content is much cheaper than shipping physical media.

These are all factors that could contribute positively towards general quality of video games.

While I do not disagree with your estimation of the current video game quality, I just wonder what the reasons might be? May be saturation of the market, customers not willing to spent money on quality, creative crisis of the developers, collective management failure (big), too high expectations or something else.

Most likely a mix of market saturation (just look at the number of "games" that are launched on Steam every day) + an enormous drop of the demands/expectations of the average gamer.

Okay, you mean the customers are just blindly throwing money at the video game producers so that they do not need to deliver high quality products any more. Could be...

Yep.

That is absolutely the case. Just look at how many things are "auto-buy". The yearly sports games from EA for instance. Then all the franchises where, even if the game is bad, the gamer often thinks that the next iteration might be better. There is not much waiting for reviews anymore, it's just blindly buying them. This has, of course, several reasons. Money is less worth aka there are a lot of gamers these days who work and as such have a more disposible income. "Wasting" 50€ or something isn't much of an issue. Back in the 90s or 80s most gamers were kids who were money-restricted. Then, there is the issue of the internet where everyone communicates with everyone. Being part of the group that does something on the first day is valuable to some people. That wasn't as much the case back then since there was a lack of communication and that's also the reason why releasing game consoles or games way later in different regions wasn't much of a problem. Nowadays, people would be very angry at those companies ("I want it now!"). Anyway, that's a reason why so many companies milk the franchises at their disposal (remakes, remasters, sequels, prequels etc). THQ Nordic is a good example of that too, they buy a "A" franchise and then release sequels like SpellForce 3, The Guild 3, Desperados III, AquaNox: Deep Descent etc.
Additionally, nowadays you can influence buying behavior by having some "influencer" promote your game on Youtube, Twitch, Facebook, Instragram etc.

Ditto. Masses of stupid customers and the few and ever fewer who are not having less and less relevance is the #1 reason.

At least their news section is easy to navigate.