tfishell: You guys do good work, but it's endless. What keeps you going after all these years? Devs and pubs apparently seem to hate GOG because GOG is so small so not worth updating games.
Thanks a lot for your words.
First of all, this is a collective effort. I myself started contributing only this year and I took control of the Excel file only in summer. So it's not just a few people doing this.
Let's get to the important part. You said: "devs and pubs apparently seem to hate GOG because GOG is so small so not worth updating games". The truth is, the games that end up on the list are still a
minority. A large minority, but a minority nonetheless. The whole "GOG isn't worth it" is just words that devs and pubs keep repeating themselves so they can get away with not providing support to paying customers, because that's what we're first of all. We're not random people asking for favours, we're their customers, we're paying for a product and we deserve to be treated with respect. This is yet another anti-customers discourse that a loud minority is trying to propagate to the public.
The truth is that the large majority of games on GOG, from Triple A to indie games, are kept up to date. The great majority of Linux and Mac ports are brought to GOG. For example, the story of GOG scrapping the development of Galaxy for Linux is always abused to claim "GOG is done with Linux", but that's ridiculous. There are around 130 Linux builds that are missing on GOG out of around 1300 Linux builds that are available. Linux games can still be packed into offline installers
just like any other OS. The same way Windows games on GOG were only available as offline installers for years before Galaxy existed. The same way itch.io sells thousands of video games as offline installers. And as you can see, there's no shortage of missing Mac builds on GOG even though Galaxy
is available on Mac.
If there are people who believe we have no right to expect anything from pubs and devs, so be it. But we still have the right to compile a list of games that have the same price but less features on GOG. People have the right to access such information so they can decide whether to buy a game or not. And we have every right to refuse to buy those games, or to suggest people not to buy them.
We're not doing anything illicit. We're listing public information that is available just by reading patch notes or comparing sites like SteamDB and GOGDB. In many cases devs and publishers themselves bluntly told us they refuse to update their games on GOG. It happened
very rarely that developers came to us to apologise, personally I only counted three such cases. And I don't recall a single time when someone came to threaten us with anything, because there's nothing we can be threatened with.
"If you don't stop telling people that my game on GOG costs the same as Steam but is missing updates I'm gonna sue you."
Talking about myself, I'm not even as strict as it appears. I don't add games that receive their updates a few days later on GOG than other platforms but still receive them. I didn't add Gloomy Days because I take it for granted that developers didn't mean to update a dev build on GOG and was just a honest mistake on their part. I am perfectly willing to go outside the cold logic of "I paid you so get a move on" and be understanding to developers who are struggling with lack of time or resources. That doesn't bother me. But everything has a limit.