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Entering a new year is like leveling up in a game – new adventures and challenges await, which you approach with all previously gained skills. This is a moment that drives us, and today we’d like to give you a general overview of what is to come this year on GOG, but without spoilers – no one likes those.

2021 went with many exciting activities on GOG as well as – let’s be open about it – with some hard knocks. All of those events allow us to gain more experience, learn from our successes and mistakes and grow in our constant pursuit of delivering you the best gamer-centric platform – with a selection of exceptional games, from timeless classics to new releases, and respect for ownership. This approach won’t change this year either, and we’d like to let you know about two areas that we’re putting in the spotlight in 2022.

Let’s start with the platform experience. This is a big one, as we want you to have the best experience when buying the game of your choosing, browsing the catalog, checking the best deals and new releases, finding hidden gems, or discovering that next game to play! There is a lot we can improve here – we know – and this year our development teams’ pipelines are full of projects we hope you’ll enjoy. While we won’t be sharing the exact features just yet, we want to highlight the few that have already been released and are available on GOG, which should give you a good sense of things to come.

First and foremost is the new and improved catalog that has recently gone live to all users. It brings you a new way to carry out more customized searches, sort and filter games by price and release date range, genres, and tags. With your help, we were able to first test the new catalog by slowly rolling it out to more users, monitoring its performance, and gathering initial feedback. Judging by some of your comments, we can already see you appreciate the ease of navigating the offer, especially during bigger sales, and how fast the catalog works – thanks! Our devs are planning further improvements like expanding the tags system – adding new ones, improving filtering, or giving an option to exclude tags from results. Oh, and one more thing – we've heard you were missing the "all-time bestsellers" sorting option. Well, it's back!



Secondly, we want to keep on improving your experience with GOG GALAXY. The client remains an important part of our platform and offers a unique way of interacting with GOG, if you decide to use it. Our approach right now focuses on making the main view in GOG GALAXY more dynamic and live – one way to do it is to show what cool stuff is happening on the platform, something you may have noticed during the Winter Sale when we highlighted the event and the giveaways. In the coming weeks, we will be testing some more changes in the client, so if you’d like to see them first, make sure to toggle the “Experimental features and updates” option in the settings.

And since we’re on the topic of testing, there are more features to come this year, and we’d like to keep you involved in the process. That’s why, before releasing improvements to all users, we will be asking some of you to test these ideas and share your feedback with us, just as we did with the new catalog. With some features, we’ll want to surprise you, so expect the unexpected improvements as well!

And what is the second area of our focus, you may ask. It’s games, of course! But not just any games – it’s about classics. While we’re years from calling ourselves Good Old Games, we remember our roots, and those games will always have a special place in our hearts and on GOG. We get that actions speak louder than words, that’s why we will increase our activities around classic games. This means a plethora of things – from preparing articles and interviews about those meaningful titles, running dedicated sales and special deals, through adding more digital goodies all the way to releasing even more classic games we all miss. As for the latter, obviously we’ll keep those surprises a secret for now, but looking at the classics we brought back in Q4 2021, like Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain or Star Trek: Armada I & II, you get what we’re aiming for.



Just like with the store experience, the same goes for classic games – you may have already seen our first activities around them. For some time now we’re cooperating with The Video Game History Foundation on the Throwback Thursday initiative. Putting a spotlight on our favorite “good old games”, and adding personal stories from the GOG Team members was a no-brainer and we don’t know why it took us so long! The formula is still evolving though, so expect some updates here as well.

During the Winter Sale, thanks to the Foundation’s huge archive of assets, we were able to add new bonus goodies to titles like Tomb Raider 1+2+3, , [url=https://www.gog.com/en/game/total_anihilation_commander_pack]Total Annihilation, Thief The Dark Project, and more. Your reception was amazing – for the very first time we’ve put on sale The Video Game History Foundation Support Pack, a bundle from which all proceeds go to the Foundation. Thanks to you, we managed to gather more than $4,000 USD that will support preserving, celebrating, and teaching the history of video games. You’re the best – thank you!



That is all for now – while we don’t want to spoil any specific features, releases, or activities, we hope you like this small heads-up from us at GOG. Let us know if this type of update is something you would like to see more often, what is missing that you would definitely want us to share (having in mind sometimes we just can’t reveal some of the stuff), and share constructive feedback about our plans for 2022!
Good lord, when GOG Galaxy is going to be released for Linux?
Hey GOG. Thanks for this update. As a long time user I truely appreciate hearing about changes to my favourite platform directly from you as opposed to reading press releases or posts on PCGamer or Reddit first. Considering I use or activate the platorm daily I feel this aspect is important.

I also want to say thank you for bringing back the "all time bestsellers" feature. Much appreciated.

One feature I would like to see would be an indicator for the individual listings of catalogue games that are different versions of ones that are already in my library. Ex would be base game vs. deluxe. vs ultimate editions. If I have the ultimate edition in library an owned indicator for the base and deluxe editions should appear also . Even for individual DLC or soundtracks, if already owned in library due to season pass or deluxe edition of a game, then "in library" indicators should appear on the individual listings also.

Another feature I would love to see would be better DLC filtering. I would like to be able to find all unowned DLC for games that I own quickly and efficeintly. I would also like to hide DLC for games that I don't own when perusing the catalogue. Which I know can be done now but the filter hides ALL DLC not the ones that I cannot currently utilize.

Just some food for thought.

Cheers people and keep upt the great work.
What about the Linux version o f GOG Galaxy?
Thanks for updating us on your plans nd also glad to see bestselling off all time back as it is interestng to see.

I know last year was tough and i suppose the pandemic did not help either with trying to get games and having full staff for customer support.

Hopefully 2022 will be a good year and look forward to seeing some more classic games.
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Longcat: Yeah. Still not a peep about DRM, or online gated content like the Hitman fiasco. And no response from blues to any user that mention it.

Still not buying shit from you GOG, you've lost the trust, and have done absolutely nothing to regain it.
While they could have communicated it better (more than an additional post in a thread dropped off the news page) and more timely, they did remove it from the store due to DRM and offered a refund to anyone who bought it.

You can choose to believe they did it because of unexpected pushback or it was an honest mistake they just took ages too long to decide on and communicated badly (pretty much par for the course as well). But whatever additional they say now won't change your interpretation.
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_Auster_: About bringing back old games, maybe you'd want to make a collaboration with the Japanese store/subscription service Project EGG? They also release titles from old platforms in digital format, many being surprisingly decent.
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chandra: Our cooperation with The Video Game History Foundation was an important step for us and something we want to develop further for the time being, but we're definitely not stopping here in our classic games-focused activities and are open to new opportunities :)
I still have a lot old games on disk that are not on GOG. Would love to see them here.

Just to name a few.
m.i.a missing in action ( Vietnam helicopter game like the strike series )
Sudden Strike Cold War
Nuclear strike ( which works on modern hardware pretty well with a little tweak. )
Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace
starship troopers terran ascendancy
War Front Turning Point
No Man's Land
Kingdom Under Fire
Army Men Air Attack
Vietcong
Axis & Allies RTS
Comanche Gold
Dragon Throne: Battle Of Red Cliffs,
Three Kingdoms: Fate of the Dragon

I understand you need to pick games that will sell well.
Post edited February 01, 2022 by Syphon72
Thanks for the update. I like the bet on classic games. I like that if you continue betting on gog galaxy. I like that the player community is being respected.
high rated
Some from my wishlist.

Enemy Infestation (Ripcord Games / Panasonic)
Split Second (Black Rock / Disney)
Blur (Bizarre Creations / Activision)
Dune 2000 (Westwood / EA)
Emperor: Battle for Dune (Westwood / EA)
Command & Conquer series (Westwood / EA)

No One Lives Forever 1 and 2. Unfortunately that appears to be a licensing nightmare.
Post edited February 01, 2022 by Jalister
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Longcat: Yeah. Still not a peep about DRM, or online gated content like the Hitman fiasco. And no response from blues to any user that mention it.

Still not buying shit from you GOG, you've lost the trust, and have done absolutely nothing to regain it.
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BitMaster_1980: While they could have communicated it better (more than an additional post in a thread dropped off the news page) and more timely, they did remove it from the store due to DRM and offered a refund to anyone who bought it.

You can choose to believe they did it because of unexpected pushback or it was an honest mistake they just took ages too long to decide on and communicated badly (pretty much par for the course as well). But whatever additional they say now won't change your interpretation.
Heh, they removed it after massive pressure from the community, and then never commented on it again. They obviously knew it had online gated content. And it's not about Hitman alone, it's about DRM in general. GOG had a FCK DRM policy from the beginning which they quietly faded out, and now doesn't even want to comment on.

I've been here since the start. It's not about choosing to believe anything, it's about what GOG has become. If anyone is interpreting anything here, it's obviously blind fanboys who will defend this shit no matter what GOG does. Until they clarify their DRM policy and the Hitman controversy, they are not getting another dime from me.
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kyuzo68: What about the Linux version o f GOG Galaxy?
When there's enough people buying on Linux to justify the development cost. Until then, it would be a massive waste of time and money for them to make a Linux version. Don't like it? Don't use an operating system that you know has almost zero commercial software support.
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Syphon72: Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace
My man!

Please, GOG. Bring this one. It's not like there's no proof of demand considering the amount of votes on the wishlist: https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/star_wars_episode_i_the_phantom_menace
high rated
Glad to see GOG opening up a bit in terms of communication.

Hopefully we'll also see some love for offline installers: there's been no improvement in that regard - and actually quite a few regressions - since the release of the original GOG Downloader.

Having official tools to keep up-to-date my offline installers library without the process requiring a silly amount of time and dedication along with not having to worry about ending up with an inferior version compared to the Steam or Galaxy download-as-install ones (either for lack of updates or because the latest - and only available as offline installer - update is broken) would go a long way towards bringing my expenditure here closer to the almost-weekly purchases of the early days than to the almost-yearly of recent times.
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Syphon72: Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace
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LusoGamer: My man!

Please, GOG. Bring this one. It's not like there's no proof of demand considering the amount of votes on the wishlist: https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/star_wars_episode_i_the_phantom_menace
GOG, listen to these wise people, and while you're at it, bring all the remaining Star Wars titles too.
high rated
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GOG.com: First and foremost is the new and improved catalog that has recently gone live to all users. ...
Thank you for the improved search options and bringing back "all-time bestsellers". :)
I've said this already but please bring back letting people type in a dev or publisher's name and having games published by them come up. And letting people have a "reverse wishlist" they can hide specific games onto (but can view the list if they think they hid a game by mistake); let people select the game for hiding on the game page if having a checkbox on the thumbnail is too likely to unintentionallybe clicked on.
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GOG.com: Secondly, we want to keep on improving your experience with GOG GALAXY. The client remains an important part of our platform and offers a unique way of interacting with GOG, if you decide to use it.
I don't care about Galaxy personally but I also don't hate it like some users. If possible keep making it easier for devs and pubs to use, but also, imo don't reject a game just because a dev won't implement Galaxy features.

I wonder if you could partner with Hamachi or Gameranger or some similar service to give new life to multiplayer for old games? (or incorporate this into Galaxy, unless a lot of time and money would be needed) I want to be careful about encouraging adding yet another item to GOG's "plate" but this could theoretically be another way to position yourself against Steam - "old multiplayer on new machines".
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GOG.com: And since we’re on the topic of testing, there are more features to come this year, and we’d like to keep you involved in the process. That’s why, before releasing improvements to all users, we will be asking some of you to test these ideas and share your feedback with us...
cheers :)
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GOG.com: ... While we’re years from calling ourselves Good Old Games, we remember our roots ... we will increase our activities around classic games. This means a plethora of things – from preparing articles and interviews about those meaningful titles, running dedicated sales and special deals, through adding more digital goodies all the way to releasing even more classic games we all miss. ...
I understand you don't have a ton of resources, but please keep testing games already here with the goal of having them work straight out of the box (and maybe you do already) - I understand this is difficult and probably time-consuming, but for better or worse it is a not-insignificant part of your reputation. Related to this, I know it might not go well but if you had to raise prices slightly each year to pay specifically for this service, I think people would be okay with this. (logically work your way down the all-time bestsellers' list)

has GOG ever implemented dgVoodoo with any games? I thought they were given permission to do so years ago.
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GOG.com: The Video Game History Foundation on the Throwback Thursday initiative. Putting a spotlight on our favorite “good old games”, and adding personal stories from the GOG Team members was a no-brainer and we don’t know why it took us so long! The formula is still evolving though, so expect some updates here as well.
I'd encourage you to work with the community also to get their stories about good old games they recommend (or just games in general here, especially titles that might not have sold well and could use some exposure). And situations where DRM-free has been useful.
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GOG.com: ...
Cheers for the write-up.

I don't mind Galaxy the way some people do, but I think GOG's strengths and business position remain with DRM-free and "old games on new machines". Don't put too many things on your plate.

Some feedback (a lot of which is me repeating myself tbh); I'm not spending a lot of time processing my points so people may come up with good criticism against what I wrote:

* I'm not exactly sure what's going on with Selaco, but it seems like bizdev or whoever needs to be more open about why they aren't communicating back? When they're super-busy, maybe have an auto-email reply to each new submission saying something like, "Hey we're really busy, please try submitting again in a few weeks."

* I understand Support is perpetually swamped, and there are probably good ways to automate a lot of simple questions, but I'm not sure about the bot based on the frustration I've seen on the forum. Have people go through a series of options, menus/dropdowns, or searchwords perhaps before the ability to use a contact form? I dunno, there may not be any easy answers.

* I remain on the "less curation" train overall, except in cases where curation would help prevent serious "2nd class citizen" issues (or of course the game is extremely boring or buggy or an asset flip or whatever). I'd be fine with games like Underworld Ascendant (granted for me it's because it's got like 1800+ wishlist votes iirc) and Bullet Witch showing up.

* I encourage bringing more bundles of decently-reviewed games that are cheap on Steam but also have 125-150+ votes on the community wishlist, like missing 1C entertainment and missing Microids' titles.

* Speaking of "2nd class", GOG should take a more active role in ensuring significant patches get here within a reasonable time. I understand you're very busy in general, but I can see this being the "death" of GOG long-term if GOG gets a reputation for this. Personally I don't mind things like achievements or leaderboards not being ported here, but missing patches and DLC is very concerning. I understand you need day-1 sales, but waiting until the game is "old"ish before bringing it here can (I assume, it seems logical) help avoid this.

Could you reward devs with a "recently updated" section on the front page?

* I remain okay with gutted multiplayer for "old"ish titles, especially when it means "AAA" titles can show up like Tomb Raider 2013.

* Please bring more highly-voted freeware titles. I understand resources have to be spent on that for no money in return but it's a nice touch.

(I'll probably come up with more things later but I've got other things to do now :)
Post edited February 01, 2022 by tfishell
Please, don't abandon Galaxy development. A lot of people like and see the incredible potential of Galaxy! Just try and keep it optional and/or for multiplayer.