What kind of loser think uprating every single damn post as a good thing?

I agree. This is a gaming store. If they would add something like a "tangible" reward (as our hero says to Cor Kalom in Gothic 1) concerning games (maybe not as often as once a month, but once every 3-4 months perhaps), I would be favorable to it.

Can't sign up because I have no credit card.
I don't know a single person that does own one, in my experience that's kinda rare in europe.

Annoyes me to be invited, by a european company, and then only be offered american credit cards as payment.

I don't care about supporting a program that just adds some community fixes to the games that have been available for years on gog. I just want "new" old stuff, like Prey 2006, Wolfenstein 2009, Dark Messiah, Silent Hill 2/3 the rest of Splinter Cell games etc. That's what appealing about gog, exctiting stuff was them bringing Silent Hill 4 or Dino Crisis to the platform and they should put most of their efforts there.

Rest assured GOG are trying for what you mentioned, but games like those are stuck in legal limbo or the publisher doesn't want to bother bringing them to GOG. There's a reason it's rare. There's only so much GOG can do.

We did recently get TR Rise and Shadow, and some highly-desired newer games - Clair Obscur, Silent Hill f, and Crysis Remastered Trilogy.

I assume you've voted by now - https://www.gog.com/dreamlist/

If you scroll further, they fade out to completely black (effectively not there anymore), and then the badge makes a lot more sense. I think it's a clever concept, but the effectiveness of it depends too much on scrolling (pagedown navigation not considered), and screen resolutions has a large effect, too.

I really don't get this at all. Other than charging a subscription for Steam-like "badges", according to this page, the whole thing is about raising enough money to actually buy out the rights for the games from existing publishers? Reality Check : Microsoft paid $75bn for Blizzard in 2023, $8.1bn for ZeniMax Media in March 2021. I don't think having a few hundred Patreon subscribers bringing in a few thousands each month is going to be enough to save up to buy out Microsoft to bring Diablo 2 or bring Warcraft 1 back here. Repeat for 2K Games, Disney, EA Games, Ubisoft, Rockstar, etc.

Also, please stop passing off other people's remasters, tweaks & source-ports as your own "preservation" work. If you only "Preserved" Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle and Grim Fandango just by dumping the original games in the trash and 'selling' the Remastered games with literal zero effort or required tweaking, then Steam, Humble & itch.io equally "preserved" them just by also effortlessly selling the same remasters too and did so without any "subscription". The originals of these games actually vanished from all stores including GOG (not available even as extras to the remasters), which is the exact opposite of preservation. Just because those remasters have an in-game key that toggles old / new visuals that mimics looking like the classic version, doesn't mean you actually "preserved" the original games at all. This is fake non-preservation. The only people preserving the DOS originals today are Abandonware sites + legal disc owners who are stopping original versions of games from disappearing into a "digital black hole of nothingness" on every remaster that turns around and destroys its historical namesake for a cheap buck. And some other games like Flight of the Amazon Queen: 25th Anniversary Edition are "preserved" (sold) as a Steam exclusive, yet aren't sold here on GOG. So do we take out a "Steam Patreon Preservation subscription" for those then thank Valve for "keeping them alive"?...

I appreciate what GOG is trying to do but this sleazy marketing of constantly wanting to take credit for integrating everyone else's pre-made fixes or source-ports, or dumbing the the word "preservation" down into just "we sell zero-effort 'replacement' remasters that we didn't make or have to tweak in any way" is increasingly dishonest & off-putting.

my thoughts:

- I have so many games right now and very limited time to play, so the amount of games I buy is steadily decreasing - so this is a nice way for me to support GOG (bringing abandoned games to life, making them playable on Windows 48+, being the nicest games shop on the market) without bloating my library even more

- the ability to push up some of my personal favourites (with little votes because barely anyone remembers them) in the dreamlist is a nice bonus

- I love behind the scenes and stuff like that, so also a great thing for me to get for my bucks

Well, fact is, i only "have" so and so much money and i only am "allocating" so and so much money on games in order to stay in a healthy spot with my finances. So i can not just "upgrade" my spending even more because of some new "options". If i do it, it simply means to "cut" the spending on some games... in the end the money allocated to GOG will stay the same.

Although, i got enough of games on GOG i am interested in, either for gaming or just collecting. So i always got a way on "spending" the available funds on GOG, in some way.

What matters more is that people actually ARE spending a certain amount of funds toward GOG, not "how they do it". Because the major issue is simply that 90% of gamers are not spending any money on that platform at all and another 9% are only spending some coins very occasionally, while the big pool of their "game-money" goes elsewhere. Statistics are not lying... we know them. GOG got roughly 1-2 million more or less "active gamers", while the biggest platforms got between 100 and 150 million more or less active gamers.

Anyway, it is not wrong having such options, so i would not see it in the same bad light many other GOGers are doing. In the end, for GOG every penny simply may count and many gamers simply are not that interested into buying even more games anymore, due to different reasons... but are willing to give some bonus-coins for small services or simply as a donation. So, why not? If it works... no reason to worry and if it does not work at all... it may not stay for to long.

I get what effect they're trying to create but the whole thing still reads like "See these games that have vanished? We can bring them back and NOLF too if only you'll subscribe to our Patreon!" advert, which is mis-framing the issue to put it politely. The only people "preserving" Dune are us disc owners who've already done all the compatibility tweaking work to "keep it alive" (and in many cases, it's a trivial 5 minute job). "We added DOSBox" is not some subscription-worthy Herculean preservational effort people think it is.

The beginning and end of GOG's problem is exactly the same ordinary publishing / licensing issue every other store like Steam faces (entirely a legal rather technical issue), and a whip-round on Patreon trying to outbid mega-publishers like Microsoft / EA who spend billions on acquisitions isn't going to change anything. All that's really changed here over the past year is that ever since that Stop Killing Games campaign earlier in the year (which has since fallen flat), GOG have simply rebranded "DRM-Free" into "Preservation Program" for marketing purposes. None of the underlying 'fundamentals' have changed at all though. And at this stage it should be self-evident that the groups of people who best preserve old out of rights games vs 'digital' stores that are constrained by legal publishing contracts have to separate entities out of necessity...

That's why I said 'consistent'. I mean, I wouldn't be here if I didn't think they were getting things right on the whole, but they do make some bizarre mistakes.

And that's probably where a lot of the money goes when you buy a game here (the part that doesn't go in operational costs and investor dividends). It's nice, but if they take ongoing donations, I'm not paying for that (at least, not beyond what I usually pay when I purchase a game here). That's a basic cost I expect GOG to pay from their usual activity revenues if they want to stay in business.

I'm more interested in paying to keep existing games in my collection playable on modern platforms (especially at least one open one) without a lot of effort on my end (given what I'd need to do if gog ever goes under). Given that GOG is a store and not a service and that their catalog keeps increasing, that king of long term maintenance cost cannot sustainably be borne by their usual activities so I'm open to paying a recurring cost for that.

I realize they are mostly reusing a lot of pre-existing solutions and fixes to make those game work and not writing code beyond some glue scripting perhaps.

It is still operational work and I greatly appreciate someone else doing it for me and packaging it in a nice bundle.

Maybe you don't value this work because you have a lot of time to do it yourself. I don't. That work is VERY valuable to a lot of us.

Would patrons get priority on letting GOG know which games deserve preservation/fixing, along with receiving frequent updates on said preservation attempts? There are still multiple games in the store that have major problems and are basically unplayable on modern systems without resorting to hours of extensive tinkering and using community/third-party patches (some of which still don't resolve the issue. The ones that immediately come to mind for me are Requiem: Avenging Angel and Blood 2: The Chosen). If I knew that my subscription fees would go toward optimizing games currently in the store and that patrons would get priority in choosing which games get optimized first, that would be the #1 factor in convincing me to sign up. The concept of preservation is somewhat useless if there's no intent to make those preserved games functional from a long-term perspective.

Granted, I haven't talked with GOG Support in a really long time, so if they're already helping people 1-on-1 with playability issues and successfully solving those issues, then maybe part of my point above is irrelevant.

You may have missed this link, so here it is again for your benefit:

https://www.gog.com/en/patrons

But to answer your query, it's actually more ambiguous than I first realised.
The page says that the Preservation Program helps to acquire, maintain, enhance... and so on and so forth (you've heard the rest before), and that this is where the money would go to - directly contributing to improving the effectiveness of this program by paying for operating costs, hiring engineers, etc; it also says that, 'As a GOG Patron you will get access to... Vote on Preservation Program priorities: Help decide which games we should focus on.'

But these two ideas are never actually directly linked... it was natural for me initially, and perhaps most readers, to assume that they would be, but the first part is effectively an overview of the preservation program:
Nowhere on that page does it actually directly specify what patrons would be voting for and what impact that would have. For all we know, your votes on the Dreamlist could be worth ten pleb votes, and that's it.

So... you would get priority, but priority what? You'll have to wait and see.

Please refer to the financial thread for more insights - https://www.gog.com/forum/general/cd_projekt_strategy_and_development_of_the_company_financial_results_suggestions_by_armchair_ceos/

CDPR is the moneymaker driving that stock price. GOG is not in good financial health and there's not many reasons to keep it. I've mentioned if I was a non-biased director / manager on that board, I'd be advocating to sell GOG since it makes nearly 100x less than CDPR umbrella of dev studios and then reinvesting that money back into CDPR to make even more money later. From the info they've fed us, there's not that many quantifiable or financially beneficial reasons to keep GOG.

I cannot emphasize this anymore than I have already. Asking for donations and monthly subs is not a good sign of GOG's financial health regardless of GOG moderators' replies here with PR-direction and a PR-crafted post on that FAQ page. The numbers that they share with the public and the 3rd party game journalism articles about the toxic work environment and staff turnaround #s all point towards this. Just read and compare financial statements between CDPR and GOG and you'll immediately notice the dichotomy between the two sister companies.

If the project proposal of remastering to modern OSes makes it too expensive to pursue, then it should be abandoned. As you've said before, GOG is a publicly traded company and not a charity. There is nothing forcing GOG to keep remastering these old games that aren't profitable anymore (or maintaining Galaxy, but this has been discussed ad nauseam in other threads). That's something GOG management has chosen to do and it isn't paying the bills to be self-sustaining anymore.

It's a lot more work than ripping community mods. It's also hiring staff or contracting private investigators to hunt down IP rights, hiring lawyers, agreement meetings, contract adjustments, playtesting and tinkering, training support staff, maintaining fixes, etc. all with long communication delays with chances of rejection for every step just for a bunch of old games that boomers / Xers / retro gamers expect for <= $10 USD/copy - https://www.thegamer.com/gog-private-investigators-off-the-grid-ip-rights-holders/

The economics don't work out and sometimes you just have to let failing management fail in hopes CDP upper management wakes up, changes direction, and replaces them with more competent people. Of course, I wouldn't be saying any of this shit if it has been successful, but their books don't substantiate counter-claims by incompetent GOG's upper management's enablers like any staff afraid for their jobs and their biggest fans here like people who don't read the financial reports and argue based off emotions and unquantifiable what-ifs. Supporting this monthly subscription plan gives them a thumbs up, which I'm going to hard pass on.

No offense, but GOG staff don't really communicate there and is relatively useless for me. I know it's useless for you too because you barely post there. It's not a substitute solution in any capacity at all.