I meant that I don't believe that GOG might turn into itch.io even if GOG continues to add more indies (which btw I hope they'll do) because in opposite of itch.io GOG still does not add EVERY indie game.

I bought bundles as well as regular games and in my case I never got a Steam key with them. However since PaterAlf confirmed that this does in fact happen I guess my argument was wrong here and it was coincidence that I never got a Steam key on itch.io.

Wait but they're for the same platform. Steam, Epic and GOG are all PC. Why the trouble? I don't own it here but it seems to be the same price as on other platforms. Scummy tactics.

That makes one miss the time when we would download patches manually either from the publisher or various gaming sites, eh? Back then it was not important where you bought it.

My best guess is that they are just up for a quick cash grab, but don't want to invest too much time into platforms that don't sell as much as others.

I hate to say it, but I really agree with all of your points here. We've both been around these parts for a very long time, and we don't deserve a cookie or anything, but yeah. I played through Bard's Tale 4 recently and purposely played the GOG version despite having a Windows Store copy, and asked myself why? The Windows Store copy runs better and (not a huge deal but still) has working achievements.

Unless it's a CDPR game I don't trust GOG to be able to enforce keeping modern games up to date, but it's still the best imho for older games working on modern systems.

It wasn't like this for me until probably a year or two ago, when I really started to see how many publishers of modern games just lag behind on pushing updates on GOG.

In response to market share estimates, I would put GOG at around 5% of the market share, and you all must understand that I truly love GOG for what it used to be and still could be.

From a business point of view Gog is at a disadvantage.

If they want developers and publishers to take advantage of their service they need to make it just as easy for developers like Steam/Epic does to update games and add achievements, or they'll continue to face situations like this.

A couple developers I've bought games from here (Barony being a good example) have stated that Gog makes it complicated to update here, etc.

It's a bad business decision on Gog's part not to invest in better and easier developer tools so developers can just do a couple clicks to update their stuff here, instead of having to deal with a completely different pipeline.

Actually they DID make it a lot easier than it used to be, the Galaxy API should take care of updating Galaxy installations, it also creates offline patchers and offline installers for the uploaded version automatically.
I gave it a quick reading and it doesn't seem THAT complicated.
At some point in the past, yes, then they had to contact GOG to publish a patch, but they don't have to do that anymore.

That ist not completely true. Sometimes - especially with never devs - GOG still does not give devs the opportunity to upload all by themselves without checking it first. This should however be the minority of cases.

They got track record with other games, I believe some of them were removed from the store. Just to be certain, I decided to not wishlist them anymore, not on steam either.

Whether GOG has power vs publishers or not is one thing. GOG however certainly has the power to treat customers - and its customers that they get their money from and not publishers - better. And in the context of this topic (of games on GOG being outdated vs games on Steam) they dont: Selling a game here that is known to be inferior to the Steam version without giving any indication of that is IMO incompatible with the "honest communication with gamers"(*) which they promote. A simple potential first step at improving this would be to make the already existing version history and game version numbers available on their stores game sale pages before purchase.

(*) See for example here: https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/wp-content/uploads-en/2021/07/en-cdpir-factsheet-07-2021-1.pdf

FWIW Yoku's Island Express is a really fun game, I'm glad they were able to work it out. Team 17 has a lot of products here and its nice to see them care about GOG enough to drop a patch to bring this to parity with steam.

GOG results can be found here on page 31: https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/wp-content/uploads-en/2021/04/consolidated-financial-statement-of-the-cd-projekt-group-for-2020.pdf

GOG 2020 sales: 343 748 KPLN (>40% of that due to CP2077)
GOG 2019 sales: 162 256 KPLN

So GOG market share (of PC game market) was (less than (*)) ~0.14% in 2019 and ~0.3% in 2020?

Note that GOG sales are financially less useful for CDP than CDPR sales as they only get <30% share and GOG has high costs too - unless they sell their own games.

(*) Quick Google search implies the current real number is rather bigger than $30 billion.

Okay, thanks for the clarification.

I don't think GOG would turn into Itch.io, because for starters they have a better display structure (in my view). However, a lot more Indie games ... and lets be honest, there are apparently only a handful of people deciding on them, so we are reliant on what they deem is decent enough to be here, and if too many come here, it could get quite messy ... at the very least, a lot to wade through.

Currently, even though I like many Indie games, I am glad GOG show restraint.
And I am quite happy to go to Itch.io for my Indie needs ... and many of the games if good enough turn up at other stores DRM-Free.

Hell, I am still wading through those two large bundles from Itch.io.

I also came to the same conclusion. GOG has 0.3% market share in 2020. Doubled because of CP2077. In 2021, revenue has increased, but the incremental costs have overtaken those revenues. They're operating at law of diminishing returns here. This is also bad news for DRM-free sites like Zoom Platform because GOG is the leading case example of profitability ceiling with its current business strategy and level of service.

People are getting this 8% or 15% GOG market share from case examples of one or two games with 8-15% are GOG users. Those are optimistic outliers. There are hundreds of games that barely get any business. This explains why gamedevs will drop GOG from updates and eventual delistings because they're not getting enough income to deem it worth it.

If people want more update and feature parity, we should be actively evangelizing and recruiting more people to use GOG to becoming significant so that gamedevs can't refuse updates to GOG without garnering negative attention from media outlets. Negative reinforcement from GOG will only go so far. However, people are individually selfish and will just buy Steam versions because they care more about getting the latest games / features / updates instead of committing to DRM-free. Also LOL!

I guess that should not be a problem.

"Hey, you. Do you know this great store that sells games DRM-free so you won't need a client to play them? It has this small disafvantage that some of their games are outdated or even abandoned and you have a certain chance that this will happen with future games as well ... so there's a certain risk involved - but no risk no fun, don't you think?"

How do you like my pitch? ;)