One of GOG's biggest problems is that it takes way too long to acquire games that it's going to release eventually anyway.

For example, today, Black Friday 2023, I bought the game "Detroit: Become Human" from an official Steam key reseller for a price of -68% off, at a cost of $12.94 USD.

This is a game originally from 2018, so it's already very old.

Instead of buying/renting it from Steam today, I could have, alternatively, waited another 2, 3, 4, 5 years, etc. until GOG will probably eventually release it.

And no doubt if and when GOG does release it, then most likely GOG's "launch discount" will be the standard sale price that it usually goes on sale for, which is -50% off, for a price of $19.99 USD.

So, in other words, my choices are either to:

1. wait several more years into the future, like a beggar eager to receive a few scraps dropped onto my plate from the King's table, before I buy from GOG what was already, years ago in the past, an old game, and at a price that is higher than what I could have paid from an official store several years earlier. Or

2. Buy the game from elsewhere, now, at a lower price (which is what I did do). Or

3. Buy the game now, and then double-dip for a DRM-free copy if and when it ever comes to GOG. Sorry, but that's a waste of my money, so I'm not going to do that.

I don't like any of those three options, and I hate DRM'ed games. But out of all of those three options, option two is the best one, and options one and three are terrible.

A couple of months ago, near the end of 2023, GOG released several games from this same dev. Realistically, reasonably, GOG should have acquired & released Detroit: Become Human at that exact same time.

By not doing so, they lost a sale from me for that game when they (probably will, eventually, eons from now) release it.

And keep in mind that I am already an outlier, in that I've already waited many years for this old game to come to GOG, whereas most average gamers are not going to do that; for them, if there is no day one GOG release (or at the very least, day one after the EGS exclusivity deal ends, which I believe is what Steam had for this game, but yet GOG didn't), then they are going to buy it from a store where it did have a day one release, and never wait for it to come to GOG, and never double-dip if and when it eventually does come to GOG.

So, what is my main point of this post? It is this:

Some games are never going to come to GOG, because the publishers/devs aren't interested in DRM-free ever, and never will be. GOG can't do much about that.

But, for those games that are going to come to GOG, because the publishers/devs are open to that, like Quantic Dream games, then GOG is sabotaging its own sales for those games, by waiting way too long before GOG actually acquires and releases them on GOG.

I think GOG can and should do much better in this regard.

What do you think about these points?

I really doubt GOG has any control here. The publishers have all the leverage.

At most, I think GOG positions can get them to release on major sales over the middle of the week. But I imagine it's a difference of a few days. Longer delays are likely due to the publishers.

There's nothing GOG CAN do.

And ironically, you made that clear yourself.
You just ignored the reason for the second kind of games, though it's (basically) the exact same reason:
no interest of one sort or another on side of the devs/publishers.

This assertion seems to be contradicted, though, by the fact that the devs/publishers do release on GOG, after many eons have passed.

If they really had no interest, then they would never release on GOG at all.

So, since they have some interest, then GOG should be finding a way to get them to stop wasting eons worth of time, for no sensible reason, before the games actually come to GOG.

The only reason the games release on GOG is because eons of time have passed.

They never want to want to release on day one because GOG makes pirating a game easy, let's be honest. They want to sell as much as they can from the DRM'd stores before the DRM is cracked and players lose interest.

Not only that, but releasing on GOG means another platform you have to keep your game updated on.

It's only after sales have died down, after the final update has been released, after the game has been cracked and pirated anyhow, that they even consider GOG. At that point there is no downside to releasing the game here, and even then they frequently don't want to do it. But the few that do it realize they can get some double dippers and some remaining holdouts.

A lot of that is inertia. Think of Skyrim. I highly doubt GOG said "Well all these thousands of customers wishilsted it since 2011, so we won't bother asking Bethesda until 2022 then they'll say yes at the last minute"... GOG probably asked multiple times over the years but it took until some "critical mass" of perceived demand / multiple requests to put in enough effort to remove the DRM (Creation Club) to get it here.

The best you can do is politely e-mail the developer / publisher and ask "Have you considered a GOG version"? The more people do that, the more "people keep asking for a GOG version" stays fresh in their minds when they release on stores other than Steam in the future. Delays are frustrating, but if everyone rushed to buy the Steam version, there wouldn't be a GOG...

You really don't want to listen to reason, do you?

They do release here...because they have an interest in releasing here.
They just like to milk the DRM'd market first - and when that is dried out, they come here.

And if your best argument is basically: "Yeah, but they COULD release on day one!"
Then my best argument is: "Sure, they could...but they DON'T."

And then my argument beats yours, because mine is depicting reality as it is, while yours is nothing but a nice fantasy.

But hey - out of curiosity: what way would YOU say, could GOG take/find, to "get [devs/publishers] to stop wasting eons worth of time, for no sensible reason, before their games actually come to GOG"?

I'm really curious to hear your solution(s) to this problem...

Edit:
Did you skip this sentence completely, or just the last four words?

GOG can't do much about that, when the publishers/devs aren't interested in an earlier release

I think GOG could do a little to increase their throughput and acceptance of games. Especially if their submission/upgrading process is as much of a pain as it was last we checked.

All the others have made good points. Why would GOG wait 7 years for the game to release here to ask? It's because they don't wait and signing up with a partner doesn't give them a blank ok to release all of their games here. Bartortosz mentions they have a list of games they really want to bring here, especially from Japan, but it's really up to the developers to do that.

youtube.com/watch?v=aseobWShEO0&t=2m17s

Realistically, devpubs choose to wait until their games have depreciated so much long after their DRM has expired to release here for additional sales if they don't already have a storefront of their own to cut out the middleman.

---

What CDP/GOG can do to bring devpubs over:

- Make porting directly from Steam as simple as possible - docs.gog.com/gog-and-steam/
- Automate payments to devpubs instead of asking them to manual invoice them
- Continue to build trust and incentivize same and other devpubs to release more games through stats, primarily sales numbers
- Build a bigger userbase, although it's very interrelated with the previous point

Mate, they have frequently asserted stuff about demons running things, a flat earth and so on...

Edit: more ontopic id like to add it really is often the legal teams that spam the drm - thats from an industry insider point of view.
Generally the dev teams hate it, the marketeers hate it, but the people making the choice tend to side with the legal team / person. Thats my insider experience (and no, not breaking any NDAs there).

Every time you rent on another DRMful platform, you're actually hurting yourself and all the rest of us and making the very problem you post about worse. So there's only one choice in your post: #1.

You're not starved for options. Play something else. And it's not like waiting is a problem -- let others have shitty experiences with bugs first.

The funny thing is, the game in question is sold DRM-free on a platform other than the one OP chose, and has been DRM-free on said store since they removed Denuvo three years ago.

I'm waiting either for a free giveaway on this other store that is known for such things, or (and this is my personal preference) a GOG release.

Always do your research.

It is probably due to the missing achievements. The publishers don't want to implement them initially while GOG insists on having them, and it can take years before they reach a mutual agreement whether or not the GOG release will have achievements.

So yeah, there you have it, the reason is those darn achievements. If there were no achievements at all, we would get all games here day 1.

I don't think so.
It's probably true with some games, but not all of them.

I think it was Ken Williams who suggested to GOG that they use some DRM for the first six months, and then remove it later, and can have day 1 launch.
GOG said no, as they should have.

So the game was released on GOG later than Steam, not because of achievements, but because of DRM.


Then again, achievements are DRM, as stated by Steam's public documentation, so there is a connection there.
And any game that has achievements on GOG is less likely to collect my money, but that is a topic for a different conversation. But I do support your "no achievements" idea.

Ancient-Red-Dragon likes to complain about the missing achievements in gog games , that's why timppu wrote that . =)