What I find funny/interesting is that some of the ones who have told me and others to "trust GOG, they know what they're doing" in the past when I/others voiced valid concerns in the past are now some of those saying "Nooooo GOG, this is a BAD idea!" & similar, and also that some of them are also ones who want GOG to bend over backwards to the consumer in other ways but NOT this way. o.0

Exactly, and that's what really rubbed me the wrong way.

That's not really what I meant by 'validity' of their concerns. If some medical doctor, in a press statement mentioned some effective measures to combat the Corona virus, all of which were true and valid, yet some people would point out he had an alcohol problem before in his life so that everything he says can be ignored, would that make his relevant statements invalid? It's basically unrelated, and doesn't detract from the validity of what he is saying, despite who he is or was. Focus on the message, not the messenger. Waiting and seeing is all we *can* do (as GOG dictates all and doesn't even warn the devs), apart from voicing some concerns and expressing some criticism on the forums. It's not binary - it's more of a spectrum and a matter of degrees. For those who were ok about DRM free, how much more can they take, before they pull their games out? What about the newcomers who were eyeing to publish here, does this provide more incentive for them to publish here? Or less? What about even the established brands who were ok to publish some games here? "Time will tell"

"Don't second guess GOG"

"They are *likely* in talks..."

Yeah um, ok, wish I had your faith in these matters. To me it hammers in why we don't see many games on GOG.

Also, nobody has still argued that this policy is on the whole more beneficial than it has disadvantages.

Human nature being what it is... At first just reading the OP's post, can look like a really scary policy, so that's when you have to put your neurons in gear and read said policy, then think as rationally as possible, then go on the hunt to gauge reactions -which some can be dismissed given some concerned as I've mentioned, then take a step back. So here I can only talk for myself, usually the best and safest approach unless one is cruising for bruising ;-)

Just to be clear, 'limitless playtime' means the playtime is limitless. In addition it's 30 days. That's what I meant, sorry if I wasn't clearer on something that everyone is aware of by now. It's just the way it is, and always has been. Sure, something radical might change, and the sun might stop shining in our galaxy, but actually, the probability of that happening is slim to none. So we are left with the reality that creative content creators perceive this new refund policy as risky. Not everyone is you, and frankly GOG could use an infusion of new consumers and games, how that could be a negative thing currently is beyond me. That was a bit rude, please don't tell me how to spend my free time, and I won't do the same to you.

Yet, you fail to mention what the benefits of this new policy actually is, and how it outweighs the disadvantages?

Snipped a bunch so all I'll say is that I stand by the above you've summarized. It's not a question of me having faith because when it comes to human nature, haven't got that much of that, it's simply that none of us have all the answers regarding that policy and whatever talks Gog is having with Devs about this. Again, that policy is not the reason why we don't have as many games here as we'd like.

I can understand all that you are saying and why, it's just that we have a different take/outlook on this, nothing wrong with that.

That's fine, very rarely do people agree on the interwebs, anyways.

Yet, you still haven't argued what's so good about this new refund policy that it outweighs these *perceived* negatives? I mean, it was done a few days ago...how could it be the reason ;) ?

Why do you think we don't see many games on GOG, and what could we do to remedy that?

You are right, I have not argued as you put it and some people did put some arguments forth if you care to read the posts, but the one thing I've mentioned before and that too I stand by, is that one sure positive -and here I don't have the pretense to say it outweighs negatives, is that some Devs will think twice before putting games available to us here then proceeding as treating them as abandonware when it comes to updates. Because that's been happening here more often than we'd like. Am not talking about DLC here, but essential updates.

That too I've mentioned before: and this has got nothing to do with that policy, since there is no lack of Devs/Publishers not putting their titles here because they don't like GOG's free DRM stand. I don't think it's necessary for me to elaborate on that as been discussed plenty of times as to why that is.

And the previous refund policy didn't help with that matter? Were people unable to refund in sufficient time, when realising the game was not updated in the past, or currently?

How did this new refund policy help in this matter, compared to the old one? Are the extra 14-16 days a god given miracle to gamers, that prevents devs from ignoring GOG through lack of updates?

Is this really the only positive here, compared to the myriad of negatives associated with this new policy and how it was handled?

So many questions...

Not an assumption. Facts that you can read when doing a bit of research or looking at missing updates on GOG. But just like you said the important thing is not WHO but WHAT they said.

In theory that's true but what ARE they saying? They said in the article that refunds went up ... question remains how many additional sales they got for each potential refund. That's the whole idea of this policy. Make things more risk free for the customer and hope that the additional sales will outweight some possible additional refunds.

Well, according to GOG (I think it was even in the same article - not sure though) customers HAVE been asked for a much better refund policy - maybe not with such a big timefranme though.

SOME devs not all of them. I asked my dev friend and he was also not worried at all and it's a very small team so he is one of those who needs every purchased.

I think there is. There is it's a method in statistics in which you can show up which variables are connected and which are not.
https://blog.flexmr.net/correlation-analysis-definition-exploration

Well, if refunds would not increase much it does in fact mean that the policy did not have much of a negative impact. To figure out if possible additional sales are the result of the policy or if there are other reasons you'd probably need to compare a few more variables but given enough data you should be able to get at least an idea.

I had time to think about it and I would answer your question now as follows:
"It might be worth to try it at least"
If it does not work out ... it would not be the first policy GOG dropped (flat prices / one price for all / fair price package)

I think it's best we leave it at that, because you obviously so dead set against this policy that you didn't read what I said, which was that on what I specified, I don't have the pretense to say it outweighs negatives. There are answers to some if not all your questions if you care to read other posts pertaining to this.

They're voicing their concerns about
1. The lenient nature of this new refund policy that most content creators deem riskier than before
2. The way this policy change was handled, without warning/informing devs about it

And the two devs that people took issue with in that article, Rose and Ismail, doesn't mention the others voicing the same concerns (like Ragnar Tornquist) where such allegations can not be used.

Nevermind all the devs fearful of a PR reaction, afraid to voice their concerns.

Of course that's the jist of it. Make this new policy worthwhile, possibly even not result in a loss of revenue. I think sanely, it is unlikely it actually increases sales. So the benefit is some perceived 'freedom' advantage to gamers/consumers that they get with 30 days and unlimited playtime, compared to 14 days with some conditions.

But as many have pointed out - there really was no concentrated effort to demand a better refund policy, certainly not this lenient. If for some reason people were unaware of missing patches before purchasing the game, then surely in 14 days it would have become apparent. Why 30 days?

I think it's pretty clear. The marketing department at GOG just said 'Double it!' for bragging rights, and 'let's not tell the devs until it's too late mwahahah'.

Mmm. It's called a difference-in-difference analysis, often seen in cases where there is a good control group, or if the Universe deems it acceptable to provide scientists with the golden perfect Natural Experiment. Or like I said, an alternate universe device. Even the difference-in-difference approach has many limitations and is of dubious accuracy unless the control group is really robust.

Needless to say, nobody's gonna write a peer reviewed paper analysing the effect of GOG's new refund policy ;)

It's more 'Let's just force it and throw it out there, see what happens! Things can't get any worse, you know?'

Yeah I mean this would tell us whether or not the refund policy resulted in more refunds. That's it. It wouldn't tell us how it affected the bottom line of a company. If the possible increased sales due to more 'freedom to play and experience' from the on-the-fence guys, outweighed the possible increased refunds, then it would have been worthwhile, even if the net impact to the company would be a whopping zero. We would have still benefited from more 'freedom', with negligible impact to devs/publishers.

But. If there is also an effect of some publishers not wanting to publish on GOG / publish less / pull out, then well, we've lost.

Um. That didn't answer the question.

I went and back and read your post and my reply. It's still reasonable, and my questions are reasonable and relevant and would have taken the discussion forward. If you want to bow out of this little interweb discussion, feel free to do so, but please let's not assume I can't read. ;)

Regarding my position on this - if you think I'm arguing in bad faith and cannot be convinced either way (or in this case the other way), then that's your prerogative. I could say the same about you, but I won't because I've interacted with you with only a few sentences/paragraphs on the interwebz, and cannot wholly make that assertion.

I prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt, and not assume they are arguing in bad faith, because they happen to disagree with me.

All I'm doing is asking questions and criticising the dubious policy change. I think I'm in my right to do that, as a customer here, on a gaming forum.

I've already been told to not care about such things and just shut up and play games, now I'm being told I'm arguing in bad faith. Great. What next?

It does seem incredible to me that people seemingly defend this policy without considering the pros vs the cons, and whether this policy change is on the whole likely to be beneficial or detrimental.

Most? Where is the proof that most content creators are seeing a risk. Some? Yes. Most? I'd like to see the numbers.

Wasn't it Ragnar in the article who said that Steam also did not tell devs anything? So it seems to be a thing that#s quite common to devs. They did not just complain about GOG but how they as devs are treated by those selling their games they developed.

That's a complete assumption from your side which might of course be possible but is not based on any facts at all.

You only need to use the broken search function here in the GOG forums to see that there are a lot of complaints about GOG's original refund policy.

Is there really such a big difference between 14 and 30 days? The biggest change here is the "no question asked" and the "even if you already downloaded" part imo.

That's probably exactly how it went *sarcasm*

Those statistical methods are actually used in marketing - don't know if GOG is using them of course but you said that there's no way and that's where we disagree.

Of course they cannot know what happens before they try it for real which is what they doing right now.

Sure but we cannot say anything about this as well before things get in motion.


It did not? The question was
" Do the benefits outweight the cons of this new policy, in your opinion?"
I think it is worth a try as long as there's the possibility to stop the experiment the moment they see that it failed (more negative than positive impacts). At the moment we are simply talking about POSSIBLE risks and everything GOG did can be reverted with (hopefully) little impact if they can see that they made the wrong decision.

At the moment we can all just speculate. There are many variables in this and some messages on social media which might be a minority or just the tip of the iceberg of unvoiced concerns. There might be hundreds and thousands of people just waiting to exploit GOG or there might be near than none ... we simply just don't know. Is it a risky thing to do? Maybe but I don't thin it will be the downfall of GOG even if it should not work out as expected. Fact is that many (myself not included) had a problem with the original refund policy and GOG decided in the end that they would want to try something different and watch from there how things are going. Right now I really see this as an experiment and not as a policy that is written in stone. Things are in motion and nobody from us can tell the future.

Of course it's speculation, but the fact that most devs/publishers never touch GOG with a ten foot pole, coupled with the fact that already with Steam's refund policy there was outrage and this perceived increased risk (with only a 2hour 14day policy) then we can at least say there will be *many* who deem it riskier than before. And actually that's all I'm saying - that they deem it *riskier than before*. 30 days no limit no questions asked vs 14 days with conditions, riskier vs not so risky. Happy? I'm so glad to get caught up in semantics in a massive multiquote post about super relevant things.

This is like saying stealing is OK because other people are doing it too. Um. No, no it's not OK. It's fine to acknowledge 'what about' Steam doing something bad, as well as GOG.

I'm sorry, did you think this was some sort of dissertation defense? Hm. I thought we were shooting the crap on a gaming forum. My mistake.

Ah yes, the broken search function. Why didn't I think of that.

Actually it's the no limit playtime that's the big issue here. As mentioned in that Eurogamer article, most of the concerns were about how this lenient of a policy is completely unnecessary, and that yes it opens it up for abuse as most games could easily be completed in a month's time. Now I don't even believe the abuse scenario is credible, i.e. that there will be a sizeable amount of people abusing the system, as they could just torrent crap, but the fact is that devs/publishers *perceive* it as a risk - and thus might not view GOG positively in light of this policy change.

It's still impossible to say it definitively, and in the case of marketing departments, robustly or anywhere near accurately. There's a huge difference with how scientists do it compared to marketing departments, and even they admit it's just an approximation.

Um. You can still make informed decisions. Like, whether it would be a good idea to tell the press about a homeopathic remedy for the coronavirus, that you discovered on the internet, as a government official. Hmmm. How do you think the people of the world would take it? (this actually happened recently to a very big country's official not too long ago).

Um. No. You still missed the point of the question. You should list the positives to the negatives, weigh them and consider each of them, then make your informed decision. You've yet to actually mention the major benefit from this policy change. You are just saying currently, that we cannot know for sure, 100%, predict what will be the effect. This is true. And that the policy is reversible. This is also true. But to answer my question, whether in your opinion the policy change will be beneficial or detrimental, you need to actually answer the question.

Again, as I mentioned to someone else, it's not binary. It's a spectrum, it's a matter of degrees. It's not 'either GOG will succeed or it will crash and burn and fail and this policy will be it's ultimate downfall!'. It's more 'GOG will lose some more content creators from bringing their games here, resulting in a loss for us all'. It's actually a strawman to even claim that people are so doom-and-gloom that they think this policy change will destroy GOG and will be the end of GOG. Of course it won't, but it might hurt them where it hurts.

Is this all speculation? Of course. Same as weather forecasts. But they seemingly still manage to make informed decisions about the future.

TLDR - you can dismiss everything else, except the question about whether or not, in your opinion, is this policy change beneficial or detrimental. Does it confer a super duper advantage that's so worthwhile, it negates all the negatives?

You have got to be kidding me here! Words do have meaning and I sure would appreciate you not attributing to me words I never wrote. Did I say your replies were unreasonable and that you were arguing in bad faith?
Certainly not and I would have said so clearly if I thought that was the case. I simply pointed out to you that you didn't read me properly, because I stressed that one -note that one does not mean only- positive I gave in example was not in pretense to say it outweighs negatives

To that your answer was: "Is this really the only positive here, compared to the myriad of negatives associated with this new policy and how it was handled?"

At which point I decided it best to leave it there and I told you why. I twice before already said it was absolutely fine to have different opinions and agree to disagree, but when someone is on the opposite side of the spectrum -fine too, I see no point in having this conversation drag on, especially that if you took the trouble to read fellow Goggers' posts, you see plenty of pros and cons being put forward. Marko did answer you quite at length more than once and yet you don't see satisfied.

So I did not go into lengthy posts in reply enumerating and weighing all pros and cons, again plenty have already done so, I simply said what I had to on the subject. It is your prerogative and right to ask each and every one of us to enumerate and weigh it all if it eventually satisfies you, it is ours to oblige in this or not.