Then I meant the first survey they've made and must have forgotten there was only a chance to get a prize. Hope we aren't going to have an argument about it, because technically that still counts as 'free game'. :)

But anyway, the point is: there was a time when Gog relied on its customer base for feedback, openly and directly. After 2013 they stopped, not sure if that was a direct result of TeT leaving of if they had other reason, but it's obvious they've grown disconnected from a good part of the old community.

More in general, "people asked for something" doesn't automatically mean Gog is going to do something about it. 'People' ask for everything and its contrary (some people wanted indies, some didn't; some people wanted a client, and some didn't; some people wanted movies - no wait, that can't be right) and it's up to Gog to decide which interests they want to pursue and which kind of customers they want to cater to.

Sorry, I'm unfamiliar with this particular controversy. If it's relevant, I'd appreciate if you could give me a short recap.

Okay, that's something at least. It would be interesting to see how many votes it actually had before the Galaxy announcement in 2014, but alas, Internet Archive doesn't have the page cached.

Yes I do, and that's what I was referring to, actually. The forum has never exactly been a pro-Galaxy place so far. In all my time here I can't recall more than a dozen threads asking for a client.

Ditching surveys is not a result of TET leaving. And they still rely on their customer base for feedback, but the forum is a small part of their customer base.

True. But are you going to please the few or the many? Sometimes you try to please the few, most times you try to please the lot.

People did want movies, though they were hoping for old classics or modern blockbusters. What we got was not that.

Here's the release thread. According to a lot of posters, GOG has sold out to the devil. On the other hand, the survey that went out a week later gave a 66% (or was it 75%?) approval of DLCs coming to GOG.

I was hoping tfishell might have mentioned the number on the conference thread back in 2014, but seems like he didn't. Don't think I can provide a number then, but he did think that a lot of people wanted a client even back then.

No, that wasn't greed, you just had to make a living. But you probably weren't posting videos on youtube where you boasted about how much better you were for driving all the way to the clients like a Real American Man™ while trash talking your competitors who still used planes, were you? That's my beef with them.*
As I said, changing their business plan is absolutely a legitimate choice as far as I'm concerned. They're free to do whatever they want, but then, I'm also free to be wary of their behaviour.

*The other thing (and in retrospect this is much more important) is that they've shown time and time again that whatever change they want to make, they never properly plan ahead for it. So they wanted to sell new games? Allright. Guess what, Gog is nearly a decade old now and I still don't feel safe buying new releases:

1) I can't be sure if or when a game will be properly updated. And I might not even be able to find that info without buying, because store pages don't show what version Gog is publishing and public changelogs are maintained by regular forum users who may or may not want to spend their own time doing the job for Gog.
2) When something gets updated I still won't know unless I manually check the library from time to time or fire up the downloader, because the update notifications are sent manually (which is clunky as hell) and they DON'T WORK on their website.
3) The game might not have the same content it has elsewhere (multi-language support, free DLC, soundtrack etc).

Inb4 "just use Galaxy". Yes, I would actually use Galaxy for game updates... if they hadn't discontinued Galaxy support for my OS because it wasn't worth the effort. But that's another story.

I assume that means Facebook (and maybe Twitter). So are you saying they collect feedback separately on each platform? Because if they were to run e.g. a survey on a separate platform, they could just link that on both social media and their own website.

And I'm not disagreeing with that. But I do get the impression that more often than not they don't think things through.

I was kidding. But seriously, that was a lot of time and effort wasted on their part.

Thanks, I'll read more later. So it was essentially the very first DLC on Gog? Then the reaction is not that surprising, especially if it came out of the blue.
And still, if they asked what we thought about DLCs in the survey that came after, that means they still had doubts on the matter.

There's also Reddit as social media. And Instagram (I think that's still active), and twitch. And the support tickets of course.

No. I'm saying that they do get feedback from multiple sources, including not public posts (support tickets, messages to Facebook, DMs on twitter and so on).

You're not the only one.

Not entirely out of the blue. The Bulgarian Colossus free DLC had come out a week or two before The Con Artist, and people were asking for that. Took a few days (9 from what the linked thread mentions) for it to appear, so people were asking for DLCs.

My guess is that they believed DLCs were right, but were asking us to see if we also thought they were right. They also thought that Planetary Annihilation would be a good fit for the store, were surprised we didn't think so (result in the first survey), clarified and asked again on the follow up survey, but eventually rejected it. Not sure if that was due to the replies or if the game failed to meet their expectations (or a combination of both).

I agree for the most part. And then it comes back to: each customer deciding whether or not a particular issue is a concern for him or her.

My feeling is that if they had their druthers, gOg would just as soon have NOT had to compromise on any of those things. But they did compromise and now it's a bit of a problem reconciling the old marketing with the new reality. A problem for US, that is. Not really a problem for them.

Then again, I go back to my original statement of wondering why we're surprised when things change in a marketplace where - by a long shot - you're not the market leader. Were those early 'principles' enough for them to continue to be viable today, or would we now be grousing on the Steam forums about the days when we used to be able to get our games on gOg? While they had been profitable at that time, there might have been market indicators - to which we weren't privy - that made them believe those changes had to happen in order to remain viable. No way to know for certain, but with (or in spite of?) those changes the store has continued to grow in customers, sales numbers (admittedly, much of it from the The Witcher franchise), and catalog offerings.

Yeah. As someone who never really bought their 'principles' thing I don't resent Gog for betraying them, but the way they did that certainly wasn't nice and has made them a lot less reliable in my eyes. The only thing I don't expect them to do now and never is introducing DRM... but if they ever do that, I'm out of here.
Not because of DRM itself - I do use Steam after all, and so does some of the Gog staff for that matter - but because I just wouldn't trust them anymore at that point. At least Steam never pretends to be your friend.

Though we don't know the numbers, I do remember one old Q&A where Iwiński mentioned that without those changes Gog would have continued to operate (albeit with only a skeleton crew). So yeah, it wouldn't have died, but it wouldn't have been very profitable either.
I had wondered why CDPR couldn't have just opened a separate store for new games and/or movies, or expand their old store rather than messing up with Gog, but then again my business sense is worse than a Nigerian Prince victim so maybe I'm just talking out of my ass...

... so yes, they do get feedback separately from each platform, rather than a centralized location/event.

Because I acted like an ass (again... or still if you prefer) to the community in this thread, it would be nice if maybe I could make just one Gogger feel a little better about things.

CLAIMED

Again, I apologize to all. I'm having a bit of a bad time in my life but that's no excuse to take it out on others and that I think is what's happening, although it's hard to tell since I've been an ass the whole time I've been here LOL.

And please, don't bother giving this post a +1. It seems like every time I give away a game or do a contest the post gets a green "high rated" thing next to it. I don't care about rep even a little bit, in fact I wish it were removed from the forum, and giving away a game is not like making some sort of great post that gives folks some insight or motivation or something or provides them with some valuable information. I know I'm probably wasting my finger time here typing this but I really really REALLY don't deserve a "high rated" post in this thread after the way I trashed it.

Wow, that's one BIG apology and it will make someone very happy! Really nice and geneorus gesture!

In the Galaxy video, the narrator says you can "share the achievements you've unlocked." How does one do that, exactly? I've been wanting to do that but I can't figure out how it can be done.

He also promotes crossplay as an amazing solution to cross-platform releases, yet GOG still releases games that need crossplay with their Steam version counterparts but don't have it.

Thanks, Lifthrasil. I wasn't around when many of these things came about.

So now you know where we Good Old Gognards were coming from. At least that will give you some perspective next time you're gonna complain about our complaining. Which of course you're still free to do, as much as we are to complain in the first place. So yeah.

Turns out, cake's a lie.

Yes, it is.

Still work in progress, I guess.

I wouldn't trade current GOG for ~2011 GOG. I loved their idealistic rebellious image back in the day but it's not like I've lost anything that really mattered to me. I still have everything that I actually joined GOG for back in 2011 and even more. Most importantly, their retro catalogue is several times as large now as it was back then.

And fun fact: when I joined there were users around who had already been on here for two or three years and kept bitching about how GOG isn't what it used to be. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯