You could just restrict the option of removing an item to those which are free and could be restored easily by the customer. (Hence, demos and the GOG permanent freebies).

But for those I would have to buy the game to get the demo additionally? Seems pointless.

I actually asked the gog support a few months ago about this same issue and they said that they cannot add nor remove games from my library unless it's about a refund so demos are permanently connected to your library sadly.

Great news. They removed a game from my account on *exception basis* one time, it could mean that there will be no more exceptions for the people of GOG. I'm not happy.

Sometimes its not that bad to have a demo, maybe it has a nice wallpaper you can use for your GOG account page? but I do wish they'd offer the ability to legit remove games and give you the notice of hey you are about to remove this game blah blah blah proceed and it cant be undone.

Totally agreed!
Really sorry to hear that buddy.

It isn't just the issue of being constantly bombarded by support requests from people who accidentally removed things. I saw first hand at one job that it's better to just leave things there no matter how inconvenient it is to not be able to delete things from a customer database.


I used to work health care enrollment until last year. There was a period where if someone had more than one account, they were to be escalated it to have the multiple accounts merged together into one account.... only this created far more problems than it ever fixed. Some actual examples of things that really happened that I got the joys of dealing with --

Such as the time when the wrong account got deleted. As in the account that that had someone's enrollment no longer exists. Besides canceling their health care, there's now no record of them having health care.

Or the account with all the current active enrollment is still there, but they wiped the prior year's enrollment as the data didn't get merged over. This is the US after the Affordable Care Act went into effect so deleting the prior year's enrollment information meant that the computer system wasn't going to automatically generate the document that proved they had health insurance.

Or none of the enrollment gets messed up at all. Everything is fine and dandy, until someone tries to do an address change that results in an error that is above the pay grade of all levels of support because there is corrupted data in the account. These types of errors literally took months to fix as they had to be escalated to the system programmers to look into.

There's also the two occasions that I dealt with personally where all the accounts were deleted to the extent that the only proof that any of them existed in the first place was the prior phone records. Fixing these required essentially rebuilding the accounts from scratch and putting retroactive start dates on things.

Ultimately, whoever thought it was a good idea to be merging and deleting extra accounts so that everyone would have just one account only realized that this was an all around bad idea. It was only generating more support requests related to the problems that only existed because they were trying to merge data and delete extra accounts. The procedure got changed where instead all the accounts would be escalated, indicating which ones were duplicates so that those accounts could be flagged as duplicate accounts.


Granted all of the above was at the very, very bad extreme end of things in terms of what can go wrong when you start deleting stuff from a customer database, but Steam doesn't let you do anything other than hide stuff in your account either - including demos. It isn't just GOG that thinks this is a bad idea.

No online gaming site is going to want to deal with belligerent customers that went to delete a demo from their account but deleted the full game instead. From a support POV, it's better to just not let you delete stuff at all in the first place.

What there should be though is a completely separate library section for demos, just as how games, movies and the wishlist all have their own separate sections. This way demos are not cluttering up your game library.

You have misunderstood what I meant.

The game demo library page and the full game library page would be the same page, just have different entries in them, depending on whether you bought the game or just got the demo. Or unavailable elements grayed out.

In other words, the demo would have its own sub section, probably in Extras, and if that was all you had, then only that would be showing on the game library page, with no downloads for the full game showing ... or perhaps they are just grayed out.

But if you are also thinking, why have the demo download available if you have the game, then be aware, that demos are sometimes different to the fully released game. Sometimes they have extra things in them or work differently. Some even have like a bonus level that never made it into the final finished full game. In any case, the link to the demo, is just a bit of text, not the demo itself stored in a folder dedicated to you. There are lots of demos out there, that are collector's items ... some quite rare and even worth something.

Ah I see. Yes that would be one solution to prevent duplicate entries for full game and demo. Even more or less easy to implement.

But many more things are easy to implement, GOG just doesn’t want to start them because it’s just good enough™ now …


And to all people who answered with very interesting stories about „not removing anything“ as this causes problems: I already told the solution. Just give the user the possibility to delete any demo if the demo is still available to get for free from the catalog. If the user clicked wrong, who cares? Just get the demo again if you want to! No need for customer service, no harm done.

It’s just a simple check (and maybe a verification box explaining exactly this).

Yep, to this and your other comments, though especially this.

And we must remember that this is all in the world of software, which continually becomes redundant, so those paying for work on software naturally want to spend as little as possible, as all too soon all that hard work and cost is for nothing.

So it is not just a GOG issue, it is going on all over the web and with all sorts of devices ... they only do the minimum that they can get away with ... that is the mindset. That is one of those things that I hate about the digital era, and I am not alone ... though the obvious advantages and benefits are there too, so not all negative ... just sometimes I wish things would slow down, and the benefits of longer term be more fully appreciated.

I suspect that GOG was seen very much as an experiment in the beginning, and due to various things is still an ongoing one.

So if GOG indeed are going quite well now, as some claim, then they really need to pause and reflect and address many long term issues that they once had an excuse to overlook, but not any longer ... not unless they are secretly gearing up for a complete revamp.

I agree it's ridiculous GOG doesn't offer the option to remove demos or other free games like prequels which often is prequalent on the gog store.

There should be an option to remove them since the demo entries are clogging the library. I can't see any reason GOG would refuse this, it's just irritating their customers. Why even bother putting out demos in the GOG store in the first place if you can't remove them?

The implementation isn't perfect, but I appreciate it when we get demos here. For me, it beats having to hunt them down on other storefronts all the time.

Exactly. if. On Playstation they are not even free anymore. Not always anyways...

"Support"/"Games and Applications" -> Search for a game --> "I want to permenantly remove this game from my account" -> follow the procedure. I think I even did that once.

There is also the option to remove a licence from the "My Account" page.

Though both option seem to be inconsistent. You can't do that for every game / licence.

I would like to remove demos (and free games) from my library, too.

Maybe, GoG needs a third entry in the user's library section. All demos are available there, and aren't counted towards your total. That way you can download said demo to try it out, but don't 'purchase' it and have it in some log or any database things to handle. Also you probably can't attach tags or anything to it, only 'add/remove to/from wishlist' options.

Or they could attach the demo to the main game, and just have it as an option/bonus? You can already (for some reason) buy DLC for a game you don't own, and there's already handling for it.