Ancient-Red-Dragon: IMO the best thing for GO to do would be for them to cut a deal with Steam or Epic or Discord (depending on big the latter two become) that lets GOG games piggyback off of their multiplayer services, in order finally to bring viable Crossplay to GOG.

Ancient-Red-Dragon: On the other hand, I'm not sure how GOG will survive if they continue to do nothing to fix their barren multiplayer population.

Lucumo: Just like a monopol is bad, too much fragmentation is bad as well, unless the industry can support it. If it really develops into an arms race, some stores will definitely go belly up eventually or offer sub-par support due to not enough people buying stuff. Ideally, you would want to get money from elsewhere as well. GOG doesn't have the best position in that, as all they have going for them is (bad - more often than not people think it's still Good old Games) brand recognition as well as a user base which they are trying to get rid of for whatever reason. Steam is a monolith, big publisher stores have their published games as well as services, Epic has their engine and Fortnite, Discord offers a lot of extra features and they really need to make money, so as to support the service (that's why they went for the store idea and they will push hard), itch.io has their indie niche and there are also some smaller ones, usually also catering to a niche or language/country.

DreamedArtist: Does anyone know what GOG offers to devs? I never found out if they offer like 80% or something.

Sabin_Stargem: I think that GOG needs to take an actual approach to become and stay relevant. My picks:

1: Commission the port of console games to PC, with a 1-year exclusivity period. Also require the addition of extra content, and a guarantee of all DLC & patches. Games like Persona 5, Catherine, Earth Defense Force 5, and so on, stuff that makes a PC gamer look longingly at consoles. A year should be long enough to force Steam users to consider jumping onto the GOG service.

2: Create a large team of headhunters, with each member specializing in their genre. Their goal is to find good games that haven't had great success. GOG should be able to make a decent profit from showcasing these "B" games, and there is the possibility of a surprise breakout hit. Getting tapped out but popular games like Super Meat Boy is a priority, if only to help GOG's claim of curated great games to have a bit more authenticity.

3: Buy up the rights to various emulators, and fund their development. Anyone can use these emulators for free, but the emulators are branded with GOG's logo, and have an opt-out splash screen peddling ROMs that GOG sells. The basic idea is to make the emulators so dang good, everyone uses them by default. Including other storefronts and console publishers. If they use these emulators, the GOG branding is kept, as per EULA.

The long term plan is for GOG to establish a dominance with 3rd-party ROMs. While they can't have 1st party stuff like Paper Mario, they can create a backlog of good stuff people haven't had a chance to try. Lufia 2, Snatcher, Asura's Wrath, Terranigma, Sigma Star Saga, Wonder Project J2, and so on.

4: Make use of GOG's video service. Allow personalities like SFDebris, Pickinguproses, LGR, Phaelous, AVGN, Zefrank, and so on to upload their catalog of videos. Each day, a video from each personality is made available for free watching. If someone likes the content of these personalities, they can buy a video or a collection of videos from the catalog. This would blow away the profit of Youtube's ad revenue for the personalities, and allows them to upload content that isn't subject to ContentID.

In addition to that, GOG should try to get the rights to old anime that have little value to their owners, due to age or niche interest. Patlabor, Slayers, Irresponsible Captain Tylor, The Big O, Samurai Pizza Cats, OG Dragonball, and so forth. Basically, an appeal to nostalgic fans who now have money. Just like like with how GOG started.

5: Start selling ebooks related to videogames. EG: "Game Over", "The King's Quest Companion", the Doom novels, "Business is War", "Scott Pilgrim", "Service Games", ect.

Breja: God I miss just going to a brick-and-mortat store to buy a physical copy of a game without any accounts, clients and other shit even crossing my mind.

Anothername: GoG has installer .exes which work without the internet or launchers in any shape or form. Unless any of these other shops start to offer these they are completely irrelevant to me as a customer no matter the split. I got used not buying games I'm otherwise interested in if they came with online DRMish shenanigans so for me nothing changes.

nightcraw1er.488: Ha, your hoping.
1) quite a lot of console games are ported to pc mainly by the companies who made them in the first place. Gog has no say in this, nor ever will. They are a store front at the end of the day.
2) they already do, but with "curation" and the limit of older games available they have to restrict the release of the few they can actually get or convince devs to release here.
3) emulators are a real nightmare legally. You would need to onboard the console maker (imagine trying to get Nintendo onboard!). Then there is the various subcomponents which may be licensed, not to mention bios. That's before you even start to license the game itself and all that. Then you would need to market it to a market which has already had those roms for decades for free, so little money to make.
4) I assume this is some sort of YouTube thing. Having such content on the site will drive a lot of the usual crowd away. Certainly I wouldn't go near the place. I can't think of many things worse for a store than including that lot.
5) nice idea, but it would just go the way of the film section. Nobody comes here to buy books, or film, or music. There are loads of great sites already for those things, and trying to compete on many fronts is a sure way to end.

Continuing to be drm free is really the only thing they have to compete as, but as the world clearly shows uber control with online only, client based connection via the devs store (maybe even streaming soon) is the way most will go and most of th world will not care.

Sabin_Stargem: #2: Degica was willing to work with GOG, but they were turned away.

Sabin_Stargem: Mushimesama was a SHMUP, apparently too niche for GOG's taste. That weakened GOG's ability to keep an relationship with Degica/Cave.