That could be my fault since I suggested it get locked for going so off topic.

Please make an entry in the topic listed below, so that it can be cordially arranged.

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/forum_game_make_a_wish_for_the_person_before_you

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Repugnant

Officially reported:

CrazyOlCoot

foad01

Time4Tea

I wouldn't go so far as to claim he is a plant by GOG, but perhaps they take advantage of the disruption foad causes.

And foad never cares about the truth, just cherry picks some facts, often getting things out of context, plus throws in some nonsense of his or her own just to muddy things further.

Clearly foad gets his or her jollies causing disruption, and likes the sound of their own voice ... even though this is just written words here.

And I say all that as an ardent supporter of GOG. But that doesn't mean I am blind or even forgiving at times of GOG's failings etc, but overall I believe in GOG ... who are certainly less than perfect ... but then, who isn't ... especially foad. ;P

GOG got Chronos and Silksong, many new games coming and we just got great releases like OlliOlli World - GOG certainly doesnt feel like a sinking ship right now.

Seems to be a common thing with trolls in general, they think we hang on their every word and need to hear their life story between the pointless drama and off topic spam. I partially blame anti social media for the needy constant attention seeking/validation.

Well, they don't seem to be that wrong about it...just saying.

Trolls are like mosquitos at night when you wanna sleep, it's hard to ignore them. For most people.

When it comes to "GOG dying" I'd say it's at a tipping point.

Lol, I didn't originally intend to use that pun, but it sorta fits nicely there, doesn't it? The donation system was an obvious cry for help, but they continue to shoot themselves in their foot even with that "feature" by not offering solid details about how these tips are being spent. When there's no details offered, people on the fence would wonder whether a share still goes into the pockets of the execs, or the tips replace money the company would have to invest anyway, still fattening the wallets of everyone but not feeding the starving business operations it purports to support.

And there is of course the endless overload on Support, indicating staff there are perpetually short-handed. The absence of even a part-time moderator for the forum (etc) all screams a company well over-extended for its profits.

Then there's the cost-cutting I and others have seen with the CDN service. There was once a time where more distantly geo-located GOG customers were afforded stable and reasonable download speeds along with everyone else, even for browser customers. Now it's wildly unreliable for people not centrally located to specific population hotspots, and generally favours Galaxy customers - intentionally or not.

The Preservation Program would appear on the surface level be counted as a decent attempt to bolster GOG's public image, but some customers have found themselves not enjoying having game performance fiddled with at a whim and alternative versions (backtracking to the pre-preservation version) limited solely to Galaxy customers. A second-class system, intended or not.

The Dreamlist is frankly a Wishlist with a new coat of paint. New customers to GOG fell for the notion that it somehow meant the "winning" vote actually meant the games arriving on GOG. Alas, we here all know better.

And Galaxy 2.0 isn't quite what most expected of it. A launcher for launchers at best, with an eternal bug chase to keep the officially-supported integrations working with each associated platform change, a perpetual "Beta" status, updates which nuke functionality and require full re-installation to clear the problem, and no signs of ever being refined system performance-wise. It's frankly an embarrassing clunky mess.

Now I know it's impossible to make everyone happy, but their problems are so widely spread across their platform that you'd in my opinion have to be lucky not to encounter any of these and be 100% satisfied with GOG's service.

So compared to back when GOG decided a fancy new version of Galaxy was the cure-all for the platform, yeah, I'd say GOG appears to be on much shakier ground than it once was. Is it dying? It's certainly at risk of complete failure if it can't turn itself around. It's not looking good for sure.

A follow up question: would you be understanding if GOG had to shut down, despite disagreeing with the direction GOG has gone in? What if it turned out too many people were pirating GOG games because it was so easy to find a clean installer online, like on sites dedicated to pirating GOG games only (vs just finding zipped up files of Steam versions of whatever via torrents), mixed with people who are too invested in Steam and Steam features (even Epic with all their money for free games is struggling to get people invested, right)? Would you be "meh"? Would you just shop at another DRM-free store like Z-P or Fire Flower games?

Also, people can talk about the future where Galaxy never existed, but what's done is done, just accept that. But that's another question: if GOG were to get rid of Galaxy in the near ish future, do you believe they would survive? How much money would they actually save? Don't pretend like Galaxy never existed, just imagine GOG starts preparing to get rid of Galaxy now and it leaves in like 6 months to a year.

What you seem to be suggesting is: what if DRM-free turns out to just not be a viable business model? I don't believe that to be the case. GOG was doing good business for many years before the Galaxy client came along. Z-P seems to be doing good business, despite having a smaller selection of games and fewer sales than GOG. And that's not to mention that DRM-free was the norm for PC games for at least a decade, prior to Steam normalizing online DRM. If DRM-free were not viable, then the PC game industry would never have gotten off the ground in the first place.

Therefore, if GOG were to go under, it would most likely be because their management screwed up. In that case, I would have little sympathy/understanding. It would be a shame and a bad thing for DRM-free, but I believe the DRM-free movement would go on and yes I would just keep shopping at other DRM-free stores (as I do currently).

Imo, GOG needs to get rid of Galaxy. It was a bad decision in the first place and the client has apparently become a large financial weight around the store's neck. Therefore, the only sensible business decision is to axe it. But, I understand that discontinuing at this stage would be complicated and messy. The biggest issue I see would be with the multiplayer games that are reliant on Galaxy. GOG would need to think of some way to modify those games so that MP would work without the client. Perhaps they could devise some sort of multiplayer server application to fill that gap, similar to Gamespy? But yeah, it's possible things might get worse, before they get better.

What stores do you use besides Z-P?