I see many topics about GOG ceasing services in Russia and people justifying / arguing against it. But most people don't seem to understand that the same logic that this multimillion dollar corporation uses to shun the country they hate can also be used against them one day. They think that its fine here because ''its justified'' and that a for-profit corporation will only do ''justified'' things.

I think we all can learn a valuable lesson from this. No games company or corporation is your friend, no matter how much they appear to be on twitter / social media. Their ''support'' or condemnation is purely based on balancing the gains from supporting vs condemning something and to go around saying any company is ''based'' for this or that decision is playing right into their hands.

You give money, they give you your games; quid pro quo, there is nothing more in that relationship. Thinking otherwise is just PR doing its job.

I am reminded of other instances where ''cool'' companies showed their true colors and took quite uncool steps to improve their public image by throwing people they were earlier profiting off of under the bus; like when Apple censored games on its store with the Confederate flag or when Blizzard kicked a Hong Kong independence-supporting Hearthstone player from a tournament and kneeled down to appease wolf warriors on Chinese social media. I see this as nothing different.

Companies can do what they want but I hope everyone is as sobered by this as I am. You are a ''valuable customer'' only because your ''value'' is is more than the value they (they being any big company or corporation) can get in throwing you under the bus for petty brownie points on social media. They are not your friends.

I thought this was obvious years ago, especially with virtue signaling; And the push of NFT's to sell you something useless simply based on greed.

Seemingly a lot of the 'Get Woke' is to try and get on said 'gravy train' of seemingly in some political posturing but more often 'Go Broke' follows. There's seemingly a war on redheads, on white straight males, and a push for everything Woke. People who think Twitter is the real world and not their actual userbase and paying customers. (And ends up with a lot of.... odd... decisions in entertainment/games that results in very low sales). But as companies make bad decisions people are refusing to purchase from them. (My own refusal to purchase stemming from 2017 reasons, unrelated to today's... political activities/opinions)

Hehe... i suggest watching DoomCock as he covers pop culture, Disney, stupid decisions in Hollywood, and you'll see a lot of similar posturing while having terrible sales in movies no one wants. He's also funny as hell.

Same way we can understand that there are people that aren't falling to this theater of scissors in countries fighting each other right now, there are people inside CDPR and GOG that are sad with this. So I just wish and pray that people that have no guilt to be safe.

This whole situation is a convoluted and complicated shame.

All Hail lord Doomcock! Our glorious leader from another world! He's a funny fellow.

GOG is Polish. This has nothing to do with your American "get woke, go broke" culture wars, or your Disney, or your Hollywood. This has to do with if Kiev falls they are next on the chopping block. This has to do with if one of the atomic power plants Russia has been attacking blows up they are among the first wiped off the face of the earth. This has to do with Poland having a large number of Ukrainians in it and the possibility that people working at GOG and CDPR has already lost friends, family and/or coworker's lives to this.

I don't think the blocking of Russian users will do much good either, but Christ, not everything is about you guys.

I try to stay out of American media coverage of anything these days, especially of ''pop culture'' but yes, twitter is not the real world. If the world cared as little about what the US thinks (ie twitter) as much as the US cares about what the rest of the world thinks (ie very little), every country would be much better off.

If you say so. Looks the same to me...

That's the problem though, I don't see how any of this computes. Poland is part of NATO and can't be touched by Russia, and even if Russia is completely loony, stopping business there does nothing but hurt normal people who use the site. Many countries are tense / just a few jabs away from war with neighboring countries and they manage to exist just fine. I hope GOG accomplished what they wanted to do, whatever that was. All I understand from this is to not hold any company as above acting like this and assume they'll turn on you too when the time is right.

Narcissists and '#StandWithUkraine'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIcbrFuRfzc
Imagine using a war for personal clout. Narcissism is a hell of a drug.

Did you just hit puberty or something? No corporations can ever be trusted.

I'd say this is incorrect. Corporations really go downhill after their creators die leaving it in the hands of board members. At this point they are a shell of their former glory.

They acomplished disappointment from my part.
This decision makes no sense logically. You're right. That's why we're chatting about this. What if something happens in my country next? And yours? Will they ban people like this? There're better ways to protest against whats happening than just banning every Russian and Belarus customers as means of saying: "Guys! You should protest with us!" GOG and CDPR, what are you doing? Please, think to yourselves. You are just helping to divide the world even more. I'm not even Russia, Ukraine or Belarus citizen.

There are many russian and belarus faithful clients that bought your games, shared your platform, played, loved, created mods for The Witcher, and no doubt, are helping to fix, with you guys, through mods and troubleshoting, Cyberpunk. And they have literally NO FAULT in what's happening.

I never trusted any company blindly. But this move from CDPR is another level of disappointment. :(

Corporations have to comply to the rules of their country. I doubt gog can even decide for themselves to do further business with Russian customers. And even if they could the risk and effort to do it would become too much of a burden for the business (no bank or creditcard company could back up and guarantee for the money transferred).

And russian oligarchs lose a lot more money like probably whole yachts instead of not being able to buy games. Not Putin ofc he managed to evacuate his yacht before without telling his buddies what will happen.

Besides that there is a huge difference between a war where people get nuked to death and not being able to buy a computer game. Millions of families lose everything they had. If they are lucky and not losing their lifes.

Imagine being that POS terrorist country that you got such sanctions.

Do you need a history lesson on how Germans and Japanese were treated during WW2? Wanna cry about that too or you're a hypocrite?

Right now is basically a WW3, it's just countries decided not fight with military (yet) but with sanctions instead.

Well, it depends. Publicly listed corporations have been known to slaughter babies for their shareholders, but privately owned ventures? Not really. And in case anyone was wondering, yes, CDPR & GOG are publicly listed, so they eat children, much like the witchers :).