I had a lot on my plate in the physical world this past week, and with a hand injury on top, I wasn't able to partake in this thread in a timely manner. But so many people expressed my thoughts and sentiment about this, so all's good, and I owe a round of +1s once my hand recovers properly.

I read Destro's post about GOG's final (for now?) decision on how to go about this, and I'm shaking my head.

If anyone at GOG still reads this thread - the reasons given, that you still stand behind, are far from convincing, and the follow-up arguments you made to explain/support them are pretty condescending for both your experienced and inexperienced customers.

If new people don't know what GOG Galaxy is, what it offers, how to get it, and then complain, I seriously doubt that bundling it with each and every one of the standalone game installers will provide them with the answers they should be getting as soon as they land on the site.
If people miss it, and go straight for the standalone installers, the problem lies elsewhere - it's your marketing talk that has failed, as has your site design, if every instant of GOG Galaxy doesn't convey the message "hey, if you're one of those that want to get things done by clicking on a single button, and start playing on the spot, GOG Galaxy is what you need" to new users.

A very simple example - what does the link to the GOG Galaxy page do hidden in the "About" menu of the new nav-bar? Do you think that this is the menu a new user who just signed up will look into? I don't. The most straightforward approach would be to make it a button of its own, which on hover-over (since you love it so much) would give one the basics/highlights with a link to the download page. Same for the big blue "Try GOG Galaxy" button included in the details of every game in one's library. I don't know if the GOG Galaxy banner still floats on the front page as I killed it a very long time ago, but if it's still there, redesigning/reworking it to do what I suggested above is going to do a better job than bundling the client itself in the standalone installers.

Insisting on going ahead with this plan just reads as pushing as hard as possible to get the client on every single user's system. While I do understand the desire for the client to succeed, given the time and resources invested and still being invested, such a tactic, as many already said multiple times, puts you in the same category as companies pushing adware on unsuspected users. And standing behind your decision implies that you don't really mind being under that light.

I'm relieved to hear that there will be a separate set of clean standalone installers as I didn't appreciate the complete disregard for our bandwidth and backup HDD space, but past experience makes me sceptical reading Destro's post. I'm concerned this may mean even more delays in updates, and I don't quite see how this can be a long term viable solution.

Destro claims they listen and discuss our feedback internally; I'd really love to hear the thought process that led from listening to our feedback and the suggestions offered to the revised decision presented in his post as the best way to address this. So many manhours wasted to fix an issue that didn't exist in the first place...and so soon after we were told that providing a temp solution to restore very essential functionality, like notifications, was work not worth doing.
The most likely explanation I can think of is that someone at GOG may have finally realised that it's a pretty stupid idea to offer bundled standalone installers to those backing them up via GOG Galaxy, and decided to do the sensible thing for those users, and the rest of us just happen to benefit from it.


I'm adopting a "wait and see" approach for now, but am far from even mildly confident this will end well down the road; the cynic in me says that it's more like putting us on life-support until the numbers say it's time to pull the plug.



GOG has also said that our experience on/with the site would not change. Then came the unbundling. After that, came the NAS and chat, and along with it the loss of dozens to hundreds of PM exchanges for a good chunk of us. That were never ever restored. And won't ever be. Then standalone patches started to become a rarity for some games, and redownloading full installers were practically the only route to update them without using the client. And recently came the scrapping of the notifications system with the vague promise of a new one that would come eventually™. A new one that would not include game update notifications, however. Those would return at a later date than eventually.

There was also a time that GOG had more to offer than DRM-free. Which GOG doesn't even push like they did. You may want to check out their mocking video of GamersGate and their blue coins; it's quite entertaining.

So, forgive us if we don't take your posts at face value; some of us have seen how statements turned out to be lies when they no longer were convenient to GOG and it's new(er) plans.

On a side note, do you hang out with Ciris?