So, I've been sort of randomly watching this and that on YT, and chanced upon this little video, by Josh Stryfe Hayes, a... reasonably popular (I think) youtuber who covers MMOs but also does retrospectives on older games. If you don't want to click on it - he talks about Daggerfall being available free on "Good Old Games" and then asks "is it Good Old Games or is it Galaxy of Games?" and then with help from chat arrives at the conclusion that Galaxy is the client (correct) and the store is still called Good Old Games (incorrect).

What I'm getting at, is that if after ten years of trying to rebrand people who deal with gaming for a living and their audience still are at best confused and in the end default to your old name... you probably failed, and maybe shouldn't have tried to change in the first place. Let's face it - GOG as a name, and not an acronym, just doesn't make sense and never cought on.

They made the rod for their own back by having the word old in the name in the first place

They were always going to have difficulty with the name as they tried to expand, but if management was remotely competent they could have at least tried to create a new meaning for the acronym, "GOG" with no defined meaning really is stupid and nonsensical, something as simple as 'Galaxy of Games' would have been fine, it sounds alright and if they'd used such in marketing it may have caught on and stopped the confusion.

But no, this is GOG, we need to stay the course with stupid.

Gog is a recursive backronym for "GOG of Games"

Between the Galaxy (client) ads and the huge DOWNLOAD AND INSTALL button that's polluting the library, and confusing some to think that they need the client to run their gog games!
Plus the fact that gog, instead of good old games is getting almost anything this days.

I found it completely understandable why anyone would instead of "Good Old Games" think of "Galaxy of Games".

The thing is, it's neither.

That's exactly the point. You cannot take an acronym and turn it into a name itself. It's an orphaned acronym and it's stupid.

If they really wanted to rebrand due to not focusing on old games any more, but to maintain old domain, they should have gone this way:

Good Old Games > Galaxy Of Games
GOG Galaxy > GOG Client (Galaxy Of Games Client) / GOG Launcher (Galaxy of Games Launcher)

I always call it Good Old Games. Everyone knows what I'm talking about if I say that.

Makes me question if the rebrand was truly necessary. "Old" is a vague and an unspecific term. Is Fallout 4 old? Is Horizon Zero Dawn old? I can see arguments for both yes and no. No new game stays new forever either.

Them selling new games does not mean they had to ditch the "Good Old Games" name. Oh well...

They could just have lost the D and called it "Good Ol' Games". That would have worked for new games, too.

Isn't that what SCUBA is?

LASER
RADAR
SONAR
POSH

Just off the top of my head

Pretty much everyone I've talked to that still thinks of GOG as Good Old Games have been the type that see Steam as the only option that should be available for modern games.

It's gonna be Good Ole Games until it shutters for me, and the marketing people were silly to have ever changed it.

In the end, does it matter, really?

Since "GOG" hasn't come up with another plausible explanation for the name (other than "it is just gog, which doesn't really mean or refer to anything anymore"), people still call it Good Old Games, even if they realized it has at least some newer games too, and is not about (only) old games anymore.

The main point is that GOG is recognized somehow, not how exactly it is called in YT-videos and forums. For instance, I recently saw an article in a Finnish online gaming magazine which reminded people that certain, pretty new, game is on a deep discount on gog.com (I don't recall what the game is, but I am pretty sure it was not Ultima 7 or Heroes of Might and Magic 2). The same mag has similarly sometimes reminded people that some pretty good game is free on Epic store etc.

The worst thing GOG could do now IMHO was to change the name of the store, e.g. galaxygames.com or galaxystore.com because then it would take time for people to make the mental switch... Well, naturally they would still own the domain gog.com and could simply redirect gog.com to https://www.galaxygames.com in browsers etc., but still there could be some confusion when email receipts etc. would not come from @gog.com anymore but something else, also in the title.

Nah, just keep gog.com and don't fret whether someone calls it "good old games".

I miss their their colourful logo from the original site design:-

2014 Survey : "Name a company with a Green & Gold logo".
Me : GOG!

2023 Survey : "Name a company with Black & White logo".
Me : 1,000,001 generic ones so prevalent that nothing ends up actually memorable?...

Port Out, Starboard Home is a complete myth actually, backronym made up purely for the days when photocopying mildly amusing / interesting stuff and passing it to co-workers predated chain emails and the internet!

GOLF was never Gentlemen Only, Ladies Forbidden either, and a statue of a dude on a horse is just a dude on a horse no matter how the horse's feet are posed!

Anyway back, closer to topic, didn't HP decide that it was just HP for a while and then go back to being Hewlett Packard again later? I think BP tend to try to claim that the letters BP don't stand for anything any more too?!