So true.

@a bunch of you.

Clearly you need to read properly.

And this has nothing to do with the fairly recent impact of the virus. I am well aware it is having an impact. It is more about the underlying code of this website for one thing, which of course the net usage right now would only ascerbate. But the main issues I have mentioned have been happening long before that, if somewhat in recent times for some of them ... still not virus related.

So design decisions, coding decisions, etc ... and a real bad decision in a few ways, to have removed the GOG Downloader right now, and attempt to force those who were using it, to use Galaxy which would only impact web traffic even more.

Not suggesting there would ever be a good time to remove the GOG Downloader, without giving a suitable replacement first.

Enjoy your biases and attitudes and tunnel vision and poor reading skills.

I have a lot of respect for GOG, so haven't written this thread lightly. If I didn't care, I would never have written it.

It felt time to me to speak up. My apologies if you think I am just being a drama queen, but that is more about you and your faulty perceptions and understanding, than me.

Enjoy your gaming and stay free of the virus.

P.S. This whole issue has been building for quite some time, and I am not the only one who knows or feels this.

I'm sorry if I came across as overestimating the gog community, this was never my intention.

My point is that, so far, the only thing that retained GOG's values and identity was the pressure of a critical mass of customers. Not GOG itself, it holds no principles by itself. GOG is always steering towards Steam, oops-ing when there's a customer pushback, and waiting until the population changes enough to resume course. And does this population change. Look at your forum and community.

GOG is GOGing because its customer base is its customer base. As soon as they'll feel safe with users even more "used to" the Steam way of gaming, you can expect the next dominos to fall with the same arguments.

It makes no difference for you, but the sympathy I had for the old version of GOG was determining my shopping habits here, my "customer loyalty", my "oh damn it's a bit expensive but oh hell it's supporting GOG anyway". The antipathy that grew with the years and the change of mentality plays an even bigger role that what is or isn't implemented - when anything good is forced, temporary and unstable.

And this ambiguity of GOG, this perpetual negociation between what its brand's image still imposes and what is the underlying sensitivity is something that can be seen in all aspects, from the shop structure to the forum moderation. It stinks under the facade, and the least that an occasional user can do is to point it out from time to time.

Even, or especially, if it offends the fans.

Welcome to the club.

Only use GOG to occasionally glance at their general forum run by crap mods.

Do you mind not glancing at GOG at all please? We don’t need any more crap users. Cheers

Sorry.

I like to watch.

Honestly you would get better responses if you didn't attack people in your posts.

The middle is pretty thorough however you start and end it by insulting people and acting like they have a problem with you. I wouldn't blame someone at all for not reading your posts if they feel they are just going to get insulted all throughout it.

I can clearly see how people can get the vibe of a drama queen based on the structure of this and previous posts, if you just stated "This is the issue I am having" then if someone isn't quite getting what the problem just expand and provide an example rather than taking shots.

They have disappointed me as well for many years now. Not mainly due to removing the GOG Downloader, though, I honestly don't care about that. Didn't use it for years. But all this pushing of bloatware is very jading, DLC all over the place, one "principle" after the other falling like domino bricks.

Yet... they're the least bad in a bad bunch. They still offer DRM Free games, and although Linux support is for the most part shit, it's still the only actual store I buy games from. All the others are infinitely much worse. I love to buy directly from developers when possible, as long as it's DRM Free. But despite GOG's development being a huge concern over the last years (probably at least 4-5 years by now), they remain the only alternative.
Since the webpage was brought up... This I wholeheartedly agree with. It's horrendous to use. Especially the front page. It regularly fails to load or totally locks up when I use it on mobile. I basically don't use the frontpage any more, because it is futile. Giant banners and 'slide shows' and stuff that takes seconds to load. Content that is jumping all over the place. Go somewhere and hit back, and you're in a totally different place. It's a horrible user experience.

Whoever made that front page should be taken out back and shouted at. Repeatedly.

I don't get on here as much as I used to, I'll tell you that. This place has become something of the pits. Many of the good posters have left, and the store itself has become almost unbearable. I love the community for what it was when I first joined. Now it's a hollow shell of that. And the store has changed, but not for the better. The outdated (even in 2011 and 2012) forum software is still broken and buggy 8 years on, with few to no attempts to fix or replace it despite several community complaints. And Galaxy is a broken mess of a piece of software that barely does what it is supposed to (with an enormous memory and CPU overhead for what it is) at best, and at worst doesn't function or functions adversely.

GOG once touted that they officially support Linux only to completely drop that idea. Their own software doesn't even support it, and apparently never will because they honestly don't care. It's almost like they never truly had a plan for where they were going to move and have merely benefited from being under the same umbrella as CDPR, which finally hit a real payday with The Witcher 3 and hopes to replicate that success with Cyberpunk 2077. It's sad and every time they break something and promise to fix it only to forget about it or completely drop communication about it I remove myself a little further from my investment of time and energy here.

It's easy to blame the "lower" workforce; [devs, programmers, consultants, admins, techs et al].

A concept that many, especially in IT/gaming companies are painfully aware of; leaders without much understanding and or education of the things they are supposed to govern are hired because they have a fancy degree in leadership / economics. In most cases we [] really understand what actually needs to be done but are hampered by these useless leaders.

GOG's web devs might very well be highly competent for all we know... but at the end of the day, leaders decide what goes and what doesn't goes. Blame them!

So, those leaders involved in the decision (or indecision) to not adapt or improve certain aspects to make consumers more happy (of course, there's a limit to how much one should accommodate costumers) should be fired, but when the ignorant board or top leaders are protection them for the sake of appearance or friendship then the company is definitely going loosing costumers.

But then, they also realize that such people are already on Steam, and have no reason whatsoever to come to GOG. So calling them "potential customers" is misleading, as they most probably are not.

Maybe we should start yet another poll:

"Poll to anyone who buys games from GOG at least semi-regularly or has a quite sizeable collection on GOG already (like several hundred games or more): Why are you buying games specifically from GOG?"

I guess only active forum members would participate (not all people who ever visit GOG), but at least we could get some indication why someone would regularly choose to buy games from GOG instead of e.g. Steam (or other places).

I wouldn't be surprised if the top 3 reasons were, as follows:

1. DRM-free games + installers.

2. The game is not available on Steam (or Epic, or whatever).

3. GOG version of a classic game has some fixes that are not there on e.g. the Steam version.

I'd believe that e.g. #2 is less and less important, it is relatively rare that some game is available on GOG but not on Steam, at least for a prolonged time (usually it is the other way around). There are some, but only a handful. People who buy from GOG only if the game is not available on Steam are probably not that profitable to GOG nowadays. Maybe they were back when GOG was almost the only place getting older classic games, but the tide has changed a long time ago.

EDIT: Maybe there would also be a fourth, but a rather insignificant group: the people who got angry at Steam or Valve for some reason, e.g. they got banned from the forums or some game or whatever. Then again, such people would just as likely to go to Epic or Origin or whatever, to go bitch how Valve mistreated them because banning them from the forum or refusing their stolen credit card.


Take instance me. I currently have well over 1800 games on GOG (which does slow down my buying of games because I have so many games from the store already), and just yesterday I bought several games from a sale for 65 euros or so. Why did I choose to do that, instead of heading to e.g. Epic or Steam or the various Steam key seller sites from which I could have had a bunch of games probably even cheaper?

In my case: DRM-free installers.

They're still bringing Linux versions.

https://www.gog.com/game/ara_fell
https://www.gog.com/game/deep_sky_derelicts_definitive_edition
https://www.gog.com/game/devils_kiss
https://www.gog.com/game/the_longing
https://www.gog.com/game/abandon_ship
https://www.gog.com/game/rimworld

If only a tiny percentage of their userbase uses Linux then I understand not creating a Linux client for Galaxy yet. Steam has billions so they can afford to experiment with Linux, VR, etc.; GOG barely made a profit last year, right? 26k votes is great but it's still a cost to create this.

If someone (not necessarily you paladin, as you have tons of rep and years here so I assume you do care somewhat), does not care about DRM-free/installer files, or perhaps the new refund policy or supporting the "underdog", I'm not sure there's much point to buying here.

I think I agree with the list, not sure about the sentences below. Did GOG rise to prominence on games not on Steam, and can they do fine without exclusives?

Looking at the bestselling list I guess they can remain fine, most of those are on Steam too other than a handful.

Well, that is the question, why are people buying games from GOG instead of e.g. Steam? A long time ago it used to be that the games GOG released (mainly old classics) were simply not available on Steam.

To my knowledge there aren't that many GOG exclusive games anymore, even less so if we are not strictly talking about old classics which may be only timed exclusives on GOG. It is probably relatively rare that GOG can agree with game publishers that they stay away from Steam and Epic, even if it was just for some time. I guess such games fall into two (minor) categories:

1. Old classic games where GOG has done the work to make them usable on modern PCs. In such cases the publisher probably is willing to agree "Ok we let you sell the game exclusively for 2 months on your GOG store, before we release it also on Steam". Nowadays there are other companies doing that "bringing old classics to life" work, and they can bring the game to Steam right away.

2. The few games that GOG Ltd. publishes itself, like the old SSI strategy or Goldbox RPG games.

Not even CDPR games are released exclusively on GOG, besides maybe a free-to-play GWENT.

Do it. But I think you also want to find out if people have stopped buying on GOG (or are buying less than they used to) and why.

No need to poll that, as such people are often quite vocal already even without polls, like this and various similar threads demonstrate. Such poll would quite fast deteriorate into a shouting contest about people complaining about how they buy less games from GOG because they don't like the discussion forum software used here, or because GOG had gall to "succumb" to liberals, or whatever.

Plus, many of them have left the store so they won't even participate in the poll.

Anyway, the reason I am buying less games from GOG than in my peak is simply because I have such a high portion of the whole GOG library already. :) That tends to slow down buying when you already have 90% of the interesting games appearing in sales.