Is there a way to permanently remove the games from my account, like we can on Steam? I have some games on my library that I 100% won't ever touch again and I'd like them away. Please no "just hide them" e.e

We don't have such an option here. You can contact support and ask to have it removed, and until they do, you can hide the item.

No, annoyingly you can't, and there's no point bothering support as they have already told me they no longer do manual removals, claiming it causes a lot of problems behind the scenes.

Nah, all you can do is custom tag them.

It's annoying but from what I remember of previous discussions is also "insurance" against account hacks, ie, if GOG doesn't have the ability to "undo" permanently deleting a title, then someone takes control of your account, starts permanently deleting half your games, you get your account back with half the games missing and GOG couldn't restore them, that would not be good...

That's a good point and also a great reason why GOG should not allow customers to self-delete games out of their library.

However, that is not a good reason for GOG to forbid customers to self-delete demos out of their GOG library. That is a major problem that GOG very much needs to fix, by giving customers that option.

No one is going to care if a hacker deletes their demos, so there is no reasonable reason for GOG to continue not to implement this feature.

And until if & when they do, then demos on GOG will remain a plague that are never worth accepting onto one's GOG account.

Considering it's just some database entries, your $60 game is just a line of probably 100 bytes or so.

Back during when i worked at a tech company briefly they said you never delete content added to a database, instead you can just hide it . Space is cheap. But moving data around and when restoring missing entries can cause issues down the line. It probably is much easier on data integrity checks also if a table is immutable (present data can't be changed, but that doesn't include adding new data)

To hide stuff you include a 'bool deleted' field, you just include a little bit extra in your SELECT search and it's about the same as actually deleting something.

SELECT name as name FROM gametable WHERE name="Some game" AND deleted = FALSE;

In that event even if games are 'deleted' they actually aren't, and undoing them all is a piece of cake.

Ah, but that presumes the database management is sane. Which we both know it isn't. For example, we know that some games are connected with serial codes/keys, and instead of having a button that generates them on the fly or just a download with a list of all the valid serial keys, they've apparently run out of the things before.

For all we know they could be entering this data into Excel, which is not unheard of. :p

I see the dangers in letting users delete stuff from their accounts, but I never bought the 'too difficult' excuse for staff to do it. At my most charitable I assume at this point the difficulty comes from their database being managed in a format that is absolutely sub-optimal or buried in outdated linguini code.

There's no way GOG has a database so clean that they could append it with something as simple and logical as a bool deleted field, it's either that or they have no one knowledgable enough in what they're paid to do to implement such. Not sure which is the worse scenario.

This will be a hot take, but I don't want such a feature.

It will bring more problems than it will solve. If you don't want a game on a digital library, which doesn't take up any physical space, then hide it and forget about it.

On the other hand, if someone gets ahold of your account, either via hacking, or some annoying cousin comes over for a visit and decides to troll you, while you go away from your PC for a moment, they may permanently remove lots of your games.

If they ever added such a problematic feature, it would have to have an unconditional restore button that never expires, not even if the game is delisted from sale. And if there was such a button, then removal would basically be a placebo, no different from hiding we already have lol, so let's just stick to hiding, which exists already.

What if GOG refined the game counts and the library system etc so that hidden games are never-ever visible nor counted? Move them to the orders & settings page (under a hidden games tab), say, and not get any alerts or update flags (or anything for that matter) for them until they are unhidden by the user.

You know, make hidden actually mean hidden. A pseudo-deletion. The games are still in our accounts technically, but they are only viewable on another page, and then only as a listed item able to be unhidden if the user wants to see them ever again.

No true deletions, simple recovery if an accident or hack happens, and no staff intervention (hopefully) required. We can "bin" our unwanted games and they'll never bother us again. The library page won't show they existed. You could code Galaxy not to list them as games we have until they are unhidden first.

If hidden really meant hidden, I think most people would would accept using it as a trashcan. At the moment, hidden stuff still nags at us when we open our library. Not ideal, GOG.

As i mentioned i worked at a tech company for a little while back in 2010, and by extension worked for AT&T. They REALLY REALLY REALLY didn't want you modifying or doing any delete commands on the database, and it's easy to see why.

More than that, even in 2010 you could write full commands which you tell the database was the only way to modify an existing database, so a missing or malformed command wouldn't wipe the entire database outright. I agree. Adding the field wouldn't take too much work, and implementing the rest of the calls to honor it wouldn't be too much work either. Fixing a lot of the bugs wouldn't take much work, but I'm sure it's down to management higher up, who basically don't believe it's worth it, or that it may disrupt things. Or maybe the one hired to make the framework for it is no longer part of that team and they simply aren't allowed to unless something catastrophic happens.

I'd think the simplest answer, is that probably every purchase, post and everything is saved as a commit which is a sequential text (like a chat); And if the database breaks they can simply run through the last full backup of the database plus recent additions, but manual changes won't be permanent until the next full backup (which may be once a year). I don't know if or how often the machine with the database may crash, or how many minutes it takes to catch up to the previous state. Backuping up a database and seeding a database (especially for testing purposes) this is somewhat common from my experience. Plus it goes across types of databases and compresses better. And you can just append everything, so having a dedicated drive to appended changes makes sense, or even sending it to the cloud compressed and encrypted to an offsite server.

I think hiding a game is sufficient enough.

I have to say, i don't see the point. Some players want numbers, and the higher the game number the more they can brag they have the numbers.

Some people only want exact numbers of games they like, and having a game (gag game or otherwise, like 'Bad Rats') is a black mark in their library they want removed.

But the display/download and the storefront are two entities. The storefront needs only to know 'purchased or repurchased' and will display accordingly, while the library you may want to customize, be it order, tags, achievement management, last downloaded, save games, etc. They likely are quite compartmentalized.

I agree if you have a game hidden, then in the store instead of 'purchased' it should be greyed out or something, but I'll guess half the work is done client side, where game ID numbers, names and prices are sent as a bulk JSON block and then the local computer in Javascript proceeds to decode and set up the pages to display. And they again, only care about if your list of purchased games (saved as a cached cookie for convenience?) shows price, or purchased.

Functional, but disappointing.