Good tips, but it doesn't change how the game's main rating (under the store page's title) is based on all ratings and not just verified owner ones. A potential consequences of this is people disagreeing with the overall rating and underrate/overrate their review to bias the score even more, which muddies the game's real rating even further. If a number isn't accurate at describing something, it is worthless.

If GOG used the verified owner's rating instead of the overall rating, then this wouldn't be a big deal to me. Or if there were other tools used to mitigate inaccurate ratings as Sargon suggested with review edits, version-specific reviews, or Bayesian averages, etc. I'd wonder why a person playing it for 20-30 years on one platform would be on another platform reviewing that same game in the first place or not having another copy of the game on GOG if they love it so much considering it should be discounted heavily for that.

And just because they've played for a long time doesn't mean that their experience will be reflective of a similar GOG version. Both viewpoints are subject to weakness of inaccurate reviews due to platform differences and version changes. At least with an owner's opinion, I know I'm getting someone's genuine opinion even if it's a poor quality one. I've attached some examples that also illustrate non-owner ratings and how they pull scores down and contrast their overall and owner ratings:

- Mary Skelter 2 - 2.8 overall, 4.2 owners rating (outrage over previous censorship that is now fixed)
- The Triumphant Return of Diablos - 3.3 overall, 5 owners rating (outrage because 18+)
- Ys IX - 3.6 overall, 4.9 owners rating (one of the reviewers here bombed all of NISA's other games simply because they didn't have regional pricing for their country)
- Witcher 2 - 4.7 overall, 4.2 owners rating (outrage over CDPR/GOG's work culture)

When did censorship, regional pricing, adult content, culture war cases, etc. suddenly become the only factor in judging game quality? To their credit, some of that stuff bothers me too, but nowhere should one small thing completely define the entire game's rating. It's not reasonable especially from someone who doesn't even own the game and is instead trying to make a statement and affecting the overall rating.

Consumers should be able to look at the rating under the store title and have a good idea of the quality of the game. If I reviewed the store page and the comments are too murky to discern and I have to consult a third-party source, buying games becomes a tedious chore rather than what should be a simple task.

Well, gaming can sometimes be theraputic to some people.
T'would be nice if my insurance footed the bill for my gaming habit(or at least part of it) :)

No, it doesn't. HIPAA privacy is strictly limited in scope to cases involving Heath Insurance (hence the name Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) While there are privacy laws and issues of concern, HIPAA is not among them.

Tell me you have no idea what you're talking about without telling me. I've never seen an ad for a DRMed game on Galaxy from any other store, and I do use it regularly on multiple devices.

The Geoblocking isn't required by law. Very few of these games are outright banned. Most of them are age gated in countries, and thus GOG would have to implement age verification. Honestly, that shouldn't be an issue for most people since they are paying with credit cards already. You get a few nuts that say "But muh privacy! I want to pay in yap stones!" But generally, most cutomers should have no problem supplying age verification for games that require it.

So to explain, that was a metaphor. What I perhaps meant is that I would not trust GOG in matters of confidentiality.

I see. I misunderstood. My apologies. I see so many people citing HIPAA when talking about unrelated privacy issues. I'm not sure why this particular one bothers me so much.

The user reviews and ratings on GOG have a very bad reputation. The rating system gets abused and one hour after the release you see something like a 1.5 out of 5 rating for certain games. The review section gets abused with batshit crazy nonsense. Steam reviews have also lots of nonsense, but developers can flag reviews and everyone can comment them. If developers get the wrong impression of the GOG reviews then it will damage the efforts of some people to get certain games on GOG. This is actually happening. It can probably give a wrong answer to the question "Will the users on GOG will like and buy my games?".

For a start it would help to remove the user ratings and reviews who don't own a specific game. One of the biggest problem is that there is no protection mechanism there. Everyone can create an account here on GOG and write a shit review and give an 1 star rating. Being forced to buy a game to review and rate it would be a good protection against the bots and alt account abuse in the user review section.

The next step should be a comment feature. It should be possible to comment that a certain review is outdated and mentioned problems are fixed.

Unfortunately if Steam is anything to go by, 95% of feedback comments aren't intelligent helpful posts correcting factual inaccuracies, but rather "How dare you dislike what I like" shrill fanboyism bad enough that it forced Valve to backtrack on their earlier decision to enable commenting on others reviews by default and they re-disabled them by default again due to overwhelming popular demand...

And don't forget, many toxic respondents are the devs themselves!

I see this complaint here and there and it's odd to me on a PC like that, as I don't find the client slow at all. I actually think it's faster than Steam usually. Weird.

I would l ike to see those changes too. OP is right. We need client for linux too, but i would prefer good old GOG Downloader . amaybe it will be worth to revisit it...

Probably because I should have used GDPR but I forgot it existed.
As I understand, Galaxy 2.0 is an Electron app, so it's about as performant as a Unity engine game. Unless people have gone though and carefully linted the code (though most won't bother), it'll run like ass because it's basically an unoptimized browser in a box.

I got an Dell E4310, which I use while traveling around. I like this notebook very much and wouldn't want to change it. Since I prefer to play older games, it would be nice to get the possibility to exclude games on their requirements. That would make it easier for people with older equipment to find the games they really want. I am not sure if I understood it right, but doesn't EU regulations already forbid Geoblocking for shops since a year or so?


To respond to the review changes:

I saw many people giving games bad reviews based on their old retail copies, but GOG changed many of those games in a way, that they run way better now. Another thing that is really annoying are people just writing absolute garbage and give games bad review scores or really good ones, that absolutely don't judge the games right.

And that is why I ask for Reviews to be only posted by people who own the games, so the scores show the real appreciation or hate of the owners. And with that I would like to point out, that the reviews of people who refunded the games should be marked as such and be excludable (is that even a word?) from the scores like the non-owners are right now.

The first sight on the scores happen to be the overall score of ALL reviewers, which is absurd.

That's quite the amusing antique you've got there; is it one of the models with that useless quickstart feature? But yeah, that thing is so old that I can't even reliably find a data sheet which specifies what specific support set the graphics has. I'd suggest you buy yourself a refurbished laptop from somewhere; Dell typically has good clearance deals on somewhat recent hardware. Though, it's really up to you to choose to use something from this decade or not. You tell that to Germany, who will happily geoblock.

As for your opinion on the reviews: I have Daggerfall, but I want to dissuade people from using the GOG cut, because it is outdated, doesn't respect the code licences of the modders, and is bloated to all hell. I've never played that version, but I still want to dissuade people from that bunk. Would it not be right for me to write a review to underline those issues?

As I said, I hear that complaint a lot, but it's just not true in my experience. i use it all the time and find it quite fast and responsive, no worse than Steam and way better than the Epic store. Obviously I have a great PC but so do others who complain, so as I said... weird.