Hi GOG staff,

I am begging for the following changes on GOG Store:

- Reviews only by customers who bought the games.
- Anti-Spam measures for reviews. (Saw a Bitcoin recovery spam in the Manor Lords reviews, not the first time).
- OpenGL requirements listed in the shop and as a search tag (for older hardware, like GPUs with less than OpenGL 3 support)

And some changes on GOG Galaxy 2:

- Reset option for Games included in the own collection (it is really annoying to have all the games listed from all added plattforms, even after deleting the plattforms from the profile - got too many games).
- Debloating the client a little, since it is really, really slow. (which is strange with 32GB RAM, NVME and a 5800X)
- Linux support without Wine

Change for the whole GOG service:

- Stop Geoblocking ( https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/geoblocking )

Just a couple points, that would make GOG even better for customers and way more enjoyable than the other available shops on the net.

These are all great suggestions. Make sure these suggestions are on the wishlist and we can vote for them. If GOG required owning the game to review, then the reviews wouldn't have spam either. I really don't care about the opinions of others who haven't played a game before. If need be, then they can post a comment that should be segregated from owners' scores and reviews. But their opinion shouldn't count towards the game's score since we've seen plenty of games' scores ruined by review bombing and reverse review bombing out of personal bias rather than how the game stands by itself.

1: I think the point of this one is so that on the off chance that someone originally owned the game in retail form or bought it elsewhere, they can still give their thoughts about it, but I could also imagine it being problematic in the ways you describe. The real problem is how heedless GOG is towards taking free advice.

The review system on GOG is archaic at best; even plaintext documents have more features than it does, and without a damnable character limit. For example, the lack of ability to collate, edit, delete, or otherwise format one's reviews.

2: Anti-Spam measurements for the whole site. Unfortunately, I don't think it was built with this kind of targeted attack in mind.

3: Just how old would your hardware have to be to not support OpenGL 3? That's been a thing since 2008. Now Vulkan, that'd be a different story, but you'd have to be running some manner of literal potato to not have OpenGL support.

The changes for Galaxy are dismissive splutter to me, I don't really want it anymore.

As for your third item: If GOG wants to stop Geoblocking, they're going to have to get compliant with the laws of the countries. Germany tends to be a particularly tough costumer. And given the sort of data that GOG would have to handle to verify/comply with that, I'm not sure I'd trust GOG to be HIPAA compliant.

What does HIPAA have to do with anything? Is GOG going to start billing peoples' health insurance for games now?

You can select "written by: verified owners" on each game page, to the right of the reviews

I still want to see the opinions of e.g. those who have the game already on e.g. Steam, as GOG quite often seems to get games long after Steam. So their opinions are still relevant to me.

Then again, partly this is alleviated by how GOG often links to online reviews (Top Critic Average / Critics Recommend /
OpenCritic Rating). But not always, I am unsure why some games get those online ratings and others don't.

GOG definitely needs better spam filtering all round. I'm still convinced that a Google bot "scraping" the site right in the middle of a spam flood is half of what's convinced Google to start flagging emails from GOG received via GMail as spam... As tfishell said, you can already filter them. Excluding them though isn't some magic fix people dream it to be in terms of fixing the "quality" of reviews here. In practise, a review by a "non-owner" who owns the game elsewhere (on disk, Steam, etc), potentially for 20-30 years continuously, has played the game 15x times and is very familiar with tweaks / mods are often far more useful than "Dis sux, doesn't work" 1/5 one-liner reviews from 'Verified Owners'. A few examples from just 2 mins browsing - "Verified owner" reviews for The Longest Journey, Sanitarium, etc, complaining of "The game is totally unplayable" when ScummVM support has long been added and they actually play better than ever (and on more non-Windows platforms than ever). The "verified owner" complaining Deus Ex doesn't work in 2023 (it does) and another complaining "you can't save" (you can), "Verified Owners" complaining that 1995 games look like 1995 games or that pixel art style games look too pixelly, the "Verified Owner" who wants Grim Fandango removed from GOG and replaced with COD advance warfare is probably the cousin of the "verified owner" for Bio Menace complaining that DOS games and people who play them "do not belong on GOG", etc...

Being able to double check whether someone owns specifically the GOG version (which doesn't mean they don't own the game) and intelligent / useful / well written reviews are far less correlated than people want to believe...

The FAQ on OpenCritic website says that they focus on current games, so they don't really have ratings for games released before they launched their service in 2015. Additionally, GOG's package and game system caused some games not to display OC rating (I don't know if they fixed it).

Edit: nevermind, AB2012 already said it best.

I totally agree. Many are either trolling (trying to hurt that developer's name, or GOG's name), or are writing their reviews with the mindset of a 2-year old (with the same as above purpose).

It has to do with their very strict data privacy restrictions due to doctor/patient confidentiality; in relation to the handling of sensitive information that GOG would have to perform to be compliant.

I would like to anti-request this request.

And no, doing that would not make GOG even better for customers or way more enjoyable, were that to be implemented.

On the contrary: that would just skew & bias the reviews even more so than they already are and thus give potential customers a misleading impression about the games they are thinking about buying, since they would only be hearing from people who psychologically have a vested interest in justifying their decisions to purchase bad games, and thus who give overly-fawning, inaccurate, not-very-honest "reviews" for that reason.

As the idea of "debloating" Galaxy 2: it's way too far gone for that. There is no possible way to "debloat" it. It needs a complete dismantling, not just "a little debloating."

GOG has already made a bloat-free Galaxy client; it's called Galaxy 1.2.

The solution for the problem with Galaxy 2.0 being bloatware (and having a horrible & annoying UI, and putting aggravating ads for DRM-ed games from other stores all over the place, etc.) is: GOG needs to officially & permanently decommission the awful Galaxy 2.0, and revert back to Galaxy 1.2 as being the only officially supported version of GOG Galaxy.

As for OP's "stop geoblocking" suggestion: GOG has to geoblock, or otherwise they would be violating some countries' law that forbid certain games from being sold in those countries.

GOG gets many games late, sometimes decades after. Many of these "non-owner" reviews are from people who played these games on Steam and other platforms.

You can also easily filter reviews to only show those from verified owners, so I don't see any problem.

What GOG's reviews actually need are:
• Increase character count cap.
• Review Editing (In the era of unfinished and ever-green games, permanent reviews make no sense).
• Comments to point out when reviews are objectively wrong or outdated.

I do prefer the reviews from people who do not own the game to stay. As AB2012 mentioned they can still be very relevant while the verified owners are problmetic often. I think the issues usually come from the game rating and not the reviews so I think the rating from people who do not own the game could be changed. They can for example make it impossible to give a rating - just a review. Or keep the rating too but remove it from the game final rating so when you open the game page you see on top the verified owners rating and then if you want you can manually check at the bottom from people who do not own the game. Another thing they can do is people who do not own the game cannot rate it unless they write a review - for example I really hate when new games drop especially in the 18+ genre and random people start giving it 1 because that is totaly fair. They should absolutely forbid reviewing and giving a rating to people who have never ever either bought sometihng here or like have some activity. That being said I assume that GOG have such a reviewing system so they can gain some information from users about the game in the review section. I guess that is impotant when deciding to buy a game. But personally I would always check other places like steam even if there are many many reviews or just a very few or none. Being able to edit your review is also something that should be added!

Best of luck.

For GOG to heed anything you or I or others say or advise, they would likely at this point need to think poorly of their own views and understanding. So really it is a logic exercise.

Most of what you asked for, has been asked for by others time and time again. Wishlists have even been created. I've asked for various improvements myself.

Nothing has really changed for the most part or rarely.

So clearly they either think they know best, in which case you or we would need to prove otherwise. Or something else is at play ... not enough staff or finances or lacking skill sets etc etc.

There are also counter arguments to a lot of what you requested.

Take reviews for instance. GOG members can own the game elsewhere, even on disc. Why should we not hear about their experiences or knowledge? And it is clearly indicated when a member here owns the game here. So if you pay attention to that, you can ignore those who don't ... if you like, but don't begrudge the rest of us.

And when it comes to geo blocking, it is all about GOG abiding by the rules or laws of a country they want to sell games to, else be banned in that country.

There is no denying though, that there are many issues and flaws at GOG, for sure ... and you have really only touched upon the tip of the iceberg. And no doubt GOG bank on our tolerance.