huan: I didn't see this mentioned in the thread yet... Did the topic of "why so much secrecy" came up? I'm can understand not sharing financial details, but what about upcoming releases? Some are announced and spend forever in upcoming tab, but we still get awful lot of surprise releases. And inevitable few posts "if I knew this was coming to GOG, I wouldn't have bought it yesterday on Steam". Is it more requirement by publishers, or is it question of image - to have some mystery aura about the shop? Or do they just want to keep the "where the hell is ..." guess-threads going? I myself am not sure if I would prefer to know more, the way it is done now gives me reason to check front page quite often. And usually the forum too while I'm at it, so I can keep tabs on what happens in the commununity (like this thread). So, just curious, don't really mind either way.
Interesting reading, thanks for sharing.
All businesses have various plans, projects which are private internal matters to the business in question, which includes partnerships, deals, and other factors. These matters would of course be of interest to any competitor out there, as would they be to any shareholder of CDPSA (GOG's parent company which is publicly traded), or potential shareholder. It is of prime importance to any company to honor any legal agreements they are under with 3rd parties as well as security laws to not disclose any information publicly that would violate any legal agreement or which would prove to be material business information to a competitor or which could jeopardize a project, partnership or other aspect of doing business.
Such information is of a highly sensitive nature to any business and thus private (not necessarily secret) business data. It is standard fare if any business is going to share their internal private business data with another party, be it a partner, a subcontractor, a customer or anyone else that they will almost always require some form of non-disclosure agreement as a pre-condition to sharing their sensitive internal business information/plans.
It's nothing secretive nor evil, everyone has some kind of private information about themselves or their business or finances, plans, projects that they do not want to share with the world for various reasons that could jeopardize things or cause problems for them. NDAs allow information to be shared under a legally binding contract to mitigate risk and are a standard legal mechanism used in business for this.
