This is what attracted me to GOG in the first place. They were different, an alternative to Steam. When you bought a game through GOG, you actually owned it. You could take that game, install it on a PC that isn't connected to the Internet, and it would run just fine. Now they seem to be moving away from that. Instead of Good Old Games they want to become Good Online Games.

When the placeholder was first discovered, the game's rerelease was held back on the orders of Red Candle (the game's developer) themselves out of fear of the game's reputation just being "that game with the Pooh joke in it" instead of the art piece they wanted it to be known as. They weren't sure when or even if it was coming back. It wasn't because someone broke a promise, but because the creators themselves want it to happen that way.

Fast forward to a few months ago where Red Candle finally decides they are ready to put the game back up and make the deal with GOG to do so. Thenn a few hours after the announcement, we get a half-assed message on Gog's Twitter that goes "We changed our minds due to messages from many gamers" without even so much as an apology to the people they are disappointing. It's vague as Hell and raises so many questions.

-How many is "many", exactly?
-What was the nature of most of these messages? People just looking out for GOG's reputation or crybabies going "WAH!!! WE DOING WANT THE GAME ON THE STORE!!!"?
-How do we know most of these "many gamers" aren't trolls who just want to ruin it for everyone or this group of commenters one can hire to artificially increase a protest (the name escapes me right now)?

I'm sure others can gave more points for the list.


Plus, saying you're canceling a release just because "many gamers" told you to makes you look like a complete push-over. If they don't like the game, all they have to do is not buy it like how everybody else handles this situation. Giving it a pass now just because you don't care about the game getting the shaft today means seeing a game you DO care about getting the shaft tomorrow. This whole thing is pathetic and only served to rekindle a fire that went out a long time ago.

"But if you build a relation, the relation is lasting very long. And then you'll have to betray their trust several times to make them go away."

Hm ...

This is well said and I agree.

For me, one of the most important aspects of DRM-free, and why any form of DRM is pernicious in general, is the concept of preservation of games. Any game that relies on a connection to a remote server to function will, at some point in the future, become unplayable. That is a fact you can take to the bank. The only reason that we are able to play the classics we all enjoy from 20 years ago is because they do not contain DRM and/or require an online connection.

And this goes for multiplayer as well. Regardless of what GOG, Steam or whichever corporate propaganda would have you believe, connection to a remote server is absolutely not required for multiplayer gaming. LAN and direct IP MP existed long before the explosion of gaming over the internet and client integration. And guess what folks? Yes, all those MP games you are playing that require remote servers will at some point become unplayable, when those servers are (inevitably) switched off.

Therefore, I reject the presence of DRM in both single and multiplayer games. The normalization of online DRM in games does not represent any sort of 'progress', it is a pernicious trend that threatens our freedom and the future of gaming. If we want to be able to play the future classics of today in 20/30 years' time, we need to be pushing back against it and rejecting it absolutely.

Sorry, I respect your opinions, but I have to call out this statement in particular as totally false. GOG has always been a digital store, dealing with online distribution of games. It has never had anything to do with physical copies of games. Steam was founded in 2003 and has always pushed the normalization of online DRM in games. To quote the Wikipedia page about GOG:

Digital distribution grew in the 2000s, along with the use of DRM to control access to games, which raised some resentment with players. CD Projekt saw potential to look back at their distribution days to offer DRM-free versions of classic games through digital distribution, using their past experience in reverse engineering to make the games work on modern platforms and provide a wide array of localization options. In this manner, they would have a reason to draw players to buy their product instead of simply downloading it for free from pirate game websites and services. They founded a new subsidiary, Good Old Games, to serve this purpose in early 2008.

By the time GOG was founded, digital distribution and DRM had already become well established (mostly by Steam). GOG was always intended from the very beginning to provide an alternative to that model.

By the way, No Man's Sky can be removed from that point. The DRM has been removed. Games with DRM-ed single player content are, to my knowledge: Absolver, Age on Wonders III, Battletech, Carcassonne, Cyberpunk, Dying Light, F.E.A.R. (incomplete Securom removal/only affects some players), Nex Machina and X4

I wonder if GOG is following this thread with as much interest as those created by He Who Must Not Be Named A Troll. If so, GOG, please give us a sign by deleting this post, too. ;P

I really don't get them anymore. It's not just that they have become even worse in communicating with the community than before, at this point it seems pretty obvious to me that they don't have any intention to try anymore and would rather gloss over any criticism and discontent and shut down inconvenient voices. Which is totally in their right, but makes them incredibly unlikable and hypocritical to me in view of their history, worse than the companies they tried to distinguish themselves from in the beginning. I wish I'd have listened more closely to the speech linked to by Cavalary above and realized that in a way they were already describing their customer friendliness as strategy for getting away with betraying their fans several times ...

There is a mountain of hypocritical statements made by GOG and CDPR over the years in comparison to what they are now and their actions. Most of it just feels like it was an attempt at gaining customer trust and in actuality was nothing more than a marketing tool to them. Chalk up issues here with piss poor management decisions combined with either shareholder meddling or pure greed, or even both. If they actually spent the time (as well as money and everybody knows that is what they are truly worried about spending here) they could be on their way of turning things around to regain trust as well as having a much improved business model.

This is just them going through the motions, complete with employees that only care about collecting a paycheck at the end of the day. The money is all that matters anymore and that is all that they see. They are short sighted enough with tunnel vision where they cannot see that cutting corners as they have been doing is going to bite them in the ass business-wise now and in the future.

This. Pretty much everything about not just what they do but how they do it these days is bizarre and comes of as apathetic at best, and openly hostile towards their old user base at worse. Whether it's protecting a troll and using him as an excuse to ban old users or responding with nothing or at best a useless, feckless PR-statement to even simple questions about something like the Epic deal or DRM in Cyberpunk. Like you said - I don't get them. But I'm pretty sure they don't get us either.

Would love to have been a fly on the wall in GOG's offices over the last few years, I can't even begin to imagine what the hell is going on over there.

Even if you mean "legal right" with "right" then I am not so sure. If you read their https://www.gog.com/about_gog page - some statements are clearly wrong - such as "Reach out on GOG forums, tweet at us or drop us a message on Facebook, and we'll get back to you." Considering the many different countries they operate in I find it unlikely that this is compatible with all laws in all those countries. And when the upcoming Polish anti censorship law goes life they may be affected by that too.
Which shareholders are supposed to meddle? The only big ones are in board/management or related to someone in it:
https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/investors/shareholders/
What makes you so sure that they "don't get us"?
If their business plan is incompatible with their (formerly proclaimed) base values - which I believe to be the most likely reason for their behavior - then no amount of communication can fix it. Although they could delay the fallout I guess. My impression however is that their strategy is the opposite - artificially create a slow weak fallout instead of a single big boom.

Not only do GOG have trouble with the site itself, due to adhering to too strict a hiring policy, but they've also fallen into the trap that is sunken cost fallacy. Galaxy. So far we've only had some odd and small lapses in their policies here and there, but it all adds up. Slippery slope must be vigilantly guarded against. It's a much maligned and misused fallacy, as it constantly happens.
We still have our DRM-Free Offline Installers and Patches. We must hold the line on that.

Last $ spent Sep 2, 2016. ~750 games, owned the whole catalogue at one point.
I gave up all hope years ago.

It wouldn't make sense to do service games, microtransactions,etc. Then why would people come here and not other places like Steam where you can get that and more? On top of that microtransactions and service games are poison to the games industry.

You are looking at this from a pure GOG perspective. But GOG is part of CDP and far as I remember CDPR (the other part of CDP which made Cyberpunk 2077 etc) makes almost all the profit. I am not sure GOG would even make any profit at all if the profit from CDPR games would be removed. Or rephrasing: From a financial POV it may be more profitable for CDP to scrap GOG and sell their CDPR games at Epic with 11% cut.

Now where does GOG come into this? I think the next step in their business plan is to do a DRMed MP Cyberpunk with microtransactions. In order to be not dependent overly on some other storefront for this they want to use GOG.

Independent from that I also think they want to continue their Galaxy-for-all-games approach for GOG. But this is probably too risky for them to overinvest in. Or rephrasing that: I think their focus is on the microtransacted MP Cyberpunk as main source of profit and growth.

The old GOG with the old GOG values doesnt really have a place in any of this.

Edit: All this is presumably also why they give no proper response etc. They want the old (now inconvenient) customers to quietly go away or at least shut up.

Edit 2: Found a proper source: <2% of 2019 CDP profit is from GOG: https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/wp-content/uploads-en/2020/04/consolidated-financial-statement-of-the-cd-projekt-group-for-2019.pdf Probably they trimmed the numbers (or their operations) to get >0.