I actually tried to send my boycott message to GOG using that not too long ago. Some stupid bot went ahead and put it in the "answered" pile because of COVID backlog.

Is there a better e-mail to give them the notification?

I believe the situation for them not getting back on Steam has to do with some deal with their Chinese publisher, not how they published in North America. If so, that publisher needs to be dropped like a rock so we can finally have this game being sold again, even if it's through a storefront that does things some take issue with. It'd certainly be better than nothing, if you ask me.


Last note: Can somebody PLEASE tell this "Magma" jackass on Twitter that civil protest and simply saying things he personally doesn't like isn't a reportable offense? Seriously, I hate guys like him.

https://twitter.com/MagmaMKII

It's been estimated it will be here in about 4 billion years!

For what it's worth, that wasn't their actual phrasing. I'd say anything from ~5 messages and up technically qualifies as "many messages", and for all we know there could have been only 2 "gamers" sending them...

Not saying that makes their conduct any less inexcusable, of course. :D

I didn't see that part b1t wrote earlier because I only had time to skim things when I made my response.

At any rate, I'm pretty sure that's exactly what's happening, just like is the case with the people fighting on Twitter. Hence why last post I brought Magma to everyones' attention. With how much gusto he's putting in, it's almost like something's at stake for him here...

But maybe I'm just reading it wrong and he's just a concerned gamer.

To be honest, the Devotion debacle is the thing that bothers me the least. Still an embarassing PR suicide, but just a drop in the general lying and treating customers as dumb moneybags.
Also, the abuse! That sweet, sweet workers abuse!

Aaaand today I'm not buying Journey to the Savage Planet. Damn, they're making this difficult.

I feel you, I'm over 300 bucks worth of purchases that I haven't made since GOG lied to our faces, it is difficult, and It pisses me off even moreso because I can't support developers the way I want to anymore.

The wishlist is absolutely vitriolic, every twitter post gets hate comments, the forum is lit up with negative threads... and yet GOG just stays silent. It truly is as pathetic as it is demoralizing, but I have to make a stand as best I can...

Couldn't have said it better myself.
If only more devs had a direct portal for their games on their own site...
I couldn't care less about corporations, they can go bankrupt tomorrow and I wouldn't shed a tear (or in case of tax evaders and frauds like Activision, I'd actually smile), but with indies and mid-tier publishers it's a real shame.

I'm aware.
To quote:
"
Earlier today, it was announced that the game Devotion is coming to GOG. After receiving many messages from gamers, we have decided not to list the game in our store.
"
Isn't it implied to "officially" SUPPOSED to mean "messages from many gamers"?
Because if you read it literally it could very well mean "FEW gamers sent us a ton of messages" (as in: each "gamer" sent us more than one, for the cumulative amount of "many messages").
Which is awfully ironic, it's quite ridiculously close to admitting that there were no "many" gamers, at which point I cannot decide if the used wording is clever (leaving hidden agenda for "those who know") or pretenciously dumb (leaving hidden agenda in public place for everybody to read).
Either way, it was never said how "many" it takes.
Not to mention this is wrong on a LEGAL level, and as I said before, GOG should be held LEGALLY responsible for this.
Here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210219064137/twitter.com/GOGcom/status/1339227388438306817
archival copy for anyone interested.

No?
5 is like, LITERALLY, the definition of "few".
Not "a few", just "FEW".
GOG isn't some small local grocery store in the middle of nowhere where "5 customers" (while it's not even IMPLIED in the official GOG's statement that the bunch consists of GOG's CUSTOMERS) could be seen as some form of "significant feedback".
GOG is a part of rather financially grown mother company, not only that but also serves ACTUAL many INTERNATIONAL customers, and in no worldline FIVE of SOME random people (again, it's not even implied those were CUSTOMERS of GOG's) can be casually considered as "yep, we will listen to the demands".
It's just satirically low number.

If you think "5 and up" could be sufficient to bring down INTERNATIONAL distribution of some media craft then you seriously need to reconsider your mindset.

Literal FIVE doesn't even warrant a public statement by itself.
It's not MANY by any book definition either.
It's laughably low number and if it would be supposed to be officially perceived as real then it would put GOG in light of being seen as even bigger hypocrites than they are already perceived as.
Because if you think "5 and up" warrants actions then what about "far more than 5 people messaged support about some issue and got no response let alone public statement" (and there have been MANY such cases for independent issues).
Seriously.
Just no.
We all can speculate what happened unofficially.
But officially afaik it's SUPPOSED TO be seen as "many people messaged us", otherwise that PR statement is totally WORTHLESS for ANYBODY to begin with.

What I think is that GOG could have any number of underlying reasons for taking down Devotion, the most easily accessible explanation being that they want to protect their stakes in the Chinese market.

Their PR response in the twitter post looks to me like it could easily be a white lie carefully worded to placate their customer base. It's not uncommon to use half truths or untrue implications in such situations.

The actual truth is, we don't know what happened behind the scenes.


But "many gamers" is indeed a misquote, and misquotes tend to eventually grow a life of their own, with less and less regard over time for original context.


EDIT: I misread the quoted post, and have adjusted my reply accordingly.

I would like to point one thing out.
Between event Z and event Q the game's product page was actually live.
Event Z being GOG's announcement of game's distribution.
Event Q being "we received many messages" tweet.
The game's product page was live for few entire hours.
This can be easily checked with webarchive:
https://web.archive.org/web/20201216100054/www.gog.com/game/devotion

There is no way on earth you can make product page live without signing a contract with publisher/developer first.
So, since the product page was live, such contract was already signed by GOG and in motion.
No company can legally back off from already signed distribution contract while prodiving non-specific PR blanket, or, like you suggest "a lie".
So, let me say this again, publisher/developers of Devotion should hold GOG legally responsible for this.
They have all legal rights to do that.

It is a slight misquote in a very literal sense because the tweet stated that they had received "many messages from gamers", but the misquote doesn't grossly distort the thing that people got mad at them - it was not the "many messages" part, but the "gamers" part - which is offensive on all sorts of levels. It's offensive because they're putting the blame for their own cowardice on their customers, it's offensive because they're trying to twist their cowardice into a pro-consumer move (You asked, we listened!). A pretty perverse way of framing things and whether you say "many gamers" or "many messages from gamers" doesn't really make much of a difference.

I agree. It is very offensive, and for the specific purpose of assessing offensiveness, whether the specific quote is one or the other makes no difference. That is not where my issue with it lies.

My issue with it is that eventually it will become common knowledge that "many gamers" is an accurate quote (and it probably already has). As more information surfaces in the future, the wrong conclusions might be drawn about what actually happened. I've seen that kind of thing happen before with random minor details that seemed insignificant at the time, and the end result is not always a pretty sight.

For the record:
I wasn't the first one to use "many gamers" term.
Almost everybody taking part in conversations related to it in few existing threads refers to the ordeal like that.
It's more of a mental shortcut instead of deliberate misquote (at least for me personally).

The thing is, the original quote is so pretenciously imprecise it leaves too much room for interpretation to begin with.
It's awfully vague and used phrasing is questionable at best.
You can't exactly draw "good" conclusions out if it.
Simply put the provided details are scarce and bogus.
There is so much wrong with the original tweet that one could attempt to write a very short book on it.
Let's face it, it's BS. And the used words only make things less clear and more prone to "creative" interpretations.
In fact the tweet is so bizzare that nobody even has to try too much, sensible theories appear out of thin air.
From a PR perspective that message was unprofessional and way too casual.
Who in their right mind would provide message THAT vague.
It's written in such a way as if it was DESIGNED to PROVOKE speculation.

Also, just because that's how my brain works, I keep thinking of it as a refrence to the "many bothans" line from Return of the Jedi, about the "many bothans" who died to bring the rebelion the info about the new Death Star. And of course the info was fake, supplied by the evil empire. See the connection?

Guys, I suspect that we may be underestimating the scale of China.

Taking into consideration only the members of the Communist Party of China (which might feel more "officially" touched), if only 1% of these members are gamers, and if out of these gamers only 1% felt offended enough to actually write a message to GOG, then that would still make over 9,000 messages.

I'm not even mentioning possible gamers that might not be members of the Party, but still feel bad.

And how many of us were feeling angry enough to sign up to this boycott, which is about more than only that game?
Not even a 100. Makes you think, doesn't it?