Agree. I think this year has been GREAT on GOG. Perfect? No, there are many games (especially indies) that I think should have released here... but didn't. Still, there were a number of great games -- and a number of most-requested -- that released in 2022.

And hell, we even got Quake Enhanced here, which many were very doubtful over ever coming here.

And we got a bunch of free remasters for those who owned those games at GOG.

DOOM
MAFIA
etc

I totally disagree with the list in the OP. Most of those releases are not noteworthy at all whatsoever (and nor are the other lists posted above by a different poster either).

The only actual noteworthy releases GOG had in 2022 were Alien: Isolation, Skyrim (but Skyrim uses a different version number on GOG and therefore is not worth buying since the different version number makes many/most mods incompatible with the GOG version), Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War (but Shadow of War is missing Achievements on GOG and therefore not worth buying).

I agree that Shadow Warrior 3 was a woke disaster, and I also agree that 2022 was a terrible year for GOG releases.

But I'm not sure it was much worse than any other year, since GOG seems always to have very slim-pickings when it comes to a selection of premium top-tier quality games.

Note the fundamental difference: My 2 part lists do not operate on the subjective bias basis, are employing the objective approach using "release date" of GOG API, zero personal influence, informing as is; The OP's list is based on, seemingly, the "added date" field with subjectively limiting the scope.

To provide a food analogy. It's totally okay when different people have different kinds of food in a restraint around you, it's okay for a store with food/ingredients to provide different things, including the ones one will never eat or like. No big store is necessarily better than a small one, it depends on the items one wants and the quality one searches for: Entering a gigantic store with hundreds of employees is no guarantee of success on getting this one ingredient someone needs for making their food experience great today. Sometimes a small privately run place making some amazing stuff in small quantities could be a better idea. A very similar case is with games in my view.

We got Chasm: The Rift, Shadow of War and Mordor, Turbo Overkill, Mafia: Duhfinitive Edition, Thymesia, Space Marine, Blue Sun for Hellpoint, the Kane & Lynch games, singleplayer GWENT, Alien Breed Trilogy, the expansion for Cuphead, Dungeons of Edera, Alien: Isolation, Space Hack, Larva Mortus, Harrier Jump Jet, Solo Flight, Re-Volt returned, Glover, Wheel of Time, Shadow Warrior III, and the Elasto Mania Trilogy.

I'd say that's pretty good. :)

I'm not the poster you responded to, but one suggestion of mine would be to immediately find a way out of the disastrous partnership with Epic Fail Store, through which DRMed Epic games can apparently be bought through some app in Galaxy 2.0. Lest anyone think this is just my own preferences, I'd like to explain my reasoning.

Getting AAA games here (or anywhere) involves negotiation. Negotiation involves leverage; a party to a negotiation with no leverage is unlikely to get a beneficial outcome of the negotiation for themselves. By selling/supporting DRMed games, GOG has eroded leverage they would have otherwise had in negotiations to get games to release here DRM-free. For example, a dev/pub can theoretically say to GOG "we'll just release our AAA game DRMed through Epic. The 'GOG audience' can just buy it through the app on Galaxy, so we don't need to make a DRM-free version in order to reach 'the GOG audience' (or at least 'the majority' of the GOG audience)." I have made this point before and the staff had no meaningful response (or are not allowed to try responding) on how such situation would be prevented.

Accepting Hitman DRMed, "My Rewards", Piggyback Interactive Trash, etc also contribute to the loss of leverage in trying to negotiate DRM-free releases. Additionally, so does focus on Galaxy 2.0, for similar reasoning as above (dev/pub can theoretically say "our AAA game is available on Scheme, but GOG customers can use Galaxy 2.0 to play it once they bought it there"). But honestly I don't think GOG cares as much about negotiating DRM-free releases as they do softening their DRM-free stance, to the detriment of the store, the customers, and PC gaming as a whole.

Steam: global market share of, what? 70% to 75%?
Epic: market share of , I don't know...10% to 15%?
GOG...the rest (10%...15% at maximum).

Not much of a leverage here. Especially when you take into account the special demand that GOG props to the possible business partners (release has to be DRM-free).

Yes, while I could have worded my previous comment better, I think you're absolutely correct to suggest GOG is already at a disadvantage in negotiations. My point is that they have weakened their leverage even further beyond their already-existing disadvantage.

I see your point in the second paragraph. However I'm skeptical many devs/pubs use that line of reasoning. I guess we'd need to know how many non-GOG games really are being bought through Galaxy compared to the GOG storefront.

I still think the bigger issue is GOG doesn't (and never really has) make much money and the past half-decade or so has had to compete with EGS giveaways and their 12% cut, Steam dropping their percentage for publishers who sell a lot, and probably other similar things.

I also think DRM-free will always remain niche since most people just want to play games as easily as possible. Not saying it'd be financially worthwhile for GOG to completely drop DRM-free (unless they have reason to believe they'd actually get AAA titles here and think they could weather the PR nightmare), but I also don't really think going full-bore back into DRM-free stance will work to regain leverage and convince AAA publishers to release more games here.

So, imo, I still think complaining about boring releases, lack of AAA games, etc. should be pretty low on the list of things to complain about. That said, I've certainly been guilty of that in the past (though plenty of times unserious about it) and in general the forum doesn't get too many of this type of complaint.

Good points. There are certainly several factors working against GOG such that I feel them reducing their leverage more is increasingly bad.

I think there are too many factors to really know this. I have made the point in the past that, hypothetically, there would probably have to be some drastic event (like Scheme going down for a month, or some publicity scandal) to get the masses to wake up to the benefits of DRM-free. But, as things seemingly move towards subscriptions of everything, it is possible people will be fatigued and say "enough is enough."

I think AAAs are a separate issue to some extent.

It is hard to predict what AAAs will be like going forward in terms of anything DRM-free, so if every new AAA is an online only game anyway, people may have to adjust their expectations of what a "big release" (my term) DRM-free looks like. To me, a big release does not necessarily mean it has to be from Ubisoft, EA, et al....I consider Skyrim a big release but I also consider many smaller scale "AA" games here to be big releases.

To be fair to GOG, they are in a kind of Catch-22 situation.

They need more customers to attract better and bigger games. But to do that, they need to be known far and wide and have a reason for those enamored with Steam etc to come here. Hence Galaxy and many of the Galaxy features. And no doubt many of GOG's customers now don't really care much about DRM-Free or at all. Mostly it is just a bunch of us old and faithful crowd who care and continue to support the DRM-Free movement.

GOG has to continually rely on AAA games getting old enough, where their owners don't mind going DRM-Free, which was easier when old games weren't seen a worthwhile revenue by the likes of owners and Steam etc.

In a very real way Indie games are the future and the shining light when it comes to DRM-Free, which is no doubt why GOG get more of them, but they are facing another juggernaut called Itch.io.

To be honest, I really don't know how GOG are doing as well as they appear to be. So maybe they are doing something right.

Wholeheartedly agree. This and the Middle Earth titles releases were awesome.

Let's be clear, any big enough AAA game is getting cracked, DRM removed, very fast, can be on the same day. Going DRM-Free after that doesn't seem as anything lowering sales (these who won't buy will not buy here anyway).

Well, at least Onlive or Google Statdia didn't go anywhere, the latter died this year. This is the true nightmare where you do not own anything at all, This thing is the wildest dream of DRM-endorcing corporations: No setups provided, no Seven Seas, all what a subscription does is show some video that can respond to the keyboard/mouse/joystick.