Huh, i'm always late to the party....

Don't want to sound like a douche but it's kind of ironic considering the discussions that we had. Don't get me wrong, i understand you, i had the same reaction a few months ago...
Here's the problem, you say that it's a 3rd boat but all i see is a person drifting on top of a plank. Now, i expected the help to come in different forms, with supplies, tools or at least with a plan. I don't know about you but if i'm going to be rescued by someone then i hope that the person is prepared and knows what is doing, i don't want to hear "It's going to be ok, i'm here for you and were going work together to work our way out of here".
"Fuck, i'm going to die here, ain't i?" is the reaction that i'll get from it. I rather have someone that will say "Ok, this has been though but i have a plan, this is what we're going to do...

Gog is the problem, this is a warzone and they just gave the new recruit a stick and said "Ok, go end the war!".

I think it's a question of resources. According to this article, GOG's revenue was 16.5M in the first 6 months of 2016. Let's say that for the year it will double to $33M. This, however, is revenue not profit. After all the expenses the actual profit would be substantially less.

Let's imagine for the sake of the argument that the total profit is $10M. Now, a senior developer's salary is something like $100,000 to $150,000. Sometimes less, sometimes more, depending on the area. Going with the lowest, and assuming they would need a team of three such developers to make a perfect forum, that's $300K. That's 3% of all the company's profit.

We can also safely assume that less than 1% of customers actually use the forum. It is also fairly reasonable to say that those of us who do use it would still buy games on GOG even if the forum didn't exist.

So ... lose ≈3% of profit to appease ≈0.5% of customers, resulting in ≈0% additional revenue. Sounds like bad business.

Try GoG division profit of something like $72,000 for the last quarter (That's what I recall someone saying in response to last week's quarterly press conference)....

All those articles always exaggerate the value of GoG. The revenue figures always include the 70% that get paid out to developers. All expenses have to come out of the 30% that is left. While the software development division is doing much better right now, they know those profits will dwindle and all that will be left will be expenses until they can roll out the next game.

Edit: Gain for 3rd quarter - GoG division = 298,000 PLN = 71,536.60 USD
For the first 3 quarters = 5,606,000 PLN = 1,345,752.37 USD though.

Look, I get that you have issues with him, but can we go with less personal attacks and more attacks at his argument?
But the question this leaves is what exactly constitutes racism, sexism, or homophobia. If the place is uber-sensitive whereby they'll consider you doing so much as taking a position against the Black Lives Matter movement and what it's become to be "racism", then the forum is obviously not a place of open discussion. We're GOG, we aren't Double Fine, and one of the things many people value about this place (although many people complain about it too) is how we all have the freedom to say whatever we like.
You can't let this place become a 4chan-level echo chamber where everybody's openly mudslinging every group they can, but you can't let it become a Tumblr-level echo chamber where nobody's allowed to say what they want, either. You simply can't have a "Carrying X opinion here is wrong!" approach.
Enforce rules to regulate conduct, not thought.
Fixed your link. To be honest, I'm surprised GOG's pulling in even THAT much. I was told that their profits were...just over a few thousand dollars at one point? Maybe the year before last? I forget, but I can tell you they're definitely not making much in comparison to what CDPR's making with The Witcher series.

Ha ha, you're a Romanian rent boy.

You're a homorentus.

You know what would be great? Someone from gog actually saying that. Honest question, is there ANY comment from a blue stating that it's due to lack of resources? Because i find it hard to believe that the community comes up with solutions (scripts) and the staff is unable to do ANYTHING. It's called investment. Do you think that new customers that visit the forum (either due to curiosity or help) get a good idea from gog? Do you think that they'll continue to purchase from gog?

I don't think that anyone expects the same quality of Steam forums but look at the cd projekt red forums, take a good look. Why can't we have that?

Sigh.. did we lose Goodaltgamer?

And where's fables?
Did she ban Tauto? :O

Realistically I don't believe new customers visit the forum at all. Forums have long been a dying breed of online communication. This is regardless of how you or I feel on the matter. A company exists to make money, and as such it is only understandable that they are unwilling to dedicate time and effort to something that their customer base doesn't really use. There are a few hundred users here at most, including those who post rarely or just lurk.

And one should not compare the amount of resources (and users) that Steam has to what GOG has. They are nowhere near the same weight category. That's basically comparing Walmart to Ye Olde Ma and Pa Shoppe.

A smaller company must focus on one thing. In case of GOG it has to be the store, not the forums. Now personally I'd love a properly designed, properly working, properly moderated forum. The reality, however, is such that it would be strange of us to expect it.

Somehow completely missed that..

Welcome to the community! :)

Its good that we have a "Sheriff" around here. May your vision be true to see trough the deceptions (and make no mistake about that, some are cold blooded deceptive snakes) and your sanity stable enough to not go on wild banning spree while firming two (virtual) Uzis loud laughing like a madmen after a month or two.

Keep in mind that this place "ruggedness" is part of its charm; its actually the first forum I remember in which ppl start arguing on a thread, going into wild accusing and hostile attacks (usually point of banhammer in other places), to calming, understanding and maybe becoming buddys. Not daily and I could kick myself for not keeping the thread-links but thats gog.

even the lowest human is higher than the highest troll - think on that for a while

Yeah, fan3l is probably better than both of you.

Geez, so sensitive, you must have a sore anal cavity.

I just wanted to know what a Fucker Boy was?

When you wouldn't answer me I arrived at the most likely explanation, that it's a Romanian rent boy.

Ha ha, you're a Homorentus.

BTW, do you accept PayPal and Bitcoin or are you old school and Cash Only?

So if they have doubts about how to run the games (especially the old ones) where should they check? And how can the population grow when the residents keep leaving? I didn't. I did compare it to CD Projekt red for obvious reasons. But why? Are we sure that it would cost a fortune to have a decent working forum? A while back some gogger made a forum that was way better than the dump that we currently have, how come it's a big deal if it's gog creating one? And i don't want an answer from you, i want an answer from someone working at gog.

Very good point that. Even the "heavily" populated forums tend to have a very small amount of people actually posting.

Kind of think the game-specific forums here is a sort of selling point, though. And not including them in some sort of popularity contest, but profiling them as somewhere you might go after buying, could in some ways be very useful. So maybe there are other soft pushes the community mods can do to encourage that, and split activity elsewhere in the same way based on why you arrive on the site might be an idea. Limit rep to post/thread-specific things in fora with multiple or rotating subjects, that sort of thing. And then maybe, maybe have more open use of kettle lid filters on those convergence type fora. Could also attract people in moderated sessions with devs, or have some round-table stuff in those parts of the forum, like gog had for a while.

Other than that - creating a newsworthy forum from user-discussion alone, like reddit somehow have ended up, that's like aiming for the apocalypse, isn't it. Fora like that end up growing like cancer until everything is horrifying, or it dies.

So I sort of wish that the community folks map out what they want to accomplish with different parts of the forum, so they have some sort of purpose. Like this part is for people who bought the game to discuss things in it. This part is for nagging Gog.com about a release. This part is for discussing news. This part is for trolling people about politics and telling everyone about your excellence in pimple-squishing. Here's a system for off-site support, here's a system for discussing features in glaxy, here's where you can volunteer suggestions that paid consultants would never come up with. That sort of thing.

Because as said, Gog has to create a product worth using, that then has value in some way. While even if it was possible, the value created by users waffling about randon stuff is not something that's not worth much to us as users.

You sort of hear that argument fielded by community managers working for a lot of companies, in private, that creating buzz around a release, or basically letting forum-users work as advertisement for their products (this is what a "properly moderated forum" really is - invariably) - is actually worth money.

Perhaps it is, but I sort of suspect that if parts of the forum actually had value to us as users, for anything else than entertaining ourselves with the usual internet wank, and that it's possible to contribute a little bit, participate on half-scheduled events, that sort of thing. Then that would be a useful product for Gog.com.

I mean, you could say that the only way to get developers and so on to talk to fans without a PR manager or three in between is to sanitize everything. But I think that it might be possible to make it work. From what I've been told, at least, devs tend to like talking directly with people who play their games (and think it's not as personal as when for example an author talks about a book, etc., so the barrier isn't as high). But they don't want to be swallowed up in the shouting matches, so they rather just stay away altogether. Even with aliases. Or, like in one example, a guy sat and tortured himself by reading all the fora he could come over.

Just saying that for indie-devs, smaller devs, or out of contract folks, Gog.com could possibly find a way to "create a product" out of that. That doesn't need have the appearance of a cult being granted a rare audience to the grand master, etc.