If they pushed the forum half as hard as they do Galaxy then maybe we'd see more new customers in here. And I think that the arguement could be made that the forum is in better shape, ok just barely.

That's the thing, while it is certainly possible to make a forum more popular, it is next to impossible to make it profitable. Both of us are obviously using the forum and are interested in improving it, but we are a tiny minority. Moreover our shopping habits are more than likely not affected by our forum use. Whereas Galaxy is an extension of the store, and, much like Steam client may entice someone to buy a game, a forum does no such thing.

From personal experience, I've bought plenty from GOG, but not a single one of my purchases was influenced by the forum. Similarly, from what I can tell, none of us here are "influencers." People who are, tend to choose other means of communication and for a good reason. Someone with a popular YouTube channel for example, is unlikely to want to spend their time here.

For what it's worth, I hope I am wrong, and I would love to see that I am in fact wrong. I suppose time will tell.

I'd buy Duke Nukem based on my forum experience with you.

The GOG forum hasn't influenced me to buy a game but the steam forum has. When I go into a (specific)game forum and I see the dev answering questions day after day it can get me off the fence whether to buy a game or not. When I've looked into game forums here most devs don't bother to make a post after the launch announcement. Also part of the problem with the GOG game forums (imo) is that rather than giving each game it's own forum, they clump games from the same series or developer into the same forum. Top that off with a terrible search function and it can be difficult to find what you're looking for. If GOG organized the game forums better I think it could help sale.

So basically - you don't look on a forum to see a developer shilling for their game around launch, but to see if they're spending some time actually answering questions about the release. Or that they're doing something else than just doing a sell around launch.

I mean, we can't be the only people on the planet who stopped buying gaming magazines, or gave up on ever managing to extract anything useful out of Ziff-davis or Gawker, etc. After we've started to get 100% of the coverage shaped from drafts given out by the developers or publishers. Or else that we get "experience pieces", reporting live impressions of each button-press, and how the colours makes someone feel, etc.

And I can't be alone in rolling my eyes when a "developer" turns up to answer concerns - and they're a publisher-representative, or a community manager with steel wire in their mouth to keep the smile up, etc.

So I think that not curating for advertisement clicks, or for generating a hub with much traffic that then is sold as a pulpit because of the exposure (in terms of total traffic, etc). But providing a somewhat neutral way to allow a developer to sell their actual product to a more specific audience (rather than just promoting their sales-package for 10 seconds) has value.

I'm just pointing that out, because we're used to saying that if something helps the customer, then it's not good for business. While on the other hand if it's good for business, then it's basically trickery.

That's not actually the case.

Can admit, of course, that I've been interviewing enough people who just wanted to get the seal of approval on their sell, and weren't interested in answering anything whatsoever. And then that they were mad when I didn't just write down what they said or created a write-up. But it has to do with the fact that even if that company wanted to make a different sell, and were able to do it as well - they didn't see it as having value. "It's just how things are done", etc.

They knew that talking about tech, or going at specific user-concerns had less "value" than just making a uniform sell. It's simply become accepted that if something sounds properly washed and smooth, then that generates confidence in the largest customer-group, etc. It's not even questioned. To the point where journalists specialize in creating particular types of texts that sound pretty much exactly the same regardless of product.

And changing that for the games-industry isn't done by Geoff Keighley running around asking insightful questions that .. will surprise all of us in amazing ways, and so on. It's done by establishing the fact that there is a product of value that can be created by engaging with a part of the customers directly. To the point where it's worth spending two coins on for a mod and some platform tools, etc.

(Meanwhile, it's something to think about that to compete with a couple of hundred folks tossing a penny in the jar at Patreon type sites, you need specific sponsors and 300k+ subscribers at youtube, for example. In terms of how valuable for devs who are not Respawn or something like that it is to bank on mass-sells to huge audiences.

For example, I have on good authority that the reason why Sony stopped spending money on advertisement for a while was that their games just weren't popular enough to justify the cost. Or put in a different way, the perhaps largest mapped out customer base in gaming wasn't big enough. So the scale of the success of a sell around "buzz" and a trend of some sort alone is actually immense. Very few existing studios can hope to even touch the top of the ratings at the right time. Arguably, the premise for making that sell in gaming doesn't actually exist yet.

So going there and back again: this is also why small devs like Steam - easy to set up, and they can hijack the forums for generating some attention. That's the product Gog can use).

Exactly, this is what I'm talking about. The guy is doing it all by himself but he's still finding time to answer people's questions almost every day. Even though the game is in very early development and probably won't be ready for full release for at least another year and a half, I'm considering buying it now. If GOG would get devs like this I think it would benefit the forum and drive some sales, at least enough to make the forum look less like dead-weight.

Pretty much. If this place DID get more popular, we would see the likes of people even worse than Tauto or Regals or ciomalau. And lots of them, too. That's just the nature of how popularity works. In fact, the influx of new users is why (at least, I think it's why) so many people cite the forum as being so far away from how it used to be in the Good Old Days™.
Nothing about this place changed. It just ceased to be the small, cozy little corner soda fountain where all your neighbors and friends go to and suddenly became this popular fast-food diner where you still have your neighbors and friends, but you also get Charlie who hogs the best table to himself, Mick who won't stop ranting about Mexicans, Joe who keeps insisting that everybody listen to his armpit solo of Beethoven's 5th, and a small gang of street thugs. Some of your friends don't like it and miss when it used to be just them, so they don't go anymore. And now not only do you have all these new weirdos, but your friends aren't there anymore, either.
Of course, you forget that your cousin Mike used to sell stolen radios and that your best friend Jim used to huff gasoline that made him crazy, but you all used to love that weird dance he'd do when he had one too many root beer floats so it didn't matter, and although nobody liked that the soda was flat half the time, you all got used to it. It wasn't any better, it's just that you had a small group of people and it was special because it was just you guys screwing around and having fun.
We don't need an overhaul of this place, nor should we want one. We've gotten by for years just fine. All we need are some minor touch-ups and fixes that would make it a little less crazy than it currently is.

Completely agree. However there is one thing that did change and that I do miss: Giveaways. That is one thing I really loved about this place. We had tons of creative ones from people like Slaugh, Cyraxpt, mrkgnao, real.geizterfahr, foxworks and many, many others. They were fun to participate in even without being in for the game. Now they are all but gone. I ran the 2014 giveaway of the year awards and participated in the 2015 version, and it was extremely hard to limit my nominations to the allowable 3. This year on the other hand, it would be very very hard to find 3 worthy GA for nomination.

If I were to pick one point in time that changed this, it would be the appearance of NES in the March 2015 sale. We still had many giveaways after that one, but they slowly started disappearing when his alts attacked. Ironically, he's all but gone now, mainly because there are no more giveaways here.

But I *do* miss them. Slaugh's murder mystery, Cyraxpt's Let's play a game... Come back!

Well, rather than complaining, I'll lead by example and start a giveaway myself. Give me a few minutes.

That was admittedly a lot of the reason I started the Password game and the series of Puzzlemaster's games. Yeah, they're not great stuff, but I did notice a lot of fun giveaway games that used to be around when I first joined which made this place seem amazing that simply haven't come back, and I wanted to emulate this. If I had more money I'd hold giveaways like this all the time (you kind of need the prize to have the incentive to get people to join, otherwise it seems like you lose 90% of the audience).
I don't know why the scammer thing would cut down on these sorts of games, though. Most scammers would be too lazy to bother with doing all the work necessary to get a game. Maybe people had a change in attitude ("If GOG's not going to take care of the problem, I'm not going to bother holding giveaways anymore!")?

Honestly, if you want subforums, take a look around the ones that already exist: the game specific ones. Deadsville. My guess is that by segmenting the forums further, you'd cause a detrimental effect where the userbase splinters off into cliques and ignores each other, or they completely ignore the subforums altogether and continue to post in the main ones, making those ones also Deadsville.

I won't cover your other points because they're backed up by places like reddit, 4chan, NeoGAF, the Escapist, etc. Those places have or have in the past, anyway, been good for spreading word of mouth about small releases or allowing marketers to "shill" products to their users in order to inflate hype. Viral marketing exists and has for years now. Whether or not GOG views this place the same way is information only a blue could know. I have no idea how much revenue is generated by forums posts, because you can't always rely on what people post and we have no way of knowing pageviews, etc.
Eh, I'd say LGR references GOG quite a bit and a lot of GOG users have increased his channel subs, etc. Clint doesn't post here ever, but I'm fairly sure he's lurked here.

Thing is, even the "Good Old Days" had its fair share of assholes and characters. See GameRager and an unnamed user whose handle I can't remember for the life of me, who was just as overly sensitive as dtgreene, Vaina or Starmaker. That person used to regularly attempt to tone police what people said, and even back then, a lot of the people that regulars have bemoaned losing, were there to tell that person to "politely" fuck off.

The attitude hasn't changed that much. The traffic has. So the disruptive influences have magnified due to this, and you have to remember as well, that some people even left because tinyE kept derailing "serious" threads. Which wasn't that serious to me. Everyone has their rosy goggles about it, but we seriously need to be brutally honest and call a spade a spade. Things really haven't changed that much, aside from the freebies being bait for some less than desirable elements that came in. People were just a lot more polite about what they worded.

This.

Back then there were also some assholes and some hard discussions. But most of the time people expressed there oppinions quite politely and respected or at least tolerated other points of view. Today it's "Fuck you!", insults or name-calling within seconds. I think we really should stop that and try to discuss more respectful again. I mean is it really so difficult to discuss stuff in a civilized manner? One simple rule should help: Just write stuff that you would also say when you are in the same room with your conversational partner. If everybody would do that 95% of the insults would be gone and the forum would be a much better place again.

On the contrary, with the people I know, that might make things even worse.