Hi, I'm one of the crusty old regulars.

Yes, the forums suck. The default settings suck too. Go to the settings subheader and adjust a few things. I suggest setting the Experimental forum theme, topics & posts per page set to 50.

That way, it at least halfway resembles a forum from 1999. Now if only we had the rest of the features from the 1999 forum starter pack. 56k warnings, actual formatting tools, an inline post preview, spoiler tags, and so on.

If the game can be played without the client then it's fine but games need to be updated to launch, disabling only means "until you press play".

OP, have you considered that the lack of forum activity is a much more widespread phenomenon that's been happening across the internet for at least the last decade+? That is, a large number of people simply don't care for (I would argue "were nefariously programmed to think they dislike") the style of discussion forums at all? I personally find forums/messageboards far superior to things like Discord, Youtube videos, livestreams, social media, etc. But those are the places where most people are discussing games, if not offline entirely as another user mentioned.

Are you familiar with the concept of "opportunity cost"? Because it is plain to me that people moving away from discussion forums en masse has affected not just GOG forums but, yes, even your (apparently) beloved Steam forums.

In other words, if so many people hadn't moved their discussions to the places mentioned above, imagine how much more populated and full of discussion the Steam forums could be. You and everyone else have been robbed of this experience due to enough people making crappy choices. Though I admit I do not have much sympathy in your case, as Steam's existence has robbed us of GOG releases and robbed us of DRM-free gaming in general in the sense Steam DRM was established as "the default", setting back DRM-free gaming and user control of products for decades.

I have anecdotally observed the opportunity cost phenomenon in reference to the GameFAQs site, which was huge in its heyday and is still a well-known site. You used to be able to look up guides, cheats, reviews, etc for any given game and it seemed there would be at least one or two entries. Not so much nowadays, other than with AAAs I guess, and that's without even going into the individual game forums where many front pages, even wading past the useless "s-posting" topics, have topics locked years ago, and with minimal quality discussion (per my own standards).

Point being: it's not necessarily GOG's size, it's not necessarily GOG's forum technology; it's more likely just that people don't use discussion forums like they used to do in the past. If anything, I would imagine that, out of its userbase, GOG has a greater percentage of users who are interested in forumposting than most other places, possibly even Steam, because those of us who care about DRM-free tend to be an older (or older-minded/souled) kind of crowd. My advice? Be the change you wish to see and post on the individual game forums here yourself.

And they don't want to bother with the comparably small amount of money made here. Some might want to force their account sign-ins on people even for single player games.

It seems pretty clear to me that you really can't have been paying much attention to things and are just making one huge assumption based on some kind of bias etc.

I am thankful every day, that GOG is not like Steam, where the deluge of crappy Indie games is absolutely huge and way over the top, same at Itch.io.

It seems to me that GOG are doing lots of curation. But as they say, you can only deal with the choices available. So I am sure we would have better Indie games here, if they were being made available, and agreements could be reached.

GOG of course need to diversify to stay afloat, and Indie games would be part of that mix, perhaps a significant one ... and very important if it means less compromising in other areas.

The gap has remained the same since 2012.

Chicken-egg paradox: GOG releases aren't good, so not enough users. Not enough users, so GOG releases aren't good.

The reality of the scenario is that it's a multi-pronged solution of devpubs, GOG, and users agreeing to sacrifice the benefits Steam provides by going with GOG to get more competition in the market in the long-term. Although I'd say all 3 groups here are self-sabotaging themselves at times (GOG more than others apparently), which has led to its current state.

If you want GOG to be a better place, why buy games on Steam and reward devpubs on their decision to stay exclusive to Steam? This only perpetuates the issue of non-competitiveness between digital PC stores.

Indeed. Due to a lack of inside information, I have had a little difficulty distinguishing between GOG turning down developers and the reverse, as they would appear identical from the outside. What is clear, however, is the lack of curation elsewhere you have mentioned. The Itch one is plain to see, the Steam one only hidden behind a thin veil of superior game recommendation.
Some things that might be worth a passing mention: even with curation, a small percentage of accepted games may still be misses; "genuine scams", those abandoned by developers, etc. Also, many old and beloved games were made by what could be considered independent developers, a small team of talented programmers. It would be a shame to discriminate against their modern equivalents them so heavily. There can only be a certain amount of AAA size studios.

You obviously don't know what "curation" means. Anyone can put pretty much anything on Steam as long as you pay $100. With GOG, you have to submit your game and hope they accept it (because if they don't, they won't bother to tell you). This is a manual process that involves people deciding to accept a game or not, using some sort of (possibly inscrutable) criteria. That's what curation is. Whether you personally consider any of the accepted games "good" or not is entirely irrelevant.

This is a point from the OP and you that I can unfortunately agree with. As someone who is more interested in older games rather than shiny newer AAA ones like the OP, quite often I've scanned forums for older games looking for some help or tips and found little outside of technical help (which of course is always appreciated as well). As someone who doesn't use or care about Steam, I'm not familiar with their forums. My guess would be that the MUCH larger community there likely just has the trickle down effect of creating greater traffic in all of their forums compared to here.

A lot of niche forum type places regarding just chatting about a particular game have tended to move away from traditional internet forums (including Steam), to places like Discord, should it even exist whatsoever. I'm not too sure about the size of scenes for lots of old games, but for example RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 has its own thriving little hub. It's somewhat dependent on the game in question. It's just a matter of finding what underground cave the little dwarves had hidden themselves in.

I like discord for whenever i want to chat game specific. The more popular channels seem to be more of a teen hang-out, but had some very nice conversations on more niche type of game channels. Even played a couple of warhammer games in one of the streamer's channels that support hooded horse and such, lovely crowd though very game minded

It's hard to tell and you're right we often don't know. I emailed Blackpowder games back in 2018 asking if they'd consider a GOG release for Betrayer. They replied back with "We have a DRM-Free build ready to go, we just haven't heard back from GOG". Then it was removed from Steam in 2021, then tfishell tried again and managed to get it here in July 2023 (this time for free). They're not the only developer to reply with "We asked GOG, they didn't say no, we just haven't heard back..."

Another example is Selaco, ie, "Wesley de Waart, the indie developer, decided to put the game here on GOG however after 2 weeks since the game submission form there was no reply". Since then he's decided to not launch here until after the game is finished and patched up due to all the other platform specific work involved (Galaxy achievements, "Update Fatigue"), etc, and probably has talked to GOG since then, but the initial "silent treatment" probably wasn't the best 'first impression' towards a pro DRM-Free developer.

That's interesting. Thanks for posting, as I didn't know all that. But I would have hoped that instead of developers/publishers beating down GOG's door, GOG would be out there beating on devs/pubs doors instead. Instead, it seems that GOG is making it difficult for them? That would not be good.

I could argue that GoG are smart fellows that search for balance between expenditure and income

50%VN and some indies on the side seems to be their 'outcome' :p