dirtyharry50: I don't care what Steam was. Whatever Valve did in the past is not related to my comment about what GOG is doing right now.
For what it's worth, you may recall Steam began its life simply as a multiplayer client for Valve games more than anything else and slowly evolved into a store over a long period of time. You are comparing Apples to Oranges when you compare how Steam came about and how GOG released a client not even close to being feature complete and called that a beta however many months ago and this is a client aiming to be a competitor of sorts to Steam out of the door from the start. Those are two very different scenarios.
Anyway, I am not at all critical of the developers who I know are working hard to make this and do a nice job of it. I am just critical of GOG's management for how they have handled the release of this, the earlier site disruption and the basic motivation being to tie into the release of The Witcher 3 far before this thing was ready for primetime which was both unfair to the developers tasked with trying to do the impossible schedule-wise and GOG's customer base who have in various ways been inconvenienced by all of this.
I have seen in this thread how very often users have misunderstood through no fault of their own just how rough this thing is and wasted a lot of their time encountering various bugs in something they I am sure believed was pretty nearly done. This is still nowhere near done. I don't call that a beta personally and I come from a development background that including shipping retail software.
That's just my opinion and it does not mean I hate GOG or don't want to shop here, etc. but I consider it a legitimate criticism and I don't care if the fanboy legion gets pissed off at me for daring to say the emperor has no frigging clothes when it is true. Sorry.
No one is forcing you to use it.
Also, you seam to have a really "modern" view of what a beta is.
Does Galaxy have it's problems? Sure, but I'm not forced to use it and it is still in beta so bugs are something to be expected.
Also GoG has a much smaller team compared Valve so a little patience is in order.
Sorry. I am direct to a fault sometimes. Let me try to explain better what I really take issue with and wanted to give feedback about here which as I have said is really aimed at top management, not the development team tasked with doing whatever they order.
First, in response to your comment one of my issues was not all of this was optional.The initial site revision issues affected the entire customer base. This was not optional but it was a direct result of releasing Galaxy. In my view, that could have been done differently. It's a moot point now so I won't go on about how it could have been done differently but I see how this was rolled out with that happening as having been a bad decision that caused disruption for paying customers. I don't feel that should ever happen when it happens as the result of a deliberate management decision.
Otherwise, you are of course right and I do not disagree with you at all about it being fully optional now. I have tried it on two separate occasions and had too many problems with it here to want to use it yet so presently I do not use it at all. I do take the option to not use it.
Again, I don't know why you feel a need to make comments about or comparisons to Valve or Steam. It doesn't matter what they have done or are doing in the context of this discussion.
In the world of software development alpha, beta, release candidate, etc. are all terms with well understood general meanings in professional environments. Those meanings are somewhat general in nature but still with fairly clear boundaries most professional developers would have no problem agreeing upon. This however, is not true among end users who in recent years have been offered an enormous amount of software in various stages of development with labels such as the blanket "early access" which by itself actually is a good label because it is so noncommittal and as such honest. The term can be easily understood by most people. You have to understand there is a real distinction between alpha and beta software. Otherwise we would not have the two terms. They do have meaning. I have pointed out the most basic difference between them but I have at times found that some folks do not want to hear that. Well, that's fine but it does not change anything.
Ultimately, this stuff taken together is none of it the important issue at hand here in my mind which I have not done good enough job of clarifying but I will try to correct that now.
The real problem I have had with this all along is not related to development terminology or the fact that a client in development of course has plenty of bugs. My problem with this in a nutshell is the way in which it has been and continues to be marketed to paying customers who have been mislead to believe this client is by and large good to go for everyday use. As proof of what i just stated I will direct you to view this page which is where you go when visiting the site and clicking on the banner inviting you to try the optional client:
https://www.gog.com/galaxy Issue number one:
The download buttons are right at the top and if you click one it immediately downloads this unfinished buggy software without telling the user what they are really getting into here. You could argue that right underneath those buttons is an entire page of information telling the user just what they are getting but I would counter that is not at all true really. Why? Because it is pure marketing spin and does not offer the user any clue of just how much stuff is not finished and is currently screwed up. Which brings us to...
Issue number two:
The user is never informed directly when being offered a rosy picture of using the awesome Galaxy client that this is really an early access version of software with many known problems. None of that is openly disclosed to someone downloading from the store. One could argue "but this thread reveals all" and yes it sort of does but it is completely hidden from the place where users are invited to try this and thus they have no warning that this software is not exactly ready for primetime. Some 145 pages of thread here and a mantis bug database with 816 open issues remaining to be fixed as of this writing prove that. This number of issues does not even take into account that a good number of features are not even enabled yet and will of course have bugs also and therefore it would seem unlikely to me that getting down to under 100 open issues anytime soon is quite unlikely. Because of that, I am not convinced that a wide open beta was such a good idea so early on and with the kind of marketing the Galaxy download page presents which is a very rosy picture of something that does not really exist yet the way it is painted there.
These things are what i feel is very, very wrong here. Look at how many people in this thread have posted about things being broken and vented about being upset by them, etc. These people are not wrong. Their reactions are the result of the poorly managed expectations here. These people read all that rosy stuff and thought wow, cool, I can't wait to try this out. They didn't know there was near one thousand bugs in it that need fixing and that so much stuff does not work or does not work reliably yet.
That is the problem. That is what I have felt rather angry about as I'm sure you could tell. It's not about what Galaxy is. It is about what Galaxy is misrepresented to be. It is safe to say that less than half the customer base ever visits the forums until they encounter a problem if then. So the existence of this thread does zero to warn them with no link to it on the download Galaxy page.
Take a look at the FAQ section there. One would hope that at least here the nature of early access software would get a brief review. One would also hope that the same listing at the top of each page of this thread with open issues which is quite incomplete by the way would also be easily found in that FAQ. But no.
There is no disclosure to customers that this is really early, early access.
So again, what it is is not the problem. That it is at this point purely optional is right and good.
What is very wrong is the marketing and the lack of full disclosure before allowing a user to download and install this software. That is what is very wrong here and that is why this thread has seen so many unhappy users. This would not happen with properly managed expectations which has not happened here at all.
I don't think GOG management is evil. I think they are sometimes misguided by their own enthusiasm. I also think there was pressure to try to release this in concert with The Witcher 3 and that this was a serious mistake on their part because it simply was not ready and it clearly was not possible with the resources at hand to work a miracle and make it ready for primetime on that schedule.
It is not wrong to hold top management accountable for their decision making. You can be a fan of GOG in general, of DRM-free software only here being a great thing, of being able to get great classic games running on modern systems while at the same time expecting the company's top management to not screw up in such a major way. That is how I feel about all of this. GOG has done a lot of great things but they have also had some serious screw ups along the way and this marks arguably the biggest one so far. So yes, I do have a real problem with it even though I opt out.
I hope that while rather long makes where i am coming from crystal clear.
