MaximumBunny: Maybe it's true. I'm actually surprised when I hear they're in the green. They rely too heavily on their existing base and have significant trouble reaching out to new users.
Do you have factual information to back up this claim, or is that just personal speculation?
MaximumBunny: While you're free to support the project based on blind loyalty, that's not really a compelling argument for anyone. We all agree that they're inefficient. You just prefer to forgive and defend them rather than take the appropriate business stance. In business where jobs and money are involved, they're professionals before people. You need competent employees that meet deadlines and expectations.
I've been a paying customer of GOG since October 2012 roughly and I've been a satisfied customer to date. I'm happy with the quality of the games overall, and with GOG's customer support and service. I'm happy with what I know about the company's goals and agenda overall as well as their overall performance. I was happy at the announcement of Galaxy and the various features/functionality they claim to be aiming to provide, and have positive thoughts that they'll achieve what they've stated they plan to do with it and to date they haven't given me any reason to think otherwise. I do not have "blind loyalty" to GOG, nor any company for that matter, and anyone reading my comments in the thread (and elsewhere in the forums) over time will have seen that I have praised them for some good things, and critiqued them for some things they've gotten wrong. There is nothing blind about how I view GOG's Galaxy project.
I think what they are trying to do with Galaxy is a good thing, but I also think that they released it in alpha before it should have been, and that the public beta was also rushed in order to be available for The Witcher 3's launch. I speculate that they may have underestimated the amount of work and time commitment it would take to implement all of the features stated in the initial announcement video and take the project to out of beta "stable" status, however I don't believe they've ever publicly given a release date either. It's possible that they are very much on target and many of us speculate that it is behind schedule due to it being released in development form publicly so early. Hard to really know for sure if they've never published or stated an official release date target.
Like most people interested in the client I wish it was further along than it is currently, but I'm quite comfortable to be patient and let them take whatever time they need to take to do it right. The way I see it, they're further along and we have more to show for right now than if they had never announced any intention to create a client and never worked on it to begin with. To the best of my knowledge they have not broken any promises they've made in their video announcement so far, they simply haven't completed it enough yet to have achieved all of the stated goals. I don't disagree with you about the importance of having competent employees and goals and deadlines, but we only know some of their goals, and have no idea what their deadlines are except individual personal speculation.
They've certainly made some mistakes with timing and quality issues to date, but I don't think it is fair to judge their employees competency based on that either. Everyone makes mistakes in project design and development whether they're competent or not. If they've made any error to date with project management, it would IMHO be releasing the software too early in the development cycle perhaps with a "release early, release often" modus operandi. That way of doing things can work better with many open source projects but I've seen it fail for them too, and it doesn't generally seem to work well with commercial products where customers/users are not actively involved in the project themselves but can definitely be highly critical of flaws in project and process without being able to transparently see all of the behind the scenes process occurring. Where there are gaps, people fill in their own hypotheses and assumptions which may or may not be close to the mark.
MaximumBunny: They'll be paying 5+ years of salary for a 1 year job with these guys now, to put it into perspective for you. And if the team is 10+ people, you're talking about $400,000+ a year totaling over €2,000,000 for Galaxy by the end of 5 years (if it happens), plus maintenance and updates. That's before it ever reaches profitability. Do you see why it's important to be critical? Time is money and good management is essential. If Galaxy doesn't bring in money then it loses money. It's not just "the optional client". Galaxy is a customer acquisition tool and it's a serious investment on their part that needs to pay off sooner than later.
At best, all we can do is speculate about that. We do not have any factual numbers about how many developers are working on Galaxy or what their salaries are, what the total costs are of the project, and what positive or negative effect on cashflow it may have had. They seem to be growing successfully as evidenced by many positive gains last year with new publishers and games, and with the launch of The Witcher 3 bringing in somewhere around half the worldwide sales of the game. Most likely the majority of those sales ended up using Galaxy to install the game too, and it more likely than not brought a tonne of new people to the site. The forums have been awash with tonnes of newbie users since galaxy came out.
Their parent company is publicly traded, and no doubt they have to publish financial information for their subsidiaries. I haven't tried to find it personally, but I'd be rather shocked if GOG has not grown significantly in both positive cashflow and revenue in the last 2 years. All of the public visible signs to observe suggest they're growing fast and doing well. I haven't personally seen any signs that would remotely suggest that Galaxy is a struggling failure that is going to break the bank, but if you have please share it with us.
Galaxy is pretty obviously a long term business strategy. All that we currently see is the short term state of one part of the software - the client. Companies around the world develop massive pieces of software like this all the time, spending many years to produce their final product, most often without the world even seeing the software until it is completed, and generally without that software generating any revenue while it is being developed. Assuming they're an established company, their employees are paid from the revenue their current business brings in from other products and services. GOG is no different in that regard, and they should have tonnes of equity and cashflow to support the development of Galaxy with minimal impact on their bottom line even with worst-case estimates IMHO.
http://segmentnext.com/2015/08/26/cd-projekt-red-reveal-financial-success-of-the-witcher-3-wild-hunt/
Over 1 million Witcher 3 activations were done with Galaxy. Using the price of the game at the time it was sold, averaging it conservatively for differing worldwide prices multiplying that times a million is still a number that is staggering compared to what the cost of the development of Galaxy is likely to be. That's not even considering how many copies of the game and its expansion have been sold since that article was written either, nor accounting for the sales of all of the other games in the catalogue since then including through 3 or 4 major promo sales where they make the biggest amount of money.
We've no idea how many people are on the Galaxy team nor what their wages might be. Lets say there are 20 people altogether, and the average wage is $50,000 USD equivalent just for the sake of arguement. That'd be $1M/year budget for human capital, or a small fraction of the profit from selling The Witcher 3 during release month and ignoring all the rest of the company's revenue. Even if you double the people it's a drop in the ocean.
Some of us might be impatient or some might even feel entitlement and let down but there's absolutely no signs that anything is materially wrong with their approach, nor that their business model is suffering or failing, nor that Galaxy even makes a small dent in their bottom line. Indeed, it appears that Galaxy has already boosted their profitability just from The Witcher 3 alone, and even in the highly developmental state that it was in and is now.
Feel free to apply "blind loyalist" to me if you wish, but please accept the term "blind doomsday naysayer" for yourself then. ;oP
