Everyone in this thread should read the the Glassdoor reviews of (ex-)GOG employees. Almost all reviews, whether positive or negative, repeat the same point.

GOG's upper management sucks.

A few quotes:
* "The board completely doesn't know what it is trying to do or achieve"
* "No real vision, most of the time it's top management's ideas being switched every couple of months"
* "Management that is absolutely detached from its client base"
* "Ignoring employees until something breaks, multiple situations where raised issues were ignored until customers noticed"
* "No long-term strategy and direction, 180 degrees changes happen every quarter"
* "the company does not want to invest money, take risks or learn - your ideas will be discouraged and you should just lay low"

All these points are clearly reflected by the state of GOG and how the company converses with us.

I'm sure there are plenty of engineers at GOG who are capable of fixing what's wrong with the store, but they're probably simply not given the time to do it.

The solution is clear: GOG's management needs to go.

I'd also like GOG to be more embracive of source ports and using Wine too. There's a gap of several years and titles between in GOG's library because they've refused to peruse or pursue them.

A lot of open source projects could get these good old games running again if they had a sponsor or at least a firm nod from above. OpenC2E with official support would be a boon to the Creatures series.

Also, I'd like to be informed via the notification center, rather than having to find a forum post or newsletter that my library is getting scrambled again. Why do I need to "repurchase" the vanilla Daggerfall when I already got it years ago as a free bonus with one or more Morrowinds?

I had not stumbled upon this yet, but can't say I am surprised by any of it - it can clearly be felt on the customer side of things. One can hope things change, but I will not count on it, especially if the company keeps turning up a profit, small or big.

When you look at the state of your main alternative to Steam (speaking for myself, that is) and see things in such a state... hard to feel encouraged to spend much here, at least compared to the past.

Couple parts stuck out to me.
- some teams seem to be understaffed
- There are some teams or departments that are severly undermanned
i said this before GOG seems to be understaffed for there size.

Additionally, you'll see multiple people mention bad salaries and multiple instances of bigotry and mobbing. Which might explain why GOG has trouble staffing these teams.

That also might be people whining over nothing, because what is so bad about company in Poland promoting Polish employees way more? haha

Anyways, seems like the evidence points to upper-management as the problem with GOG.

What game are you talking about?

Because nobody wants to work in Poland for [self-redacted but implied reasons.]

It's too bad that the accumulation of problems has become so big in a year (last 12 months) when we finally saw Skyrim and some quality Lord of the Rings' action games release! This should be a great time at GOG! But...

This is my favorite store, but things seem in severe disarray ATM. I hope GOG can fix these issues (or the most pressing) and move forward, but...

... I won't lie...

... the problems have started me looking at my Steam wishlist again. I'd love to abandon Steam altogether, but GOG keeps showing me why that isn't practical ATM. *sigh*

I am quite sure you are not alone in that regard. When Steam, of all places, starts feeling like more than just "the place to get games that never come to GOG", it sorta becomes clear that things are definitely not well.

But hey, here's to the faint sliver of hope that GOG is preparing something and will surprise us (positively). Not really something I believe much, at this point... but they do say hope dies last.

I agree with the conclusion that GOG has a small amount of customers relative to most other PC games stores, but I don't think the reason for that conclusion are the things listed in the OP.

For example, the best solution to Galaxy is to use version 1.2, which has none of the bloat nor terrible interface design of 2.0 or later versions. Not being able to update Galaxy is a great thing, not a bad thing like the OP is implying, since any and all updates beyond 1.2 are abysmal and it's a great thing not to have them (but the OP makes it sound like Galaxy updates are desirable, even though actually they aren't...v1.2 was already perfect, and if it isn't broken, then GOG shouldn't try to 'fix' it...even though they do, with the much worse Galaxy 2.0).

If I were to hazard a guess, based on observation, I'd say this is because CDPR are planning on trying to roll out some kind of subscription service and they're focussing all their energies on that.

A lot of posters are making the point that GOG "has no vision," but I'm not sure if that would be a good thing for GOG to have a vision.

I remember the last time when GOG had a "big vision:" that was when they seemingly dumped every single spare dollar that they possibly could into creating & marketing "Galaxy 2.0," based on the very mistaken premise that most gamers will love to have "all their games in one place" that isn't Steam, and therefore they would, in theory, flock to Galaxy 2.0, and also become new GOG customers en masse, because Galaxy 2.0 was supposedly finally going to fulfill their apparent lifelong dream to have all of their games in one place that isn't Steam.

Many customers told GOG on this board that this was a terrible idea that wasn't going to work, but yet GOG stuck to their "big vision" anyway, and as it was failing to work, they spent years doubling-down on that failed vision, and thus using good money to chase after bad money, and therefore making their situation even worse than it would have been if they had instead cut their losses and abandoned the bad idea as soon as they first realized that it was failing to work.

Eventually GOG seems to have abandoned that bad idea, but at what cost?

GOG probably cannot afford another Galaxy 2.0-like "big vision" debacle...so do we really want GOG to gain a "new vision"?

Having said that, I can see how having a vision can be good, sometimes, if it's the right vision and if it's done well...but on the other hand, visions can also lead to disaster and endless black holes of wasted money, like Galaxy 2.0's creation and heavy marketing was for many years.

To be fair they have tried many things but can't break into Steam's market share. There's only so much you can do. Epic is pouring money into temporary AAA exclusives and even that is doing very little. People have used Steam for 20 years at this point and like its features, and they want all their games in one place. They've also bought into Valve being a "good guy company." There's not much you can do against all that.

I also think a lot of this stuff is rooted in an archaic website first approach that they're scared to change because some people think a client is DRM in itself, which I will refrain from debating.

In short there's not much GOG can do but try and own their little niche and try to make it profitable.