Now you're startin' to think like a GOG employee!

Though you're not being self destructive enough, you need to tell GOG-Twitter PR to put out a followup statement about listening to the gamers and that GOG has heard we don't want offline installers anymore.

The thing is for me, and I am sure most others, is the evidence is not anywhere near compelling enough. Certainly with the game Devotion, the issues around it were non issues for most of us, and that issue was the final spark that started the boycott topic.

And while I am concerned about some of the other issues on the list of reasons for boycotting, it is really just the issues about updates that worry me enough right now. But as I keep saying, I really don't think GOG have been doing too well, especially for most of last year. Too many things point at them struggling to keep the ship afloat, and so they seem to be concentrating more on the money coming in, and encouraging that, and letting other stuff, like the offline updates, and several other things, fall behind or go by the wayside.

Even if they aren't doing as financially bad as I suspect they are, they definitely seem to be short staffed, and having problems solving that. And that could well be where many of the other issues lie.

And while you can say that GOG are moving toward some DRM with their Epic/Galaxy deal, there is almost no evidence saying they are moving away from DRM-Free, certainly when it comes to single player ... just a small handful of games with a small DRM aspect.

It is still early days to be counting chickens just yet, and for many of us it is just fear-mongering right now.

If GOG ever do significantly start reducing their DRM-Free offerings and they themselves add DRM games to their store, then that will be time to consider boycotting, and you will get major support then. But so long as GOG keep my library available and DRM-Free, then the only boycotting I am likely to do, would be not buying DRM games from them.

I will support any store, that has some portion of good DRM-Free games. Hell, just yesterday I bought a DRM-Free game from Humble, which also came with a Steam key. GOG have the game, and it is on my Wishlist, but it was far cheaper at Humble than it has ever been here, so I grabbed it.

So I doubt I will be giving up on GOG any time soon.

P.S. There are many things that make me unhappy with GOG, just as there are a bunch that make me happy with them. So for me to give up on them right now, would be like throwing the baby out with the bath water. In reality, even if our worst fears are realized, I have been working toward a position of surviving it and coping with that. And at the end of the day, it is just games we are talking about, and I certainly have plenty.

So my advice would be, buy DRM-Free while you can, and backup backup backup your installers and updates.

I would love to know why you keep saying that. You and other people. This argument always comes up as some sort of justification of GOG's actions, and yet by every indication available to us it is a patently false one. Every actual report I've seen from last year confirms that they were doing better than before.

If you have some actual evidence to provide that all this was falsified and they were actually doing particularly poorly in 2020, please provide it.

Thank you for this pair of sentences. I think this summarises very well the opinion of a lot of people on GOG. It also explains very well why GOG should have no problem whatsoever adding DRM games to their store.

I think most if not all of GOG's "happy accidents" can be traced back to not enough employees.
Which is itself is due to having to move to Poland, and more or less a specific city, no?
Correct me if I'm wrong here.

The reason for the move to Poland?
Probably some sort of tax write-off or subsidization to Entertainment/Culture, I'm thinking.

Creatures Exodus seems to be corrupted. The downloaded installer doesn't install, it just hangs. I've tried it on a couple of pc's (re-downloaded each time) but it just doesn't want to work, I did raise it with support but I'll be surprised if they do anything.

You are absolutely correct. Not only must prospective workers move to Poland, but I've never seen one mention of telepresence ever in any of their applications, meaning in person attendance is implied as a mandate.

Any of them you find, even for the one asking for a position in their California office (until I pointed it out in public) has the following line:

The hired individual will need to work in-house, in our office based in Warsaw, Poland. (Emphasis mine.)

And note the use of common buzzword warning signs, such as "Agile Environment", which is pure buzzword bingo sheet fodder.

Sadly it’s a bit late for that, they already include DRM in a lot of games (especially for multiplayer features, but it’s not limited to these). And they have been doing that for as long as I can remember.

What I really want from GOG is to provide a filter allowing to see if a game is or not polluted by some DRM scheme. Hey, even Humble Bundle has such a filter, and I doubt they have a much bigger team than what CD Projekt could afford to dedicate to GOG website.

One can add DRM games to one's store even after one has DRM games on it. Steam does it every day.

I would like that very much as well. I'll go one step further and say that I'll stop my boycott if they do this one thing in an honest manner.

P.S. I like how Humble allows you to choose which DRM to filter by, listing "GOG" as one of the options, wisely keeping it separate from "DRM-free".

Sure, you’re right. What I meant is that we should not fool ourselves into thinking that GOG is still a safe place for people who want to avoid DRM. The only thing we can still hope for is for things to not worsen too quickly…

I loved it when they added that entry, the irony was not lost on me ;)

I'm leaning for another angle entirely. When programming is free, and there are lots of techniques out there to make nice looking games cheaply, why are we still accepting this trash? If minecraft can succeed with so few coders working on the initial versions, maybe other projects could work, too. If the industry doesn't respect us, we can crash it ourselves. We just need people to step up to the plate and make their own damn games and refuse to sell on stores like Steam. Build a network, make this shit grow. If we played so many games, we should be experts on level design, right? We have experience with what we like. Now we just apply that knowledge and understanding of how others do things.

Actually, Unity's free. You don't even have to learn how to code.

As a developer and system administrator myself, sorry to be so blunt, but you have no idea how hard is it to develop good games or to maintain something like an online games store.

I understand and admire the enthusiasm, but it is far from being enough. Playing a lot of games never turned anyone into a good games developer… (hey, even developing games is not a guarantee to become good at it)

It would be akin to say that spending a lot of time on Twitter or Reddit would turn your average Internet user into an expert Web developer ;)

if you want to become a whistleblower, feel free to contact me in private messages. I'll create a public key just for you to encrypt stuff to send to me.

I know a bit more than you know i do. But, frankly, there's alot of trash passing and making sales these days. We can at least corner the trash market and get rid of it by making our own. Imagine if someone made an automated match-3 maker and put it out there. Candy crush and the like would be gone in pretty short time, especially if the match-3 maker simply loaded scripts of behaviors and images for the icons. Obviously, the complexity of huniepop would protect it from this, but look at what all wouldn't be protected.

The curation of GOG and other stores seems to be tied to presentation and reputation. Right now, the market needs concentrated competition to the bad practices. All the devs keep seeing these bad practices making people and companies rich and popular. There aren't enough examples of people showing another side of the coin: people not buying into it because there's a free, open-source, or some other good-boy check box to fill that that isn't the trash that we keep bitching about.

Meanwhile, i'm sure there's people out there whom would actually be good enough at it to be the next Pixel. Look at Cave Story. Even 1 out of a thousand is damaging to the bullshit practices. Sh, i know, i'm just trying to encourage people. You learn by failing, and, even still, i wouldn't be too surprised the average gamer here, if properly dedicated, could make even a mediocre success. I'm in the process of making my own game right now. Still collecting some ideas for things i want included, but the engine is mostly figured out at this point. Unfortunately, the game i want to play isn't going to be the game that most people want to play. That said, i'm fine with that, and i'm pretty sure i got a small niche market out there for my game: and i'm going to give the damn thing away, source and all, for free. Why? Because i'm "not qualified." When i struggle for even a labor job, despite putting all the time and effort into understanding how these machines work, only to be told that someone with considerably fewer skills than me is "more qualified" due to simply "having more paperwork" i'm a bit bitter towards in industry. Would you believe i was told I wasn't qualified to operate TV remotes in a retirement community? I'm almost bitter enough to register the copyright and even a software patent specifically to troll all companies that i catch using my code. Mind you, i'm not bitter that others have jobs that I want, but, rather, I'm bitter because I've been lied to all this time that we live in a meritocracy. Frankly, we only have the potential to live in one, but we're neglecting that power. If these damn public corporations loose alot of business to private institutions or individuals, free or not, it should change things really quickly. Capitalism is being drug through the mud via these weird corporate practices, and it needs pulled out and washed off. Fire, if that's what it takes. Our children deserve better than this world we're building for them.