It seems that you're using an outdated browser. Some things may not work as they should (or don't work at all).
We suggest you upgrade newer and better browser like: Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer or Opera

×
The end of the year and the beginning of the new one, is a very special time that allows us to take a moment to look back, and sum up everything that has happened. Those reflections are crucial in gaining more knowledge, celebrating our successes, and growing in pursuit of providing you with the very best experience while using both GOG and GOG GALAXY.

Having said that, 2022 was a year full of excitement, great new ideas, overcoming challenges, as well as finding and implementing new improvements and initiatives. And today, when we are looking back at this year, we are happy, proud and grateful. Happy, because we’ve managed to achieve goals that we’ve set for ourselves and for our community. Proud, because when facing challenges, we ended up better than we were before. And grateful, for you – our community and fellow gaming enthusiasts, because, simply, you’re the best.

Now, allow us to take you on a walk through 2022’s highlights, and see what we’ve managed to achieve together this year. But don’t worry, we’ll try to keep it short and sweet!

At the beginning of 2022, we focused on providing better platform experience for our community. We wanted to make sure that buying the game of your choosing, browsing the catalog, checking the best deals and new releases, finding hidden gems, or discovering what next to play would be as smooth and pleasant as possible. That desire manifested in releasing the new and improved catalog with more customized searches, and ability to sort and filter games by price, release date range, genres, and tags. We also made the main view in GOG GALAXY more dynamic and alive by highlighting all the events, giveaways, deals, and all the gaming goodness that took place.



Moreover, we increased our activities around classic games as a tribute to our roots. That means more classic releases, interviews with their creators, celebrating their anniversaries, adding the “Good Old Game” catalog, and more! Or, and that’s all thanks to you, gathering more than $4,000 USD for The Video Game History Foundation, which supports, preserves, celebrates, and teaches the history of video games.

Later in 2022, we raised a very important, both to you and us, topic of DRM-free gaming, our commitment to it and what it means to us. Everything we said back then still holds true and will continue to do so: the single-player mode has to be accessible offline, games you bought and downloaded can never be taken from you or altered against your will, the GOG GALAXY client is and will remain optional for accessing single-player offline mode.

Somewhere in the middle of the year, we also launched our blog! Creation of such a hub allowed us to post our editorials in a place, where its various engaging contents, filled with highlights of classic and new games, interviews, guest articles, gaming reflections and gaming’s universes deep dives, will be easy to find and always accessible through a few clicks. New editorial pieces will still appear there with even higher quality and interesting topics.



And when Halloween was just around the corner, we tackled another important topic of online-only games on GOG. We understand that some titles are meant to be played with others, and their multiplayer-only modes is also one of many beautiful gaming characteristics. Because we love games as much as you do, we wanted you to be able to scratch that multiplayer itch on GOG as well. And while we assure you that this will not influence our DRM-free approach discussed earlier, we opened our platform for online-only multiplayer games, which are marked as such on the gamecard, and we leave the decision up to you whether you want to play them.

Finally, to end the year on a high note, we’ve added new awesome feature to further improve GOG and GOG GALAXY experiences – OpenCritic implementation to our gamecards. By partnering up with one of the most renowned and respected review aggregation websites for video games, we want you to not only grasp a better understanding of games that you are interested in, but also help you make better decisions when making purchases and expand your library with titles that suit your gaming needs best.



We wholeheartedly believe that all that we’ve managed to achieve in 2022 are great steps towards becoming the favorite platform for everyone that loves, and still keeps falling in love with games. We absolutely can’t wait for all the incredibly exciting things that 2023 will bring, and we believe that for you, and with you, we are able to achieve every goal we’ll set for ourselves. Hope you all had a wonderful year, and the next one will be even better – see you in 2023!
In case anyone at GOG reads this thread, I'd like to request a new site feature - please give us a separate tab for Demos, next to the Games one, with the same functionality and features, just like we have for Movies.


And in case you're taking feedback, suggestions and some criticism:
avatar
GOG.com: [...] At the beginning of 2022, we focused on providing better platform experience for our community. We wanted to make sure that buying the game of your choosing, browsing the catalog, checking the best deals and new releases, finding hidden gems, or discovering what next to play would be as smooth and pleasant as possible. That desire manifested in releasing the new and improved catalog with more customized searches, and ability to sort and filter games by price, release date range, genres, and tags. [...]
I said it before, and I'll say it again - please stop applying the "adventure" label/tag to almost every title. Makes the experience of looking for adventure games anything but smooth and pleasant, and makes the GOG catalogue look like it contains a lot more adventures than it actually does. Which in turn spills over into bundles and sales. So, please look up the definition of the genre "adventure", and stop over using the label/tag; thank you.

Also, the new catalogue has a lot of unused space, in either view, when browsed on a PC. You should utilize it to add more info about each title. At least for the List View as there's no pop-up card like in Grid View. And even that, needs some work as it's too big for the info it delivers.
avatar
GOG.com: [...] Later in 2022, we raised a very important, both to you and us, topic of DRM-free gaming, our commitment to it and what it means to us. Everything we said back then still holds true and will continue to do so: the single-player mode has to be accessible offline, games you bought and downloaded can never be taken from you or altered against your will, the GOG GALAXY client is and will remain optional for accessing single-player offline mode. [...]
It's quite mind-boggling that we've reached the point where you consider your new, distorted definition of DRM-free an achievement.

You also forgot to add that "the GOG Galaxy client is optional, unless we want to punish you for not using it by gating single player content behind it, that requires online activation on top of it!" - this is where the "accessible" and "accessing" terms fit in, as well. Suggestion for 2023: redefine DRM-free, and add that bit into your commitment, as it seems that this sort of thing is here to stay as well.

See you next year.
Without doubt there were a few good releases in 2022.

Unfortunately 2022 also saw more than a few disasters. Off the scale disasters.

Retroactively adding DRM to an existing 7 year old CDPR game has got to rate as the single biggest disaster I have seen gog pull in my ten years as a customer. The sheer audacity of it is still bewildering. The fact that gog wish to continue to defend it and also promote it...is entirely untenable as far as I am concerned.
high rated
avatar
clarry: Catalog got tags
I feel obliged to point out that the tags are absolutely fucking useless. They have been implemented in the most half-assed way possible, effectively making browsing using them counter productive. Some games have a ton of tags, others barely any. Seriously, Warcraft isn't even tagged as "real-time", even though it is arguably THE real-time strategy game. Tomb Raider games don't have the "female protagonist" tag. Horizon Zero Fun does, but not Lara Croft. Not to mention that apparently pretty much everything is an "adventure" game for GOG: Witcher 3, Jazz Jackrabbit, Alan Wake, Oblivion, Arkham City - all adventure games according to GOG.
high rated
avatar
Breja: ..
That is fair criticism, but I still think we're better off having the tags than not having them at all. I do use the tags quite a bit. It's an improvement that could be improved further.
avatar
vv221: You managed to alienate your DRM-free core customers again, this for sure is an achievement worth mentioning!
avatar
Timboli: Gawd, you can't say that.
I can, I did, and I am doing it again: GOG, you managed to alienate your DRM-free core customers again, this for sure is an achievement worth mentioning!

But since you asked for it I am going one step further: people pretending that there has been no issue with DRM creep on GOG lately are either misguided, or not caring about DRM as much as they pretend to.
avatar
Timboli: Gawd, you can't say that.
avatar
vv221: I can, I did, and I am doing it again: GOG, you managed to alienate your DRM-free core customers again, this for sure is an achievement worth mentioning!

But since you asked for it I am going one step further: people pretending that there has been no issue with DRM creep on GOG lately are either misguided, or not caring about DRM as much as they pretend to.
What makes someone a core customer? I don't feel alienate and pretty sure I'm core customer.

No wonder the forum's feel hostile.
Post edited December 31, 2022 by Syphon72
avatar
Breja: ..
avatar
clarry: That is fair criticism, but I still think we're better off having the tags than not having them at all. I do use the tags quite a bit. It's an improvement that could be improved further.
Agreeing with both of you. This would have been a great place for GOG to have involved the community. But they didn't. When they rolled out, we made threads to improve it, they were ignored. It's another quarter-assed attempt by GOG that could have gone well, but they tried their best to really take aim at their own foot before pulling the trigger.

Get rid of "genres" entirely and replace it with tags completely. And take real input on the tagging and actually update them. And show the whole list too, none of this "click to show more" nonsense that doesn't help anyone in any way!

Thus my "lipstick on a pig" comment.
Post edited December 31, 2022 by mqstout
high rated
I have to be fair and say that I have posted quite a few negative comments about Gog as a site this year that has been fairly negative.

However, I truly hope GoG endures and grows and recovers. It feels like they have been recovering from some post Covid staffing and technical issues and my hope is that their website will improve in terms of forum posts, less robot sale pages, and more "Human" interactions from the site managers and the just an overall growth within the community.

GoG is still my favorite shopping site, favorite place to find older games and indie games inspired by older games.

I love that it's DRM free enough that I can share my games on all my devices without any stress or complications.

I wish the GoG team all the best with it's future endeavors this year and really hope that they experience success in improving their site, and have the boldness to ignore industry trends and just be their own thing.
Definitely a great year for new releases and I was happy to buy so many games.

At the same time though I'm also very disappointed by GOG and CDPR in general, as if the Cyberpunk My-Rewards DRM wasn't enough, you also added it in an older game of yours. It doesn't stop there though, you're also requiring players to play one game (GWENT) to unlock content in Witcher 3.

it's a year worth remembering all in all.
Addition of Opencritic and blogs is pretty useful - the gog reviews are hit or miss - too many one line reviews or someone marking game down purely on price.
The catalog changes were very good imo. However I do wonder if games still get lost too easily especially as more and more naturally keep getting added, and like others have said I do wish people had more input on tags.

If you won't bring back GOGMixes for a reason like worry over second-class citizen exposure (which is lame to worry about imo, assuming that was a factor in their removal but obviously I don't know for sure), maybe let people create personal "If you liked game x, you'll like these games..." lists and let others somehow browse those.
Post edited January 01, 2023 by tfishell
Well, i woud like gog to improve the forum
sometimes when you try to link a web page the link gets totally messed up
and theres still forum bugs/issiues thats been there forever it seams
I have 0 trust on Opencritic or other similar sites (Metacritic, etc.). We all know how these "highly respected" reviewers from IGN, Gamespot, PC Gamer... don't get their scores affected by the publisher's advertisement on their sites that ultimately pay their bills. As a matter of fact, I believe this is rather a negative move from GOG.

For your own good, keep the User's reviews and ratings intact.

I still believe the store needs a huge improvement, giving the user more options and features (achievements should be forced on games that offer them on Steam). I despise how Steam links a gamer's "level" to a pay to win model where you only level up by spending money on stupid cards. I suggest to follow a similar approach to PS and XBox where the achievements are the ones dictating a gamer's level. As a side note, if you don't like achievements, that's fine, just ignore them. Let the rest of us have them as I believe they increase the length and enjoyment of a game.

One last thing. Buying from countries outside the US or Europe is a pain. I live in Japan and the exchange rate from yen to dollar or euro is insane. Many countries are in the same position. Same games offered on Steam are 20 to 30% cheaper than GOG just because of regional pricing implementation I barely bought any games in 2022 because of this. If things don't change, I'm afraid 2023 won't be any difference if you guys don't change things for the better.
high rated
avatar
Animaitor: achievements should be forced on games that offer them on Steam
Disagree a lot. Yes it'd be nice if feature parity was always the case, but as far as achievements go, I think there are quite a few people who don't care about them, and GOG don't have nearly the money or leverage as Steam or Epic so they can't force devs or pubs to include them. No point in GOG missing out on money from people who don't care about achievements.
high rated
tfishell:

I know I have personally never given a rat's rear for achievements, and some games that make you perform them to unlock stuff are pretty annoying.

What is most annoying to me is the number of games that do require Galaxy, despite GOG's protestations.

Some I can understand, games that were designed to ONLY use third-party programs for online play - GOG didn't have much of a choice in those cases, BUT they could at least make it so that games start without Galaxy and simply tell us we need to start Galaxy IF AND WHEN we try to do online multiplayer!

It is a very concerning trend to me. As for some of the weirdness around Cyberpunk 2077 releases, I'll recuse myself... but there is a reason we like OLDER games. I played through it once just before when they increased the people and activities in the city, so I'm out of the loop on those developments.

Maybe again someday. And I've never played any of the Witcher games, just don't like that kind of combat style in games (played a demo once, thanked my lucky stars my parents weren't home when I got a sex scene...)

People can do whatever they want with games. And I can refuse to play them... but we all would rather play, WITHOUT ANNOYING DRM.

So thank you, GOG, and *we have our eyes on you*!