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General discussionIMPORTANT NOTICE: Unbundling games(1959 posts)(1959 posts)
(1959 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted March 14, 2015
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Ciris: How will the new games be ordered on the shelf: at the start/end as newest appearances, or with the games they are related to?
If you have games ordered by purchase date, they will be placed where the old game was placed. If You have manual sorting they will be placed at the beginning of your collection.
So its going to mess up manually sorted shelves? Just great!
Posted March 14, 2015
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Ichwillnichtmehr: Having seperate games unbundled makes sense.

Having a single game seperated into individual episodes makes no sense.
+1000
Posted March 14, 2015
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Ichwillnichtmehr: Having seperate games unbundled makes sense.

Having a single game seperated into individual episodes makes no sense.
I support this thing and think its great but have to agree with Ichwillnichtmehr,single game with multiple boxes/episodes is really rubbish
Post edited March 14, 2015 by RottenRotz
Posted March 15, 2015
Will this apply to the Broken Sword Remastered games, which have the original games as extras?
Posted March 15, 2015
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Ciris: Hi, guys!

Just wanted to drop in with a full list of the games we're currently planning on unbundling, including their current and future titles. You'll find it under that link, downloadable in PDF format.

If you'd rather not download anything, here's the full list in hastebin, but it's not nearly as pretty.

To answer some questions that have appeared in this thread so far:

Will we be able to toggle unbundling?
No. We're doing this for all the games, it's not a customisable feature - it's something we'd been planning for a while now as a more accurate representation of the games on your shelf.

What about games with bonus installers (in the future)? Say a game has a DLC, will it be a separate “box” on the shelf?
DLCs are not affected by this, they will stay „inside” the parent game in your My Account tab and on the shelf to avoid any confusion.

How will the new games be ordered on the shelf: at the start/end as newest appearances, or with the games they are related to?
If you have games ordered by purchase date, they will be placed where the old game was placed. If You have manual sorting they will be placed at the beginning of your collection.

Bonus goodies: will I get four copies of the same wallpaper/soundtrack/etc, or will there be yet another folder apart from the games which house those?
They will be the same for each one of the unbundled games, and available alongside each one, so you don't have to remember which game they're under.
For example, if game X+Y+Z had 2 wallpapers and manual, after unbundling the same 2 wallpapers and manual will be visible on game X, on game Y and game Z.

Galaxy wasn't supposed to affect other users, and this is affecting us.
As I said in my initial post, and in this one as well, the change isn't dictated by the introduction of the GOG Galaxy Client. Instead, it's a change we'd been planning and a change that's been asked for many times that we're implementing at this time. The fact that it'll make for faster installations when using the optional client is just an extra bonus :)
For instatnce if I buy Police Quest pack which contains 4 games,would it be possible for you to remove 2 games which i dont like in that pack from my library without removing whole pack?
Post edited March 15, 2015 by RottenRotz
Posted March 15, 2015
I must unfortunately join in the criticisms. I understand the logic behind unbundling whole games (like Castles 1 and 2 or the two Ultima packs), but unbundling expansion packs, which are considered an integral part of the complete experience offered by GOG, makes absolutely no sense to me.

So instead of downloading and running a single installer to get a complete copy of the game (Cossacks for example), updated with the finest and latest patches, I will need to download and run THREE installers, one for the base game and two expansions, even though I have difficulty imagining anyone pinning for just the base game. This applies to episodes as well.

As such, I must add my support to those that say: Unbundling games, OK, unbundling every single element, illogical!
Posted March 15, 2015
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amarthar: Will this apply to the Broken Sword Remastered games, which have the original games as extras?
http://hastebin.com/lokosotuca.vhdl
Posted March 15, 2015
I'd like to add a note that Mysteries of the Sith is listed as DLC for Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2. However, it is completely standalone and in its own installer. I'd therefore prefer to see it with its own place on the shelf. Though if it were bundled in the same installer as Jedi Knight then I wouldn't mind that either.
Posted March 15, 2015
Here are my overall thoughts, seeing as I don't buy games that have 'episodes' or 'seasons' because I'm not an insane consumer. If I buy a carton of eggs, I expect every slot to be filled.

Would Loopy Landscapes and such expansions be separated, despite being installed as a 'gold' or 'platinum' pack?
Posted March 16, 2015
I'm not sure if I like that. The bundling made it easier to keep the overview of your game library. Especially bundling the smaller games together made sense and it also made the installation easier.

But what I very much dislike is that the unbundling is only for the download, but not for the purchase. So the list of purchased games and the game list in the library are now different. That will make it much harder to check when GOG let things disappear from the game library and to check what has disappeared.
Posted March 16, 2015
wow, I don't know how to take this yet but I have a feeling that I won't like it in the end ;(
Posted March 16, 2015
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eiii: I'm not sure if I like that. The bundling made it easier to keep the overview of your game library. Especially bundling the smaller games together made sense and it also made the installation easier.

But what I very much dislike is that the unbundling is only for the download, but not for the purchase. So the list of purchased games and the game list in the library are now different. That will make it much harder to check when GOG let things disappear from the game library and to check what has disappeared.
You make a valid point here, but I think the take home goal should be for GOG to put additional levels of quality control in place to avoid games missing from people's shelves in the first place ever. If people are wanting to avoid new feature changes like this because it helps them to figure out how the service is broken daily, that is a less than optimal place to be. The solution I'd like to see to this problem is not to avoid unbundling games but rather:

"Request for Enhancement: GOG please put higher quality controls in place so people's games never have even the remotest possibility to randomly disappear from their shelves ever for any reason."

People will be more keen to see new changes if they have a higher level of trust over the technology being used to store the results of their purchases. I fully trust GOG that none of my games will ever permanently disappear but like many, I am disappointed to see Fallout randomly disappear every 2 hours for 2 months in a row and things like that. Not disappointed enough to be angry about it nor to affect my decisions to buy more games here, but if anything, I'm more concerned that other people might lose trust and not shop here and I want GOG to succeed and thrive.
Posted March 16, 2015
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Ciris: Just wanted to drop in with a full list of the games we're currently planning on unbundling, including their current and future titles. You'll find it under that link, downloadable in PDF format.
Could you please provide that list somewhere on the GOG website so that it's actually down-loadable with a simple URL.

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Ciris: Will we be able to toggle unbundling?
No. We're doing this for all the games, it's not a customisable feature - it's something we'd been planning for a while now as a more accurate representation of the games on your shelf.
Maybe understandable from a technical point of view, but no choice is still bad for the user.

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Ciris: How will the new games be ordered on the shelf: at the start/end as newest appearances, or with the games they are related to?
If you have games ordered by purchase date, they will be placed where the old game was placed. If You have manual sorting they will be placed at the beginning of your collection.
Will we get a down-loadable list of our "technical" games so that we easily can keep track of them offline?

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Ciris: Bonus goodies: will I get four copies of the same wallpaper/soundtrack/etc, or will there be yet another folder apart from the games which house those?
They will be the same for each one of the unbundled games, and available alongside each one, so you don't have to remember which game they're under.
For example, if game X+Y+Z had 2 wallpapers and manual, after unbundling the same 2 wallpapers and manual will be visible on game X, on game Y and game Z.
That would make sense when you would also sell the games separately. But when you continue to only sell the games bundled this is just silly. You not only use a more than 20 years old inefficient compression method for your downloads, now you blow up the game library even more with a lot of redundancy.

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Ciris: Galaxy wasn't supposed to affect other users, and this is affecting us.
As I said in my initial post, and in this one as well, the change isn't dictated by the introduction of the GOG Galaxy Client. Instead, it's a change we'd been planning and a change that's been asked for many times that we're implementing at this time.
But it makes Galaxy even less optional. Not Galaxy itself is the problem (actually I like Galaxy for the easy update of installed games and the multiplayer part), but the consequences of Galaxy, the removal of the current downloader API and client. Of course you still could use the browser interface to download your files. But frankly, having several hundreds of games, keeping them updated through the browser interface would already be tedious with the old bundled installers. Now it will be even more tedious with maybe twice the number of files to keep updated. Not to talk about checking the consistency of your downloaded files and your game library, which is not even possible through the browser interface as you do not provide any checksum files. So actually Galaxy is not at all "optional" when you remove the old downloader interface without providing an alternative for it.
Posted March 16, 2015
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Ciris: How will the new games be ordered on the shelf: at the start/end as newest appearances, or with the games they are related to?
If you have games ordered by purchase date, they will be placed where the old game was placed. If You have manual sorting they will be placed at the beginning of your collection.
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eiii: Will we get a down-loadable list of our "technical" games so that we easily can keep track of them offline?
Not an answer to that as I'd have no way to know, but they did mention in a video last year that GOG Galaxy would have a public API, so if the information that you or anyone else would want to get access to is available through that API, and it would naturally have a need to access the list of games one owns, then the information could be accessed that way using 3rd party software if GOG didn't directly provide a particular feature in the client itself that someone might want. You can actually do something like this now through their GOG Downloader API although it is not officially documented anywhere I don't think although I did find some unofficial documentation somewhere online. Presumably Galaxy's API will however be documented (reasonable speculation on my part).
Posted March 16, 2015
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skeletonbow: You make a valid point here, but I think the take home goal should be for GOG to put additional levels of quality control in place to avoid games missing from people's shelves in the first place ever.
[..]
People will be more keen to see new changes if they have a higher level of trust over the technology being used to store the results of their purchases. I fully trust GOG that none of my games will ever permanently disappear but like many,
That's not the point. I also do not expect GOG to intentionally remove games from my library. But mistakes happen, regardless of quality control or no quality control. That's life. And customers should have an easy way to independently verify what they have purchased. If GOG makes this check much harder with the current change they should provide a replacement.

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skeletonbow: The solution I'd like to see to this problem is not to avoid unbundling games but rather:
"Request for Enhancement: GOG please put higher quality controls in place so people's games never have even the remotest possibility to randomly disappear from their shelves ever for any reason."
That would be nice too, but that's not a solution. The point is the possibility of an easy independent control.
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This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussionIMPORTANT NOTICE: Unbundling games(1959 posts)(1959 posts)
(1959 posts)