one thing that i've seen some developers do is throw up polls.

that is: they use the wishlist as an abstract guide and then throw up a poll saying, "hey, these four or five things are in the works, but which in the works thing is most important to you?"

[and then they do that thing.]

sometimes, that wishlist is going to have to include unfun things, too, that most users don't care about, eg:

"our backend database needs some cleaning up. don't mind us, we're tackling that next."

in cases like that, what the developer has often done is promised that the very next thing they're going to tackle is something that's real high up on the wishlist chain. [to mitigate what feels like "lost development time."]

Yeah, it's a great idea because you can also see what is important to people right then. While a wishlist item may have more votes overall, there might be another item people would like to see solved first..

What are the established values?

GOG's values were:
1 - DRM Free
2 - Universal Pricing (1$ != 1€) | games cost the same all over the world
3 - Complete package with goodies
4 - Treat customers like humans, rather than treat them as wallets
5 - Games for Gamers, by Gamers
6 - Your privacy is important
7 - No microtransactions
8 - Galaxy stays optional
9- No pre-orders /In-dev games

Of those many values, only one remains solid:
1- DRM Free

To some extent:
8 - But they do try to push it, making Galaxy the default option.
For instance: I have installed Ghost Master a couple of days ago, not through Galaxy. When I play the game and I exit it afterwards, GOG Galaxy is staring me in the face, in spite of me not having started the Galaxy service...

Note that values 2 and 3 are largely dependant on publishers, rather than GOG itself.
Value 5 is dependant on the members of the board at GOG, which may change from time to time.

Casualties:
2: Under pressure GOG caved in to regional pricing in order to be able to sell some games that would not be sold by their publishers otherwise.
Note that the first game that suffered from this was no other than by Code Red's The Witcher 2 by order of Bandai and that is a recurring theme that I will get back to.
3: This changed when it became trendy to sell the music apart from the game. Not really GOG's fault here.
4: Is linked to 2 things: 6 & 7
5: I can't believe that given the current decisions by the board that they can be classified as gamers, but that is of course only known for sure by GOG's employees who, just as we do (!) deserve their privacy.
6: GOG giving us the silent/ corporate BS treatment in response to our legitimate concerns of sharing the number of games, the hours played, online status and friends with anyone who cares to click on their profile, regardless of having set privacy to "Only Me"/ "Only Friends"
7. Gwent has microtransaction gambling built-in as does the game with Gremlins Inc.
^ Yet again a value has been discarded by the mother company: Code Red.
8. To some extent, because they are pushing it, regardless of a gamer's choice *not* to install Galaxy.
9. Pre-orders were (yet again) introduced by Code Red with The Witcher 3.

Dirty socks.

Not enough sales. ;p

I'm sure they read it. Quite the activity here.

Similarly although the number of posts was considerably higher then and the reaction was somewhat faster.

Still, I wonder why the management is so unresponsive to challenges? What good will silence do? You can't improve (customer) relations by not talking about it.

Anyway. One week has passed and the situation seems still unchanged. I'm getting impatient with GOG. I'll wait at the most one week more for GOG to do something.

I think you hit the nail there. These statements seem to be quite true, regardless of what conclusion everyone draws for himself.

I have never done that myself but I think it cannot be that hard. There must be ready solutions for shopping systems out there. The GOG website shows what you need: some kind of catalogue (divided by genres, OS, year, ...), a single page per item with a link to put the item in the shopping cart, a checkout/payment page (important note: do not store credit card details of buyers unless you know what you are doing). This is pretty much standard. What is special about games (digital content) is probably the library page with the download links and patches maybe too, but then it's not too complicated or too special.

All you would need is a dedicated server, the shopping and library system in place, some payment processor and a content delivery network for all the downloads. It's doable for a motivated team determined to wire standard components and doing some stuff manually (like adding new games, patches). However, it requires some money to set up initially.

I imagine that the more difficult part would be to negotiate the selling rights and financial conditions with the publisher. But then I'm biased because I don't know anything about legal stuff, so naturally that would seem difficult to me.

Indeed. I know I can deal with everything else, but not very sure where to start here except getting in contact with developers/studios and asking if I can sell their games Maybe that is all it takes.. :)

Probably also things like:

- Do they have the full worldwide rights.
- Proposal how to split the revenue.
- Age restrictions
- Regional prices?

And a convincing answer to the most important question of all: why should they even bother with yet another no-name online shop?

It's interesting that the privacy settings seem to work much better on mobile devices. When I use my phone, I can't see the number of games, achievements and total time played when everything is set to "only me".

When the profile is open, I can see the numbers though.

This has probably been reported several times ago, but I didn't felt like reading the whole thread (again).

I am not sure if you are joking or if you are actually serious, but if you are I think you grossly underestimate the amount of work (and risks) that would be involved. I hope you are ready to quit your day job, take a huge loan, and risk everything you have in the process.

First it's not just finding some open source "online shop" web application and sending a couple of e-mail to devs.

You will need to have some infrastructure in place, both for download, payment, support, etc... you can go to Azure or similar cloud based solution but, while it's a lot cheaper than creating the infrastructure yourself, it still has a cost.

Unless you want to do everything yourself you will need to hire peoples to handle support, devs to work on the site, hire somebody to take care of the legal matters, take care of the financial / fiscal side, etc... and all those peoples will most likely not work for free.

You will also need to create some company, I don't know how it is in UK but here if you want to create a Corp you need minimum three peoples and 100k CHF of initial funds (IIRC), I suspect it's probably it's not free in the UK either. Granted you are not forced to create a SA/Corporation but it's the safest option in case(when) it fails; some others options are a lot cheaper but if you go bankrupt it can ruin you personally and you can spend the rest of your life trying to pay your debts. (Again I don't know UK laws and what are the option there) Even forgetting the money it also takes a lot of time.

Then you will need to convince devs and unless you have really good connection the in medium you can forget any AAA or even AA devs (Remember that CDPR were a distributor before they started Gog and even for them it was hard to convince devs to release their games on Gog) so at first the only one you might convince are Indy devs. But that's the same Indy devs that often consider releasing a Gog version to be a waste of time and let's not mention that there are tons of others online shops selling Indy titles so why would they waste their time on yet another new one.

And even if you do all that you chances of being profitable enough to survive are very limited, the market is already pretty saturated, especially for Indies, several shops have already died (DOTEMU, Desura, etc...) and most those who survive are mostly Steam key sellers.

So yes, if it's you dream job and you are ready to risk everything for it... well it's your life... but you need to be really sure you understand all the risks attached to it, it's not a decision that can be taken on a whim.

Even that is on shaky ground. Gwent is online only, whilst not DRM, it is not within your power to play the game as and when you want, but are relying on a third party. Also, there are other examples:
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/fear_installed_securom_all_over_my_computer_does_anyone_know_how_to_get_rid_of_it
Then there was the magic game released recently (can't remember the name) which had hats you needed to be signed in for, and battletech has components with account sign in. Plus numerous games phone home if your not careful (GDawn, VVran).

if this is something you want to seriously pursue, i would absolutely get a lawyer.

if you become a game seller, you will wind up having to sign contracts for those sales/etc. and you are probably going to want someone to look at those contracts.

[incidentally: that seems like the toughest part of the job. that and attracting people to your store.]

As I said in one of those many threads, "DRM free" is not even a clear cut "value".

Back when GOG was founded, what they meant with "intrusive DRM mechanisms" wasn't the hardly noticeable buttery-slick online verification process Steam employs now (Steamworks was only introduced in 2008). It was the SecuROMs, the Starforces, the things that made your disc drives honk and your games infunctional the second Windows 7 came along, the horrific limited activation shit that Bioshock and Mass Effect tried to pull off.

Today, home base server contact is so frequent for any client that entire newly devised "harmless" "player wants" functionalities (e.g. achievements, auto-updates, cloud saves, and, hey, profiles) wouldn't work without exactly the kind of persistent online verification technology that is practically identical to DRM measures, but isn't perceived by the player as such because yes of course these "features" are only ever possible with constant online contact (and for that reason, Valve had listed these "features", especially the social media crap, under "anti-piracy" back in 2008 – they knew that these social/competitive functionalities were the best damn copy protection ploy ever created).

You're absolutely right, this is on very shaky ground.

So it should be clarified from GOG's side. :|