Valve provides good service?????????

Profit. More important than anything else I guess.
But somehow don't want GOG to be about just profit making. Maybe irrational, but whatever.

Actually as far as service in the sense of what Steam does for consumers and developers they are... now support is another matter, they suck a customer support. :P

Profit is the main goal for any company, doesn't mean their aren't other important things though. Maybe you should look at GOG's profits though, while they do have a decent profit it's actually not much honestly... but this is largely because they have been reinvesting back into GOG.

So you can't say they aren't invested in GOG, even if what they are investing in isn't actually what you want... others do want it.

My understanding is sometimes they do & sometimes they get it from the publisher or other places. At-least that is what I've gathered from interviews they have done and stuff. Sometimes publishers lose the source code, which happens with old games so the DRM basically has to be cracked. All in all, it still requires a lot of time and energy to test the game and making it compatible with modern systems, etc.... all of which GOG does. They have been known to even report bugs to devs before a game is released.

The gold version doesn't matter really , you need source code to fully strip out DRM in most cases... which is why a lot of games on GOG still actually contain the DRM files but the DRM has been neutralized to not work. I believe a "gold copy" would still have the DRM, as the "gold copy" is what they consider ready for production... it's what used to manufacture physical copies. Something that has less meaning in this digital age.

That's even if a company still has the "gold copy"...

Personally I see their quality management pretty good, updates may not be always fast but they do arrive. The installer's naming scheme is also a bit better, at least now I know what version a game really is, I could be wrong but this is still a work in progress and some games may still have to go through the process.


At the moment my biggest problem with GOG is the missing Linux ports due to lack of Galaxy.

I also think that GOG slowly reaches the limit of it's ressouces with every new game added. Every game needs manual maintainance. That's the price of DRM-freeness but there are also some really silly errors where you can't say that this is because of lacking ressources.

For example when you open on the german GOG page the release announcement for the game Kingsway the link to the game page is broken because a "s" is missing in the URL.

In the german forum someone already wrote about that error 2 days ago. You can check and repair that error in no time but nothing happened till now. There are many such small things that sum up, where you can only say that it's lazyness, silly mistakes and nobody cares to spend a few seconds to fix that.

Ok, Judas did some fixing when someone wrote to him in the forums. That's really nice from him, but that shouldn't be the status quo. Every person who puts up a game on GOGs homepage should be responsible and feel him-/herself responisible to check if everything is at the right place and working. It shouldn't be too much to look if there are any typos, if every link is working, if discounts are applied correctly and every file is uploaded properly. That's how things are done right.

Growth *is* a double-edged sword, and has occurred because GOG made it a priority, in spite of being ill-prepared for what it entails. And Galaxy has clearly contributed to GOG's growth, and continues to do so, so yes, it *is* part of the problem -- and will continue to be until GOG learns the necessity of growing *within it's means* -- which will require significantly improved leadership and management.

Developers are subservient to the publishing giants, and consumer preferences are dictated by marketing strategies, of which "online functionality" is a centerpiece.

People want what they see, and what they see is increasingly controlled by a small number of companies that are rabidly dedicated to defending and expanding their intellectual property rights. So let's stop pretending that the tail is wagging the dog, because it isn't.

There's a huge difference between how products and services are regulated, and for a software publisher like Microsoft, this translates into a vast ocean of loopholes that it can exploit with it's gargantuan legal resources -- which will obviously prove to be immensely profitable if it is allowed to go forward. And it is equally obvious that "online functionality" is an integral component of this marketing strategy. Bells and whistles to distract us while we are stripped of our few remaining rights -- though I am quite certain that the majority of us will barely notice, as distraction is the predominant state of mind at this point in time.

I see your point and I can agree with it to some extent but building tools and streamlining processes also carries its own complexities don't you think? In my opinion, there may not be a definitive solution to all of gog's problems compared to their competitors, but the best way to approach them (while they remain unresolved) should be to provide a certain degree of transparency and communication with their customers, that way the people who strongly care about those issues can understand what is happening and why right?

On that moment is when there's a chance to transform complaints into advocates who understand the company, relate to its flaws, and want to do their best to fix them together. Well, I don't know for sure, this is only my ignorant opinion on the matter, but that's what I'd do with limited resources, or that's what I'd find reasonable to do, after all communication and honesty don't require too much of a budget but they can provide huge benefits.

If there's a quality game out there that folk are wanting, gog management claim it's too niche ;p

Not always. :P

A lot of people wanted Hatred. It wasn't too niche, it was just a piece of shit. :D

Unfortunately, their quality control was procedurally generated.

It didn't take long for the QC to all look samey and boxy and boring.

...


And then it suffered perma-death and it couldn't be arsed to start all over again from scratch.