I am taking the time to write this because I have made the tough decision to never buy another game from GOG. This is coming from someone who was there, a beta tester, when it all began and when we dreamt to have the old AD&D games from TSR brought back to life and when Fallout 1 was all the rave in retro gaming.

I have a sizable collection, after all these years, I'll be keeping it of course and I hope GOG gets their stuff together again ... but it's not going in the right direction. GOG Galaxy 2 is a fustercluck, you cannot move games location reliably, save sync "works" in a way and for a number of games but ... some expected ones are not working. Servers are not available or crashes with error 500 regularly, uninstalling a game 1 out of 2 times will not remove the games from "Installed" until you restart GOG Galaxy 2, I could go on like that for days .... it's a mess.

Hitman was release on the store ... all I am going to say is ... what the hell?? Removing it changes nothing, it means some Execs and GOG has lost its way and common sense is lost in time with GOG.

Cyberpunk 2077 ... nothing needs to be said here... Management Execs and shareholders wanting to cash in and not caring the least bit about the game or the future of CDPR.

Regularly, games that are available on other platforms receive updates and stuff in general that GOG customers eventually get, maybe, or not at all ... GOG customers are 2nd class customers to publishers and it is all GOGs fault, Succubus is the latest in this mess.

I asked for a refund for a game to be ignored and I eventually cancelled my request to refund, not a single soul responded to the request... nada nill ziltch ... it does not take 3 weeks to respond to support requests unless management has ZERO intentions on caring for customers. I feel bad for the employees, their bosses obviously don't care anymore and just do all they can to maximize their bonus.

Sooo, I know some (let's be careful here, some moderator will publicly flag me as not respecting forum policies as a good woke) people will probably just flame me or tell me goodbye in the most not polite way or plain insult me for this and call me "not intelligent" for taking the time to write this and wasting my time. Funny stuff, they are right, I don't expect this message to change anything, but at least I tried because GOG, is clearly going down the drain right now.

Farewell, and I hope GOG turns around, monopoly is never a good thing and right now Steam is exactly that, but at least it is a monopoly that takes care of their customers.

oh another mega buyer leaves :( sad day for gog
farewell mate , hope gog will get its stuff togeather , probably they will need a complete management overhaul
3 week and still no reply for support tickets is pretty much unacceptable , even government is more reliable

btw is there any store you are migrating to or just freeze gamebuying for now?

I have never understood why people always give Steam a free pass despite the fact they represent so much of what people hate about modern gaming distribution.

- They have removed games for no reason

- They promote censorship

- They push binding games to online services

- They popularized in game stores in Paid games on PC

- They introduced fee-to-pay games on PC

- They conditioned people to just accept DRM (There are gamers these days that have no idea of what DRM-free is thanks to Steam)

- They ignore complaints about games not working and even threaten to ban/delete accounts of people who have purchased games legally and just want them to work (I fit in this category with a threat of my account getting deleted just for wanting a game to actually star up)

- They allow publishers to come in and delete any negative criticism in the forums.

They have done far worse than any other company to PC gaming.... but hey I guess they deserve a free pass

We, the free people of the internet, must unite (our money) and bring forth a true DRM-free digital store for games, music, books and movies. After a while we could abuse our clients the way we see fit, because that's what stores do, right?

Did you add another reply to the ticket for your refund request? If not, then you really should have. Sometimes, it takes a long time for them to reply to tickets; I'm guessing they sometimes end up buried underneath other tickets. Either way, adding a reply has -- in every case of a delay I've experienced -- helped speed up the process significantly.

Well, I can't talk about Galaxy because I don't use it, but I will stood up the Support Team, they have been always nice with me and yes, lately have been slow but no less good. I request a refound and get it less than one hour later. Do you know that can ask for an automatic refound in the "Orders & Settings" tab in the menu?
You said that Steam treat well to their customers and that is BS, they stoled me two times and when I make a deman for my rights and my money they treated me as if I own them something, spoiler alert, never saw my money again.

I think we should just pool our money together (maybe under some nonprofit foundation), buy the copyright to some of those bloody games, open-source the code under a strong copyleft license and make a decent Linux port and offline version (cloud saves, multiplayer, achievements, etc) ourselves.

Often, when you want to do something right, you gotta do it yourself. I don't think Steam is the right alternative to turn to, but otherwise, I definitely understand your stance.

Support has been responsive to me in the past though, but I think the Galaxy thing in its current incarnation is ill thought of.

They would have had a lot more buy in if they had stayed true to the their drm-free roots and made a tight offline integration to complement their cloud offering.

Not sure about Linux but since everybody loves it why not. Everything else I agree but one thing is not clear, you want us to bring money to purchase the IP rights and open the source code and what else? Publish the game for free? So true.

You make the code available on Github under a strong copyleft license (Affero might do the trick, otherwise somebody might figure out a way to stick it on a server and avoid the license that way).

You still sell the games on the stores (under the foundation) for those who want to buy a nice package or just want to support. You use whatever money you make from that to acquire and liberate more games.

I see now, thanks. Fully agree. The slight problem is with organizing people to fund the project also with finding a suitable detectives / lawyer and perhaps a professional negotiator in case of Dune 2. Also note that source codes for games might be lost forever (Baldur's Gate, Heroes of Might & Magic, Corridor 7, System Shock 2)

You decompile the thing and re-create an organized codebase if you have to. It's a lot more work, but sometimes, you gotta do what you gotta do.

If open-source contributors don't help enough, you can potentially finance someone to work on that fuil time (with separate donations set aside just for that).

That's the point where I'm at right now in terms of the situation with gaming. If someone wants to get the ball rolling, I'll be happy to pitch in, otherwise I'll see what I can do once work mellows down (in a crunch right now).

Brilliant idea! The problem is you need to be a... senator with lots of supporters. I guess the laws should be changed in the US, UK and EU.
Magnitus' idea at least feasible. I think NightDive and a few other companies pursued that very same goal at the beginning.

There was something written here, something else.

Got to admit, I agree or have experienced a lot of what you mention here. Surprisingly, but not really I guess, this sounds very similar to what I've considered leaving as feedback for GOG when I very recently thought about calling it quits with GOG myself.

I had a cash refund request last month that took literally 24 days to get a response from. That's unacceptable to me. If you're so backed up from heavy support traffic then you need to hire another body, because that's been the excuse for over a year now. If I buy something on Steam it doesn't matter if I want a refund to my Steam Wallet or cash. It takes the same amount of time for Steam to get back to me.

I share the feeling and experience with omst of those Galaxy issues. Uninstalling games is liable to break it, and you'll need a client restart.

The biggest thing for me that made me consider moving back to Steam was the fact that too many games are missing features or content here compared to the Steam versions. There's too many instances of games with missing achievements (which I don't think is a huge deal, but I understand it is for others), or more importantly actual patches, features, and content that is missing on GOG versions. I've even seen DLC missing here that is actually free on Steam. It just makes me feel like crap when I buy a game on GOG and I find out it's outdated or missing features. I feel like I need to do a thorough investigation before I even buy something here, and that shouldn't happen.

The GOG Store itself is a complete mess. There's no organization at all with how ownership is marked, and Steam is far better in that regard. Here on GOG if I own say a complete edition of a game it still won't show me as owning everything beneath it or sold individually. There's DLC that doesn't show up on the actual games store page and must be searched for individually. Wasteland 3 for example has an Expansion Pass, but if you look at teh actual store page for Wasteland 3 you'd never know it. The individual DLC is there, but the Expansion Pass is missing. The Expansion Pass even came late to GOG and I had to freaking contact inExile to get it on the store.

I mean, the idea behind GOG is good and all, but it's absolutely not worth it when you have all the issues on top of it. From September 2020 - 2021 every game I bought was on GOG during that time. During that time I had more issues with my purchases, and spent more time talking to customer support than I ever did in 17 years on Steam. No joke.

Look, I still buy on GOG, and I just bought Subverse the other day to support GOG and those kinds of titles, but most of my money is going to be spent on Steam going forward. GOG and offline installers aren't worth the issues most of the time, and to be honest if a game is sold here on GOG it's almost always DRM free on Steam also. We'll use CD Projekts own games as an example here and something liek The Witcher 3 is exactly the same on Steam and GOG. Both DRM free and both I can do whatever I want with.

GOG just doesn't have the games either. I mean, the real wake up for me was seeing one fo the recent Bethesda publisher sales, and seeing people still begging and whining about an 11 year old game still not ever being released here. My leisure time is far too valuable to me to be sitting here worried about what's going to come to GOG or not. You guys could have been playing the shit out of Skyrim 11 years ago when it came out on Steam, or even 6 years ago when the Special Edition released. Steam or GOG is fine with me, and I don't care which at this point anymore.

I'll still buy some things on GOG, and I'm not someone that feels the need to have all my games on a single store, but I'm done prioritizing GOG like I did this past year, and if there's any feeling of missing features from a game, be it achievements, or anything else that I might not even care about, then I'm going to Steam for that purchase.