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General discussionWell...it was a ride ... not fun though(100 posts)(100 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted October 29, 2021
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malevesque: I am taking the time to write this because I have made the tough decision to never buy another game from GOG.
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TomNuke: 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 It just makes me feel like crap when I buy a game on GOG and I find out it's outdated or missing features.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.
agree
biggest issue is the not up to date and missing features games compared to steam
the support is bad and clearly underfunded
Posted October 29, 2021
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wolfsite: 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.
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They have done far worse than any other company to PC gaming.... but hey I guess they deserve a free pass
I think in this case it's that...

... Steam never argued that it was anything but a store. It never took an activist role and "stood up" for anything but sales. Sure it sucks... but it never claimed that it didn't. GOG on the other hand...

It's that feeling of betrayal that hurts most... and IMHO why Steam is "given a pass" while being pretty terrible.
Posted October 29, 2021
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rtcvb32: I wouldn't bother. I'd rather push back and update Copyright law to be more reasonable, 10-20 years again, that would immediately open all older games to the public, along with movies characters and franchises that Disney has pushed hard to keep locked under their ownership for decades yet to come.

A large build of properties makes companies lazy, who think they can just sell something infinitely forever and not make anything new, instead they seem to be happy remaking games they had perfectly good beloved versions of hoping the new fresh coat of paint will make it worth full price again.
There are a couple of issues with that:
- Unless its a hot issue of the moment, laws tend to move very slowly. I don't think we'll see change on those laws for quite some time
- I think atm, we're kind of stuck. Developers have more an awareness of what is possible when you open-source things and generally let an interested community tinker with them, but the general public is blissfully ignorant about it
- If we let companies have their way, by the time many of those games hit the public domain, it won't matter. The source code either for the entire game or a lot of its functionality won't be available for anyone who cares. Also, improvements are a lot easier to do if you have the well organized source code. If you need to decompile it, its a royal pain in the neck. All the organizational structure of the code (including relevant variable names) are lost during compilation.

We can't realistically impact the law in the short to medium term, but this is a concrete thing we could do.
Post edited October 29, 2021 by Magnitus
Posted October 29, 2021
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Orkhepaj: agree
biggest issue is the not up to date and missing features games compared to steam
the support is bad and clearly underfunded
Another big issue, for me at least, and I think you're a victim of this, Orkhepaj, is the + and - voting system here on these forums. There's no reason or place for this kind of voting system on the GOG forums in my opinion. It's easily abused and it doesn't make anyone feel welcome here or comfortable voicing an unpopular but perfectly fine opinion.

Manipulation of the voting system isn't supposed to be allowed here, but GOG does literally nothing to stop it. There's people who are automatically downvoted, threads that have every single post in it downvoted, and that is not right. There's clearly bots, alt accounts, people using scripts to manipulate something that shouldn't even be a thing to begin with.

A good step forward to improving your service, GOG, and making it feel more welcoming, would be removing this voting system from the forums.
Posted October 29, 2021
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malevesque: I am taking the time to write this because I have made the tough decision to never buy another game from GOG.
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TomNuke: 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.
Many of the points made are objectively true, but the fault isn't exactly on GOG, or rather, GOG doesn't have the financial resources to fix all of its many flaws, or at least the bosses at CD Projekt aren't willing to shell out more than that.

The power of Steam, and now of EGS thanks to the millions made with Fortnite, aren't easily scratched by small entities like GOG, and developers will always give priority to the stores that will make them earn more money for obvious reasons.

If nothing else, seeing that a developer treats GOG users with indifference or worse, leaving games unfinished, it's a spur to put him on the black list, rather than rewarding him by buying his game on another store.

So yes, GOG requires more patience and shrewdness in purchases, but it still remains the only real bastion of resistance to the overpowering rot that afflicts stores like Steam or EGS, which grind millions of dollars mainly in microtransactions and other anti-consumer practices.
Posted October 29, 2021
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malevesque: 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,
Where does this logic come from? Apparently publishers are all angels who would do the right thing if only GOG weren't so terrible. What, exactly, is gog doing that causes otherwise great people to act like assholes? Why is it that some publishers can actually do the right thing, but others can't? Are they interacting with a different gog?

There are only two things I'm aware of that gog does to actively discourage games here. One is their DRM-free stance: some publishers refuse to even pretend they're removing DRM, so they will never have games here. I don't think this is what you're complaining about, since you seem upset about Hitman.

The other is to not support Galaxy on Linux, in any form (not even in the form of a dummy API library that would be replaced later, once gog finally decides to make good on its promise to fully support Linux). This means that games which rely on Galaxy for any features will not get a Linux port here, no matter what (and if they did, and just disabled the Galaxy-dependent features on the Linux version, there would be howls either now or if one day Galaxy came to Linux, like the idiots screaming for Galaxy achievements right now). I do not believe that's what you're complaining about, either, especially since you lodge specific complaints against Galaxy, which would not likely be coming from a Linux usesr.
Posted October 29, 2021
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Alexim: Many of the points made are objectively true, but the fault isn't exactly on GOG, or rather, GOG doesn't have the financial resources to fix all of its many flaws, or at least the bosses at CD Projekt aren't willing to shell out more than that.

The power of Steam, and now of EGS thanks to the millions made with Fortnite, aren't easily scratched by small entities like GOG, and developers will always give priority to the stores that will make them earn more money for obvious reasons.

If nothing else, seeing that a developer treats GOG users with indifference or worse, leaving games unfinished, it's a spur to put him on the black list, rather than rewarding him by buying his game on another store.

So yes, GOG requires more patience and shrewdness in purchases, but it still remains the only real bastion of resistance to the overpowering rot that afflicts stores like Steam or EGS, which grind millions of dollars mainly in microtransactions and other anti-consumer practices.
Yeah, I agree, and I don't at all blame GOG for a lot of this, especially the part about developers not having parity among versions. GOG can't exactly do anything about that, because they're in no position at all to strong arm anyone. Those developers could just pack up shop and not release anything here in the future.

I personally think if you release something on any store you made a commitment to that store and everything needs to be equal. But I can sort of understand if the game just sold bad here, then it might be hard to do, especially if that game is of an indie nature and those developers are on limited resources also.

And yea, clearly GOG doesn't have the budget needed to properly run it's store and fix the things that probably should be fixed, but I don't blame CD Projekt for that, because last I heard GOG was actually losing money. It feels like the store is just forever trying to stay afloat and even just be slightly profitable. So it's basically you either deal with GOG and all it's issues, or you buy on Steam or EGS which is horrible based on what you said about them.

Personally, I don't think so negatively about Steam as you do, but I'm no fan of Epic and what they've done with their store. Valve however does have the best service hands down for PC gaming, and they actually have more DRM free games then GOG does, just minus the offline installer, which truthfully isn't a big deal.
Posted October 29, 2021
Yep, think that is a pretty similar story to all the older crowd here. Me I would say galaxy was the key turning point to what GOG has become. Personally I don’t buy anything at the moment since last year, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. Whole thing is a mess. Well, am sure they can tide the shareholders over with their new crowd.
Posted October 29, 2021
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wolfsite: 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.
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They have done far worse than any other company to PC gaming.... but hey I guess they deserve a free pass
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kai2: I think in this case it's that...

... Steam never argued that it was anything but a store. It never took an activist role and "stood up" for anything but sales. Sure it sucks... but it never claimed that it didn't. GOG on the other hand...

It's that feeling of betrayal that hurts most... and IMHO why Steam is "given a pass" while being pretty terrible.
Not really, there are still many other issues with Steam as well including there curation (Steam Greenlight and it's successor) Steam Workshop which essentially DRM's mods and community content and was abused heavily for profit and also heavily split the modding community when some modders made updates to there mods Steam exclusive.

Then there was the asset flip fiasco where people were just buying up assets cheap and throwing them together on Steam for quick profit (some "Studios" would literally buy a prebuilt demo level that was supposed to show a developer how an engine works and sell that level as a game) and Steam was like "Meh" until they were forced to do something.

Even there refund policy was forced upon them by the European Union as they constantly did everything they could to make sure the end user has less and less ownership of games they bought to the point of saying customers were buying a "subscription" to the game, not the game itself. They did everything to give the companies power, not the customer.
Posted October 29, 2021
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nightcraw1er.488: Yep, think that is a pretty similar story to all the older crowd here. Me I would say galaxy was the key turning point to what GOG has become. Personally I don’t buy anything at the moment since last year, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. Whole thing is a mess. Well, am sure they can tide the shareholders over with their new crowd.
What was the last game you purchased? Just curious.

But seeing these posts makes me think even more I should just totally abandon ship. I mean, GOG doesn't make money. CD Projekt is basically one of gamings biggest villians right now (I still see people trashing Cyberpunk and CD Projekt all the time), and probably will be until they can make it right (they never will be able to in the publics eyes).

It just feels like this store is going to be six feet under within the next five years, or at the very least just still staying afloat with no games...
Posted October 30, 2021
My logic is very simple, As a distributor you enter a distribution contract with the publisher, set your terms. Epic did, and they end up with an exclusivity deal with Gearbox for a year on new games for nothing less than the Borderlands franchise, same thing happened with Death Stranding...the end of the world did not happen and Epic store state was nothing short of pathetic back then, well its state right now is also debatable but you get my point :) It takes balls to negotiate the distribution contract, and GOG definitely does not have any seeing what we've seen for the past few years.

The DRM-Free stance does bother certain publishers yes, especially for new releases, what bothers me, a lot, is their stance is a half measure, either stand by it or clearly announce your colors that this stance is not financially viable anymore and remove that stand from the branding. Do not release stuff and then apologize because you goofed ... we got enough of that mentality in Canada with our Prime minister, I don't need that attitude with my gaming hobby as well. Stand tall and take ownership of where you stand, that attitude commends respect, the prior is just a spineless attitude with no direction.

Steam is not all fluffy unicorns and rainbows, it has it's issues, quite a few of them actually, That Early Access program being one of many that GOG copied (facepalm) but I never had any issue with refunds or support in all my years with Steam and if a game does not work or just is not fun and you are within the refund period and terms (which are VERY clear, unlike GOG), they refund you no question asked. So far, GOG has a few misses in that regards for me and my last one was one too much.
Post edited October 30, 2021 by malevesque
Posted October 30, 2021
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nightcraw1er.488: Yep, think that is a pretty similar story to all the older crowd here. Me I would say galaxy was the key turning point to what GOG has become. Personally I don’t buy anything at the moment since last year, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. Whole thing is a mess. Well, am sure they can tide the shareholders over with their new crowd.
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TomNuke: What was the last game you purchased? Just curious.

But seeing these posts makes me think even more I should just totally abandon ship. I mean, GOG doesn't make money. CD Projekt is basically one of gamings biggest villians right now (I still see people trashing Cyberpunk and CD Projekt all the time), and probably will be until they can make it right (they never will be able to in the publics eyes).

It just feels like this store is going to be six feet under within the next five years, or at the very least just still staying afloat with no games...
Didn’t actually know off the top of my head. Think the last was all the Batman Arkham set and Lego Batman. Did buy cyberpunk preorder, but ended up thankfully getting a refund.

I expect gog are still making money, more or less than previously I don’t know. CDPR are however one of the biggest villains. Not just the cyberpunk release, but everything surrounding it, and where they have put gog over the last few years. I was never a big fan of them, sure Witcher 1 was ok for it’s time, but I got the Witcher 2 collectors edition at launch and have never played it, never ran. Might do on my 3080 currently. Witcher 3, have tried it several times and various amounts of hours in, but it just fails to grab me.

I suspect with the direction they have taken there is only the option of continuing that line. They want steam users to come over, and to get steam users they have to provide what steam does with the associated costs of what steam does. It’s really that simple.

Or what they could do is just wait until the poo is squirting out of every crack and then rebrand, it’s what Facebook has done.
Posted October 30, 2021
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malevesque: 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...
While I would sympathise with your sentiments, there is already a long-standing boycott thread - mightn't it make more sense to add your voice to that?
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TomNuke: And yea, clearly GOG doesn't have the budget needed to properly run it's store and fix the things that probably should be fixed, but I don't blame CD Projekt for that, because last I heard GOG was actually losing money. It feels like the store is just forever trying to stay afloat and even just be slightly profitable...
Back in April, GOG posted a Facts and Numbers article, claiming a 208% growth in "active users", 392% growth in new registrations and a 114% growth in net revenue (comparing 2020 with 2019). Being able to make a loss with growth figures like that requires considerable business "un-skill".
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TomNuke: Personally, I don't think so negatively about Steam as you do...Valve however does have the best service hands down for PC gaming, and they actually have more DRM free games then GOG does...
Steam has served to "normalise" online DRM - without their example, GOG's DRM-free policy would quite possibly be the rule, not the exception. As for service, if Valve is the "best" given the following examples, heck knows what would qualify as the worst:

https://forums.2k.com/showthread.php?91998-Steam-account-disabled
https://forums.bit-tech.net/index.php?threads/warning-on-using-paypal-to-pay-for-steam-games.192749/
https://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?t=993709
http://community.sigames.com/showthread.php/236909-Steam-Account-Disabled
https://consumerist.com/2011/03/valve-disables-steam-account-wont-explain-why.html
https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/1y0kc1/vac_now_reads_all_the_domains_you_have_visited/
http://blog.wolfire.com/2021/05/Regarding-the-Valve-class-action
Posted October 30, 2021
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malevesque: 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,
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darktjm: Where does this logic come from? Apparently publishers are all angels who would do the right thing if only GOG weren't so terrible.
malevesque didn't say that. And let's be honest: You (as a customer) shouldn't have to do any research to find out if a game is getting patches! I don't care if this is GOG's or the publisher's fault. I'm just some idiot who's buying games. And as a paying customer, I think I have a right to get a supported product.
GOG is knowingly selling games that aren't up to date. I don't feel like doing that kind of research before buying a game (and hoping that future patches will come, too). GOG's fault? Publisher's fault? I don't care, because the outcome is the same: On GOG I'm running a risk to end up with an abandoned product. I'm a customer. My job isn't to buy inferior versions of a game to support an online store and video game publishers, just because they're so nice and caring.

Honestly? GOG should remove games that were abandoned by devs/publishers. Yes, this'll be a hit for their catalogue. Yes, this'll hurt their relationship with publishers. But at least the people who're spending their money here can be sure to get the exact same product they'd get on other stores, no matter what they put in their cart. "Well, the game's outdated, but at least we can offer it on our store!" isn't exactly a smart thing to say. It makes buying stuff here a risk - which means that I don't buy anything here anymore.

Do you know what my last purchases on GOG were? Two DLC for a game I purchased many many years ago. It's DLC, so I didn't exactly have a choice to buy it on another store. This was on March 8, 2021.
Last game before that was Divinity: Original Sin 2. I got it on August 28, 2020. Honestly? I have no idea why I bought it on GOG... Maybe I was drunk...
The last game before that was Fallout 3 on June 3, 2017. At that time I already had stopped buying games here for more than a year. I made that exception for Fallout 3 because:
1. I'm not exactly "boycotting" GOG. I'm just too lazy to research if a game on GOG is as complete as it is on other stores.
2. GOG's version of Fallout 3 works on modern systems without having to install any community patches and fixes.

That's two games and two DLC I bought here in five years. The DLC because you can't get them elsewhere and play them with your GOG version. I basically had no other choice (except buying the whole game and the DLC elsewhere). Fallout was that one real exception, because GOG really did a good job there. It's a finished game anyway, no more patches. And Divinity? Clearly a mistake on my side! But the game doesn't seem to be abandoned by its devs, so I was pretty lucky there.

When GOG was still a small niche store for older games, no one cared when they acted like a bunch of amateurs. They probably WERE a bunch of amateurs back then. But now they're trying to compete with the big players. And they're failing miserably! Catalogue is still small, Galaxy still feels the same it felt three or four years ago (I don't see much of an advancement there), they don't notice when the GOG release of a single player online only game (Hitman) still has the online requirement...
Then there's that huge bunch of PR-desasters... I know why GOG stopped communicating with their community. Because every time they say anything, it ends in people being angry! They totally lost touch with their community, so they think it's better not to talk with us :/
Posted October 30, 2021
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wolfsite: They have done far worse than any other company to PC gaming.... but hey I guess they deserve a free pass
Literally no one is giving them a pass or even talking about them.
As usual, hijacking to do your moral grandstanding.
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This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussionWell...it was a ride ... not fun though(100 posts)(100 posts)
(100 posts)