Considering they were receiving death threats and such, yes, I fully believe the devs when they say they pulled it down voluntarily.

The certainty might have a little to do with the developers themselves saying as much within their own forums on Steam, which haven't been removed. It isn't about Steam deciding whether to communicate or not, it's about choosing to communicate deliberately flagrant claims.

Steam hasn't been placed in the same situation, and they've done more for the developers by having hosted Devotion, continuing to host Detention, and continuing to host forums for both games (and devotion's has been spammed with anti-China (it would be more appropriate to say anti-Xi Jinping) messages without Steam removing them). GOG said they were hosting them, then backed out with a clearly false claim that gets made more evident every vote the wishlist continues to receive.

I have no idea what the future will bring. GOG are unique, sorely needed and to me the best thing that's happened to PC gaming over the past decade. But this is the lowest point I've ever seen GOG at. Not any one thing, but everything all happening at once:-

- "The Devotion to China" issues. If they didn't want the game for "political reasons" (bad enough) then the two obvious "escape" solutions would have been : 1. Don't acquire / announce it, 2. If they announced it but backtracked say it was due to "unforeseen circumstances". To actually welcome them in, then throw them out and then blame a flood of demand from "Many Gamers" though in the extremely short space of time between announcement and backtracking (when it normally takes 10-50x longer for GOG to respond to complaints on any other subject is simply not believable...) It also sends an unbelievably bad message to other game developers here of "we've proven that we can and will throw your game out on a whim due to foreign politics even if you uphold your end of the contract"

- CyberBug2077. Such a mess, and yet so many things could have been done differently had it been managed differently. Like not hyping too hard too early which inevitably led to feeling pressured to release too early after the third delay. Or the very obvious gaping mismatch between expecting to run it on 1.5GHz Jaguar (Intel Atom class CPU's) of decade old consoles whilst the minimum PC requirements are 2-3x that just for 30fps. You didn't need to be a game dev to spot the 10-15fps outcome of that one.

- "Going from Best to Worst Customer Service in 1 year". If your store increases in size 10x from selling 400 to 4,000 games and you are on the verge of potentially selling millions of units of your own flagship games, it's pretty obvious that lockdown or not, you are going to need to hire more support staff, even if you have to outsource it. According to GOG's own post here, they received more support tickets in a DAY from Cyberpunk than they normally get in a month (which itself was already overstretched). What could have been a great opportunity to showcase a high-quality support experience, has instead lead to so many people new to the site saying "this is the first - and last - GOG game I'm buying" due to like 12x people trying to handle tens of thousands of refunds...

- Outdated / buggy games. You all know the issue and this should have been fixed long ago. Divinity Original Sin's skill book bug was reported 14 months and still remains unfixed. Lack of awareness is a zero believable excuse given how much attention has been brought to it in the forums.

- Over-pushing Galaxy / 2nd Class Citizen Offline Installers. Gating offline single-player 'bonus content' in DRM-Free games behind Galaxy online checks, deciding pre-loading is Galaxy only, giving out free games only if you use Galaxy, etc, is doing little more than artificially dividing GOG community and still failing to fulfill that utopia of everyone using Galaxy as a Meta-launcher. People can argue what they feel is technically DRM or not, but the bottom line is many of us know full well why we shop here and that isn't it.

There are many more issues here, but I'm trying to keep this relatively short. After a couple of great years where we've had more AAA's come here than ever (after a mid-2010 drought of them), I hope GOG do turn this around and succeed. For things like ongoing "2nd class citizen" treatment of offline installers, the question isn't "are we leaving GOG", it's "is GOG leaving us"?...

Of all the things you've addressed in your post, this one really stands out. Well said!

It's more like GOG is dragging us along, because our accounts and content go where GOG goes.

Sure, but the folks who are here mainly for the offline installers feature (such as myself), i don't believe they'll be following along that path if GOG were to drop said feature.

Also, wherever my account goes, the games stay safe beside my physical collection of PC games; and so should everyone's, if they value the DRM-Free concept/notion.

This is excellent. You should post it as a new thread with "GOG leaving us" (or something to that effect) being the topic.

Good Old Games, yes. They flushed all that down the drain when they decided to become GOG (just GOG, no more meaning behinf)

Just look at Canadian politics, our current PM has more or less fallen flat with China despite his claims of being a huge supporter of human rights (look up the "Two Michaels" case for more context)

Great post, Saburo. I second everything you wrote.

that last sentence is not entirely true, call it small but, i did gave the purchase of asian hardware a thought or 2

Asus is of course the brand that springs to mind. Well respected, Well known , i have good experiences with their motherboards and gpu's ... like most maybe....

In the end i decided to go through with the purchase of asus hardware, but not without a thought.
If the situation in China becomes truly dire, as seen through the eyes of a Westerner, and lets face it, we are already pretty near dire with how they expect certain population groups to behave ( though in all fairness, i would have stood behind any European uhm behavorial conduct towards certain population groups but that is besided the whole ordeal ) i would probably stop buying those products.

It would be nice i guess if all the big video hardware bloggers would ban their products from their video's etc
then i would be sure to walk in line ;)

Correction - The USA has the American Institute in Taiwan which operates as a de facto embassy.

I even looked up the meaning of that, because I did not know -

A de facto embassy is an office or organisation that serves de facto as an embassy in the absence of normal or official diplomatic relations among countries, usually to represent nations which lack full diplomatic recognition, regions or dependencies of countries, or territories over which sovereignty is disputed. In some cases, diplomatic immunity and extraterritoriality may be granted.[1] (from Wikipedia)

And from some japanese people i've been talking to who have been looking into history and declassified documents from the japanese government, the rabbit hole gets really interesting. Apparently, japanese aristocrats didn't do anything without support from a certain group of american politicians.

1: Except GOG's been encroaching on this. We now have numerous games that are effectively DRMed on GOG that you can't do what you describe (which is precisely why I'm here, by the way). I'm still using GOG, but I no longer can just assume that a game released here will actually be DRM-free. Heck, CDPR released CP2077 with fucking DRM even in the GOG version, the streaky-underwear idiots they are.

If I need to examine every purchase I make under a microscope, what's the real difference, sadly? If they let developers patch DRM in after the fact (like with No Man's Sky -- though that's likely unintentional and will be fixed; it still happened!) How can I trust the company that puts GWENT -- a product that absolutely should never have seen light of day as it has been done and serves no purpose other than to exploit people with its DRM+Microtransaction double-whammy -- updates as headlines?