Gamers: Taking things too seriously.™

Peeps not liking waiting also........and getting POd for losing 90 minutes. Typical youtube stuff.

(Also btw ddmuse, it was very likely they were going to tape and host the video afterwards so to say you HAD to watch it and be "inconvenienced" by it is a load of manure.)

I didn't say or imply that we were forced. Just that we were led to believe that there'd be something of substance that'd be worth our time. I'm not angry, just a bit disappointed.

As a man who learned a hard lesson with the previous GOG hype, I was relieved to see that I didn't feel any disappointment after watching the April 14th presentation, in part thanks to the fact that I, honestly, didn't expect much before starting to watch - being a seasoned GOGer and being taught well in the ways of peculiar GOG marketing, I knew full well that whatever they were going to announce on April 14th could turn out to be anything at all, from super awesome awesomeness to a nearly complete personal disappointment.

Being a GOG fan though, I watched the conference from the first minute to the last, only pausing for 5 min or so because my connection failed and I couldn't reconnect for a while due to the high demand at the video stream service. in the end, the presentation, in my opinion, came out mostly satisfying to me (because when you get all agitated and wait for something super huge to happen, and then it doesn't happen, you just feel disappointed, but when you don't expect much in the first place, every big and even moderately big thing announced comes out satisfying :)). So, let's see... I'm going to be kinda "level-headed", so no shouts of delight ("awesomeness!!!") and no booing of disappointment where it may be due. :)

- The Witcher 2 presentation by the CD Projekt RED guys was impressive, it looks like TW2 is going to be a major PC RPG title and it looks like it has potential to own Dragon Age 2 by a large margin (DA2, by the way, at least in my opinion, was a meh game). I realized that I do not regret preordering the game and I'll definitely be buying it first thing as soon as it becomes available.

- The "Alone in the Dark" announcement was a very good thing, I got the package already - the best thing in it all, of course, being the offer itself ($5.99 for three amazing eternal classics with extra free content is a really, really good deal).

- The announcement of the new Atari classics line was indeed good, but it did not live up to the expectations or hype in at least one respect - when GOG gave us the clues ("What game made you ... ?"), they mentioned that we'll find it all out on April 14th during the presentation. At the presentation, however, the GOG representative said that he's not going to announce what the remaining games are, so we'll have to wait past April 14th, which means that the whole "find it out on April 14th" thing was, to be politically correct, not exactly true. The new Atari line, of course, is very welcome - more classics is a good thing, means more good stuff to play for us GOG fans and more dough to rake in for the GOG itself. :)

- The announcement of Witcher 1 was very good, while not completely unexpected of course - I was pretty sure that GOG was going to schedule this event somewhere before TW2 release, but I couldn't guess the date or be sure about the pricing that GOG would put on the TW1 package, if it was going to be released. So what did come as a good surprise for me was the deal itself - I expected that TW1, when announced, will be sold for more than $9.99, much like TW2 is going to be as a new game and all, but when the GOG dude said $9.99 first, and then $4.99 for the entry discount price, I was positively surprised. Not only it's an amazing chance to get a legitimate copy of the full game for people who never had it before, but it's also an amazing chance to support GOG even for those who already own the game but are willing to donate to the GOG pool by buying TW1 from them for a bargain price.

- The announcement of the upcoming deals with new publishers was generally very positive but also kinda left mixed feelings in some respects. On the one hand, I'm very happy that at least one of the big publishers (possibly one of those fabled "potential GOG never-evers", because names like LucasArts and EA were on the list of possibilities) is going to be signed this year, and it's good that two more might be on their way closer to the end of the year (fall etc.), though there was a certain degree of uncertainty in the words, so I guess the negotiations with the mentioned two companies are still going and it's still not 100% clear whether they are going to come or fall through. No specific company name was revealed, and I kinda felt that I already knew what the announcement was all about - after all, it's basically what GOG always did, does and will try to do - sign deals with new companies and get new good games, and we were already hinted before that there was a new major publisher about to be signed (with no specific name given either), so... No specific questions were answered (even though the pre-tease and hype implicitly hinted at the fact that some more detailed answers could have been given - at least that's what the major expectation seemed to be), but then again, it's good that a definite assertion was given that GOG still continues to do a generally very good job at getting the classics for release, and it could be some of those classics many of us dreamed to be here for quite a while. I can only congratulate GOG on their deal with the mysterious new big publisher and wish them the best of luck in their future deals, both the ones that are potentially to take place this summer and fall and in the more distant future. The announcement did leave more questions than answers though (we already knew that there was going to be a new deal from the past rumors and announcements, so it wasn't exactly "new news"), so I kind of had this feeling that I had when I watched the LOST TV series - you watch an episode, you get one question answered, and you get three more to think about next. Such tricks do keep the audience tied to their TV sets (and in case with us and GOG, to our computer screens), but it does get on the nerves when done repeatedly (which GOG has kinda did in the past too, not always living up to the hype and expectations in the end).

- The announcement of the website changes was a good thing but, in my opinion, should have either been tied to the launch of the mentioned changes (which it wasn't, we still have to wait for the changes to be introduced) or at least in part announced before, because many of the improvements (e.g. the updated Downloader app) have to do with multiple issues that got on people's nerves repeatedly in the past (there's a whole thread talking about how much the current-gen Downloader sucks, yet there was not a word from GOG mentioning that changes are on the way, and little to no indication that GOG was even working on the problem). So, on the one hand, I'm happy to hear that these issues will be addressed (and soon), on the other hand, I think it was an oversight on GOG's behalf not to announce some of it earlier (or at least launch the most critical changes together with their announcement), potentially designating someone to work with the community more tightly.

Overall, the impression of the presentation is generally very positive. I welcome the news about the new upcoming classics - both the Atari line, the mysterious publisher line, and whatever else there may be that GOG has in store for us in the future, and I'm glad to hear that GOG is doing well as a company - the drastically improved sales figures definitely showed that GOG is doing better than ever before and hopefully it means they're with us to stay for a long time. I wish GOG the best of luck and thank them for proceeding so well on their mission to provide the best DRM-free instant download store and service in the Internet.

Making statements about the new publishers, once again is ALSO just a hype tactic. Why do I say this? Because again, they don't tell you who has been signed and they they also know that it going to get the forums buzzing, keeping people at the site. Clever marketing tactics on one hand but potential hazard for annoying peole.

Also, with all the hype, why didn't they just announce who other publisher was or release it before the Atari stuff, at least that way folks would of had a sense of satisfaction and then when they did eventually release Atari it would've have been more welcome.

Honestly ask yourselves, how many posts have you seen since the announcement something like this e.g "WOOHOO, ATARI!!!!!!! I'M WETTING MY PANTS, YAY, I CAN'T WAIT TO HAUL OUT MY CREDIT CARD AND BUY, BUY, BUY"........... Not many I'm afraid, which shows me the reaction at best has been mediocre from most goggers, even those who haven't outright complained. Again just pointing out that it WAS overhyped, but then again I think that was their intention from the beginning and it taught me a lesson that it's the marketing model for GOG, so expect more of these type of tactics.

Just btw, if they hyped this announcement so badly, imagine how bad it's going to be when they do release LA or EA, I may just purposely not visit the site and then when it's all over just come and download the games :-)

Thanks to everyone who actually read my original post and expressed their opinion. Some of you clearly didn't read it before posting yourself; I have nothing to say to you.

Just as a bit of clarification, and to shed off some of the whiner paint that's been thrown on me: as someone who was here during the Activision countdown and the September fiasco, I actually fully expected GOG to do something like this again. I just deeply wished they wouldn't. Unfortunately, there is no way to easily list my last posts, but take my word and this one example for it that I did try to throw a wet blanket at the speculations a few times, and not add fuel to the fire. It didn't work at all, obviously.

To phrase it differently, and provide a tl;dr because some people clearly need it, I'm not disappointed about the news. The news is very good. I'm disappointed about the way it was presented. That is something very different.

Yeah the actual news itself is great news.
I would say that GOG’s problem isn’t creating to much hype itself sometimes but not nipping it in the bud when they probably should.

It can be quite hard stopping over-hype, maybe imposable on occasion depending on how wide it spreads. I don’t think GOG has ever been in that place yet though.

Bazilisek really made some good points, as did many other members in this thread

The "Announcements" itself I think WERE overhyped

The Conference and the news it brought in general was great however the Ending had me frustrated due to the fact that a new publisher was NOT Announced, so for another month or so we are going to have to play the guessing game

Great to hear that we are getting a new PM system and Downloader soon (which is critical with the Witcher 2 release) however it would be at least nice to hear how are things progressing for other features like The Wishlist

Another thing that I think GOG underestimated were the stream numbers, many people were stuck with the "Connection limit" because of this, so hopefully in the future GOG will be better prepared

Overall: I really enjoyed the Conference and the news it brought but there is still a lot of work to be done for the GOG staff and many things need to looked at

Just my 2 cents :)

'nuff said. I can't really see the problem here, and even if it wasn't what you expected, it's not such a big deal anyway.

So - do you know how many connections there actually were?

Haha, gotcha! why did you say 40k connections? why not 30k or 50k? I know what this means, Dawn of War is coming!

</paranoia>

But I can't understand why? It wasn't even a countdown. We only got some clues - question on the main page, it was very similar to "Police Line. Do Not Click".

It's the community who overhyped, they never told us about new publisher coming yesterday, and you seem to blame GOG for the overhyping community. Why, I can't understand.

I even may agree with you that GOG is to blame about how they did relaunch stunt (I really enjoyed it and I had good laugh about people who really thought GOG is gone, but that was because the first minute I saw it, I knew they were coming out of beta) as they really played it hard, this time it's only the community to blame for the overhyping.

I think that blaming someone else if it's us to blame isn't correct.

To be fair, Trevor did mention that a new big publisher was coming to GOG and while I don't have the proper time to check where was the info (I'm at work), I believe that he led us to the understanding that we would be told who was this new publisher yesterday.

So I agree with bazilisek, we had great news. The problem is that we were expecting OTHER greater news. Put it the other way: if we knew they were going to announce new games from a publisher already on board and ended up with that AND the brand new info that another great publisher was comming, that would have created a way more positve feeling amonst us. As it stands, we were just teased and then, ended up with a conference version of the same tease, when we were expecting the answer.

We all know that gog.com works on the assumption there's always so little to tell, so they must make as much a fuzz about each small bit of information as they can. This is something comprehensible, but it tends to become tiresome to us in the long run. Specially since the internet had us create the habit of having all information at once whenever we need or want it.