Actually, I've found it pretty surprising. Pleasantly surprising, of course. I've been on many forums over the years, some more small, cliquey ones for fairly obscure gaming series and others that are enormous with posts being made almost at the rate of messages being posted in a busy IRC room.

In all cases, the users have been almost entirely American with the odd Brit and hardly any mainland Europeans. In fact, even if you combined all the non-Americans on there together, they'd still be safely outnumbered by Americans. Even on a site like 4chan, which is absolutely huge and has hundreds of thousands of people on a day, the statistics show that the vast majority of users are American.

I'm not really sure of the logic behind this, but maybe it's because GOG are European (as far as I know) whereas I think all these other sites I've spent time on have been founded by Americans. I've seen GOG mentioned in British magazines, I've never seen any of the other sites I've had experience with mentioned anywhere in the British media.

I can't remember which user(s), but I believe I have seen Austria - also Australia of course :) - under some people's profile picture.

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I wonder ... it would be cool if GOG released a pie chart of their user base by nationality. Of course that wouldn't necessarily represent the forum's population, but as long as the forum was a random sample of that distribution, it might not be too far off.

Just for kicks ... it might be interesting to see just how much diversity in nationlaities GOG has.

EDIT: or even cooler would be a map of the world with columns on/colors for each country representing user base percentage. GOG's Map of the World.

As a typical European customer I honestly wouldn't say that I joined this site because it was founded by a Polish company. I actually had a ?? moment there, what exactly did you mean by that statement? I like good old games, this is a place to find them, thus I registered. Nothing to do with where the founding company is from. Actually, I even got the link to this place from a very heavily American-dominated forum that simply likes - you guessed it - good old games.

Maybe your specific reasons are different, but it does seem that "homegrown" things get featured in more local media more. As I said, I've seen GOG mentioned in a number of British magazines and papers, but never even major sites like 4chan. However, in America 4chan is mentioned in magazines fairly often - even on the TV news. Steam seems to be almost like a household name in the US but in the UK you've got to be pretty "geeky" to have even heard of it, never mind use it.

It could also be that a kind of cultural sensibility defines the product or site. In the way that American cars seem American, and Japanese cars seem Japanese, maybe GOG has a European feel to it innately that is more attractive to Europeans and more likely to have them stay. Of course, the huge catch to that angle is that Europe has countless cultures and there's arguably more in common with an English person and an American than there is with an English person and an Austrian (that country picked at random, nothing against Austrians!)

Back to the "American seeming" and "European seeming", Steam is based around mainly modern, demanding games and the program itself is based heavily around facilitating online play. That's something which is much more common in America, probably due to its immense size. The idea of playing older, one-player games seems more European - especially since I can imagine in poorer countries, people won't generally have the kind of machines capable of most modern games. I mean, I even I don't so I'm not trying to be snobby about it. Also, a lot of the more prominent games on GOG seem to have been much more successful in Europe (and often produced in Europe). I know these are big generalisations but we're talking in continent-wide terms here.

Thanks, that's pretty much exactly what I meant - more local exposure, in advertisements and like you said, in media coverage.

I don't know if gog has such games in the catalogue. If this would be the case then they would have to check age of their customers for example before selling. They didn't do with me, so I guess either they don't have games with restrictions or nobody really cares. If somebody would care, in principle germany could try to sue gog then....

I am sure there are some who buy the games from gog, but maybe up to now nobody had time to post in the forums.

Well which version of fallout 1 & 2 do they sell, the uncensored one or the one with children patched out? Pretty sure its the latter

For example Postal 2 is on the index in Germany. But that still means it is not allowed to be sold to people under eighteen and you are not allowed to advertise it. I do not think that GOG actually sells some game which is banned in Germany.

Some infos (not complete) from german Wiki (only in German):

Games on Index: [url=http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kategorie:Indiziertes_Computerspiel]http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kategorie:Indiziertes_Computerspiel[/url]
Banned games: [url=http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kategorie:Beschlagnahmtes_Computerspiel]http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kategorie:Beschlagnahmtes_Computerspiel[/url]

However as GOG is california-based and only selling over the net it is not really feasible to do anything against them from german jurisdiction. I am not even sure there is anything which would allow to prosecute them in german law, as they are not based on german territory.

Oh, man. That statement is ridiculous.

Good work! OK, you proved me wrong. Thanks for that. Now I am off to find other missing country. ;-)

The diversity of the community has never seemed unusual to me. The only effect it has on my posting or interactions with the community is to be much more forgiving of spelling and grammar errors (which I make as well). When I notice errors I try to imagine myself trying to communicate in the posters native language. I can't help but be impressed with the communication skills of our community members.

I view the multi-national community makeup as similar to the age variance that the community shares. It doesn't really matter what country you're from, what age you are, your race, religion etc. etc. . . . we all share the common bond of enjoying games, old and new.

I did add FoxClocks to my browser to keep up with the time zone a poster lives in. Seems the time of day / night can influence a poster's demeanor so . . . knowing it 3 am on a Saturday night can help understand the unheard tone of a post. . . =)

That's how I feel too. There's nothing magical going on here when you consider this and bansama's post about how a lot of places don't even display location

Well, apparently it's not diverse enough for cogadh.

Just for that I'm ethnically cleansing it's a small world.