First off: Yes I know that there will be a part of gogs userbase that will automatically condemm this "this ist the worst thing ever, if gog introduces this I will be gone forever yada yada yada". I think they should be ignored as most of them will adhere tio the classis "gamer" cycle: outrage > "oh, I game I need to play...to hell with it > silence.

Ok, but back to my idea, for which my two main motivators are:

- More money can always help, either by getting more or more expensive staff or to have the ability to afford a less profitable deal with a publisher/dev of a promising title
- Galaxy needs some additional features to differentiate itself from similar clients like playnite or launchbox. Which there aren't many as I currently can't see where Galaxy will be able to acutally deliver on the promise it makes - having to need only one client for all. looking at the state of the integrations (and gogs awkward realtion to them) there is still a long way to go.

I think what could help out with those problems could be a

subscription service

But not for games (like Humble monthly) but for service for games where gog currently can't offer any as gog doesn't sell them. From the top of my head I came up with two ideas that could be part of that service:

- VPN for Multiplayer (also vor non-gog old titles):
User would have an easy way to play games with others that do not support multiplayer via wan - like Age of Empires 2
- Savegamesync for manually added games
As this may be too complicated for the common user to configure (thus too much workload for the general support), at least have an ever growing number of supported games - maybe use a community wishlist to determine which game should be supported next. Maybe this could be combined with different levels of space availabe depending on how much one pays for the subscription (like 50/100/500 MB savegame space per game or 1/2/5 gb space for all manually added games combined).

Of course this needs more features but I am sure other people would be more resourcefull in that regard. But I would certainly pay for that service, if the price isn't to high. As I have no clue how gogs infrastructure looks like I can't develop any idea about absolute numbers, but I would suggest a modular subcription, so every function is optional with a discount that adapts to the number of options the users selects (the more option the user selects, the bigger the discount) and to the length of the subscription.

Anyone else who would pay for this, or am I alone ?

0 interest my side.

1. I don't like multiplayer
2. Games I add manually? Nowadays there is steam or gog. Both have clouds saves and, personally, I don't give a damn in bringing steams games to gog.

Fair enough, I am also not a very "multiplayer heavy" gamer, but now and then I like playing C&C RA or AoE2 with friends. And if it would be a cheap module, why not having it handy on occasion ? It's not about bringing games from other service (steam, epic, etc) in - I have no intrest in that, and they usually bring trheir own sync service with them, so people would have little incentive to pay for that extra. But I have a whole bunch of games that I would like to have savegame-sync for: DRM-Free games from Humble Bundle and itch.io or emulated games (NES; SNES, GB, etc) I would like to put in as singluar games in my GOG library.

Don't know. Seems very niche options, and putting them, even behind payment, would made them even more so.

But hei, I'm not the whole of customer base. So is still possible someone will be willing to pay.

It would put a bad precedent, as to why not extending the pay for feature to more useful features??

Or why not +10c each game to be able to download it with the client?

Yeah, that's a hard pass for me...

Why ? Its not about gog putting services for the games they sell behin bars, but to extend them to games they don't sell - which I deem even in the "spirit" of the Galaxy 2.0 > be the go to point for your games, even if you did not buy them on gog. Of course ideally these would be features that are free of charge but gog has to make some money.

But this could be counteracted by creating some kind of bonus program for it:
If you buy games worth 10€/$/whatever you will get the basic package for free for the lifetime of your gog account (something like you will get 1GB space for non gog game savegame sync). If you want more space either pay a small monthly fee or use bonus point you will receive when you buy games on gog (like spending another 10 bucks will give you bonus points to trade against three moonths of addtional 1GB space)

Congratulations, you just started to gamify GOG and Galaxy. That's even worse.

Care to elaborate ?

You'd either have to create a secondary store credit system or some sort of XP system for that to work. In short you're getting incentivized to buy things not for their own sake but an independent benefit which is is not far off from Valves malicious XP, badge and trading card meta game. In this case so as not to lose functionality customers have to buy shit they don't need, get locked into one ecosystem and in some cases will have to buy for a higher price because the cheaper option is in the wrong shop. This is just bad on all accounts.

Thanks for taking the time to answer but I would like to disagree No, as you still would have the option to pay for that service directly, this was merely ment as a) a nod to recurring customers and b) to make buying things from gog more attractive. I don't really see the connection to the xp/trade/badge from steam (but I have almost no knowledge about that, so whats malicious about it?) as you get a "real" benefit from it.
Yes it's somewhat of a point system, but as it gives you only access to a service (so no achievments/badges/etc. for the profile page) I don't see the problem. Again you don't have to buy "shit" you simply can pay directly for the service. If you don't pay for it anymore, you would loose Retro-Multiplayer (if you would have choosen it in the first place) much like you would loose your Netflix subscription, just an extra service. The second thing you would loose would be savegame synchronisation for non gog games, which is also just another service > don't want to use it anymore, just download the last state from the gog server and your fine.
Why should people get locked in (at least for the services I mentioned) ?

I am not really sure what exactly we are talking about here:
My basis for this statement were two things:
- the financial report from cdproject red, which states a significant loss of net win
- the shutdown of the fair price package program

But maybe this is more some kind of cultural problem ? Around here "is not the best" does not imply a bad situation, or in this case that they are loosing money or are almost broke, but just there where already better times/more money to spend in the past.
Maybe randalator could help out/make the call on that as we are geographically probably very close

Edit: Just to make this more "compatible" I removed that problematic part as it has no effect on the original motivation > better ?

Hello Guys.

I read your opnions to help GOG monetize its services so here goes what I think is a good option. I'm sure some of you will curse me for suggest this but I just ask you to think about it with a open mind.

As a regular GOG customer I usually receive news and buy games released in GOG Galaxy because is my game launcher of choice. But sometimes, I'm myself tempted to buy that really good game not available in GOG Store. So I have two options to address this:
- Buy the game in his respective online store given no money to GOG and still using GOG Galaxy to launch it
- Dont buy the game and wait until its released in GOG Store

Notice GOG lost a sale both options. But if I was able to buy this same game from its respective Store or even in GOG Store giving a small share of the profits to GOG and knowing for sure that game is not yet available DRM Free.

I mean why not do like many marketplaces already do with the know fair policies of GOG? It's not a bad market pratice if the announce say explicit and with big letters what is the source of your buy and that is not DRM Free.

If GOG Galaxy becomes a reference both to launch and buy games, not only to regular GOG users. I believe it will be much more easy to GOG make some profit of it in the future.

Anyway this is what I see about this situation. What you guys think about it?