Just a few thoughts...

IMHO 2022 was a pretty good year for GOG.

We saw the release of...

... Skyrim.

I was of the camp that Skyrim would never, ever make it to GOG... that Bethesda would milk that DRM cow until the end of time. Imagine my surprise when it showed up! IMO alongside Dragon's Dogma Dark Arisen, GOG now has the two greatest open-world fantasy RPGs of the last decade.

GOG also made an interesting choice in releasing a "new" version (modded) of...

... Daggerfall.

While GOG seemingly made a few mistakes along this road to release, I believe that a store that prides itself in game longevity, should be orienting its offerings toward modding...

... the largest factor at the moment in game longevity.

It would be nice to see GOG house mods for games like Neverwinter Nights, Solasta, etc. Do I expect this? No... I don't think GOG has the stomach for housing massive amounts of user content... but would be interesting. And seeing that games like Cyberpunk 2077 could benefit from a cultivated modding community...

GOG has had wall-to-wall sales!

But the sales... over-lapping sales... and generally unimpressive discounts haven't generated much excitement for me. But then I like smaller, themed, straight-forward sales with one or two extreme discounts. As it is currently I find most sales confusing -- concurrent sales with different expirations -- and generally populated with mundane, uninspiring discounts. I keep expecting one day to find the same game in multiple concurrent sales with different discounts.

The only thing I have absolutely disliked on GOG this last year was...

... the lack of AA and indie publisher releases!

The Ultimate Admiral / Ulimate General games seem to have abandoned GOG after a few early releases (sadly a common tale looking through the catalogue), Microprose doesn't seem interested in releasing new titles here (will we get the B-17 remake?!), and games like Empire of Sin never even made the catalogue. While Lost Eidelons and some others (ie Gloomhaven) showed up here, it hurts to feel like GOG is becoming an afterthought in the indie space just as it has been in the AAA space.

I sincerely hope that GOG can find a way to keep indie publishers who have a history of releasing here to continue doing so... and that it can attract more high quality indie releases.

Plenty of AA / indie releases in 2022.

Interesting thoughts Kai, thanks for sharing.
I'd disagree with the GOG bringing more modded versions though. This is because I think they should focus their strenght in bringing more games with true drm-free mentality.

The drm-free mentality is already enough for the modding community because a version that you are not forced to updated helps modding so much and this alone is already a HUGE contribution for modding, testing, troubleshotting and so on.

What I'd say could contribute even more is: Bring to the site the 'galaxy only' download older versions option.
If this ever happen GOG will be the ultimate e-store for modders to the games available here at least I'd say.
That is... if modders ever understand the danger of Steam Workshop... *sigh*

I'd argue that Skyrim didn't ever make it to GOG, at least not with a fully functional, fully intact version.

Instead, GOG only got a gimped version of Skyrim which uses a different version number than the Steam version does, which therefore makes many/most mods forever incompatible with the GOG version, because for them to become compatible, the mod makers would have to make a GOG-specific version of their mods, which many/most of them will never do.

This problem easily could have been avoided if GOG and Bethesda ensured that the GOG version would use the same identical version number as the Steam version does...but they didn't bother to do that.

Some make the counter-argument to this point that: "Oh but they can't, because the Steam version has a creation club DRM menu!" But I don't think that's a valid excuse, because Bethesda could easily patch that out of the Steam version, and then make the GOG version identical...or alternatively, they could have left the menu in the GOG version but make it benign and non-functional (i.e. make it so the GOG version doesn't "phone home" to the creation club), so that GOG could still have the same version number.

Yet they didn't do any of that, which I assume is solely because giving GOG customers a vastly inferior version is easier and less work than doing the right thing instead would have been.

The only other big release of premium games in 2022 were Alien: Isolation, Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War, the latter of which is a botched release because it is inexcusably missing Achievements, which easily could have - and should still be - added, yet probably won't ever be.

So then, we have only 4 premium releases in 2022, and 2 of which are horribly botched.

And tons of the non-premium games (i.e. "indie games" released on GOG in 2022 are scraping the bottom the barrel.

I'd call that a terrible year for GOG.

It was a great year. DOOM 64 is probably the hilight for me. Skyrim is nice, I guess. I don't mind the version number being different for a different build of the game.. if mods care about one number too much, it's the mods themselves that are gimped.

I gotta say 2022 was great for VNs, and that is my main wish for 2023 too.

It's not so simple though. A version number might break the whole mod because many Skyrim Mods use .DLL files that check for a version number for compatibility check to prevent breaking people's save games, save files, and other mods.

Sounds like something that should be trivial to patch. In any case, not the game's fault that modders are overeager to check for hardcoded version numbers.

I think it's worth mentioning that Bethesda broke some games on Steam too, most notably Fallout 3.

Also, I wouldn't consider Daggerfall's release as a success. The game had already been available for gog. What happened is that a mod used code that's legal property of the MIT (!) without permission. Evidently GOG realized this and they saved face by blaming it on communication shenanigans.

I believe you can access NWN EE's modules from the game itself? Also, Solasta's problem is that they depend on Steam Workshop to add the fanmade modules. So GOG would have to make a substantial change to the way the site works for us to see a change in this matter.

2022 was a pretty good year for GOG, and likely most of their customers, and I say that despite the issues I have with some of the pricing, that may be down more to the providers rather than GOG.

Some great games came to GOG in 2022, some mentioned already, and some I am yet to buy due to price. It was great that Quake Enhanced came here, despite the doubts over that and the uproar when it did not appear in a timely fashion. Because it did eventually turn up, it gives hope about others, and of course Skyrim did that big time too, despite the version complaints of some. Hell, a better version of Hitman GOTY might still turn up ... doubtful, but never say never.

I care more about GOG having learnt a few lessons and just doing the right things by us, and I don't expect AAA games here, certainly not new ones. GOG continuing to survive and maybe thrive even, is important to me, along with DRM-Free.

So here;s hoping GOG will build on 2022 achievements in 2023.
I wish them the best of luck for all our sakes.

P.S. GOG changed the gaming landscape for the better, and we should never forget that. I certainly don't want things to return to how they were before GOG appeared.

Yeah, I agree.
Some games really seem to be on sale six months a year, with the sales being basically always the same (only different in name), offered with the ever-same, interchanging, discounts, deducted from the ever-same base price, which was set years ago.
I have a hard time believing, that that does "wonders" to the number of games sold.
If, at the very least, they (talking about the devs/publishers) would lower the base prices after some time, so that the same discounts would lead to new, lower, prices...that would give hesitant buyers new incentives to finally buy games from their wishlists.
But hey - maybe the number of new customers here on GOG is way higher than I thought, and therefore all these games, with their ever-same discounts, sell like hot cakes to that new audience?
Who knows? Might be. But none of us ever asks why that's the case.
Me personally? I don't think it's due to the "wicked" nature of (some of) the devs/publishers.

I suspect that the number of items sold here is simply not high enough to warrant more/further engagement for some?

Heck - if so, we might even be thankful that not more games get pulled from GOG.
Pulling the games from GOG might already be coonsidered too much hassle for some devs/publishers.

And in cases where games don't get released here: maybe some devs/publishers NOT here on GOG yet, ask other devs/publishers who have released their game(s) here, about their experiences with the platform, and then don't see neither the revenue, nor the trouble they can expect here, as worthwhile?

Skyrim was a great release. I do not agree though that doubling-down on dragging the modding community into yet more segregationist store-locked exclusive tribal p*ssing contests is going to improve anything. I'd rather see NWN mods at the Neverwinter Vault where they're available to all.

What? No. Someone using the MIT license has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with code that's property of the MIT. Specifically, software using the MIT license can be used "without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software". The one and only limitation is: "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software."

In other words, if you use the MIT license it's almost the same as placing your stuff in the public domain, except you have to be credited.

I don't think housing mods has to be either "segregationist" or "exclusive"

Neither did people who supported the Steam Workshop until "it's just another option" ended up with an increasing number of Workshop exclusive mods that segregated users into "those who bought from the 'correct' store" vs everyone else... In reality, even if GOG did introduce a GOG Workshop, most GOG users would still have to go to Nexus, etc, for 95% of stuff anyway as many modders have said they aren't going to get stuck uploading every update of every mod to a Steam Workshop, a GOG Workshop, an Epic Workshop, a MS Store Workshop, uPlay Workshop, etc, on top of Nexus, ModDB, etc, due to the ongoing fetish with each store demanding the wheel be constantly reinvented over & over then gating everything behind clients for the sake of 'branding'. Tribal fragmentation of the formerly open & inclusive modding community is a completely absurd situation in general that never needed to exist in the first place.

Everything would be so much easier if they all just got rid of DRM, and everywhere we were dealing with the same version of a game. But then GOG wouldn't have a reason to exist, except perhaps for the rare old game they fixed.

Anyway, I have yet to see Pigs Fly .... except at a Pink Floyd or Roger Waters concert.