This is also a good answer to the gog curation criteria leading to so many rejections.

As for the last bit at the end of quoted text above: Tell that to movie/game makers who keep trying to pander to such minded people.

It is partially up to the devs, but at the same time this has gone on for a very long time, and GOG doesn't seem to have done much about it as it keeps happening.

It's likely that it was done for the first reason as it seems there are a *lot* of people that go nuts over the smallest & dumbest of things these days and they're probably just trying to avoid all that drama, but it very much feels like the second & takes away one more thing that made GOG stand out over their competitors.

I think you misunderstood what I was getting at there, so I'll clarify: in addition to screwing up the publishers' statistics (which may affect development of future Mac/Linux releases), not revealing the platform split to publishers means that if a third party was contracted out to port their game the publisher can't tell how much of a cut of their GOG sales needs to be given to those third party developers for the ports, since they have no way of knowing how many of them were Mac or Linux sales. As a result it's more likely they'll just not release the Mac/Linux versions here.

Nothing in particular for me personally; they're just yet another thing that makes GOG stand out less, on top to all of the other stuff I mentioned.

I'd also like to add though, that very little of what Valve has done for Linux exclusively benefits them. Everyone benefits from the kernel improvements, graphics driver improvements, additions to Vulkan, improvements to Wine/Proton, DXVK/D9VK etc. Even GOG benefits from it (or rather, they *would* if they better supported Linux).
I don't particularly care much for a client (although there are many others that do, going by comments posted elsewhere whenever GOG is brought up) - my issue with the lack of a Galaxy client for Linux is that it's costing us a lot of Linux releases. It's also cost us updates in some cases, where the developers added Galaxy integration to the Win/Mac versions and stopped updating the Linux versions as a result.

Same here. Actually went through with. I'd like to support Gog, but I've ran out of excuses for them.

Okay, imagine you're Gog. Some of the games on your store aren't up to date. That's probably bad for business and you want to take care of that. Fortunately for you one of your customers actually made a list. Not only of outdated games, but of any title that in any form doesn't offer the same as your customers would get on competing stores. You don't even have to track down the information yourself. How great is that?

Now if you burn the list and break your customers' pen and paper, I'm enclined not to only blame the respective dev, when I buy a game that hasn't received an update since 2017, yet is still sold on your store without disclosure of version number and for which I may or may not get a refund.

Well, it's not just about curiosity. If I may quote Shmerl: So, similar to the issue of the missing Galaxy client for Linux, we actually might be missing releases because of that.

As an added bonus: that post is a month old with no reply.

Anything making money from you should not be unconditionally supported. This is such an awful concept. Support those who earn trust and your money. Unconditionally supporting is just some Blood level cult stuff marketing departments dream of.

Well yes, but I wasn't thinking of non-humans.

Unconditional support? NEVER. I actually totally stopped buying games from GOG for over a year now. After owning over 600 games here despite Steam had half price for Turkey (it is even 1/3 now). I haven't even downloaded 500 of those games. I bought them here to support GOG, DRM-FREE and the publishers. Then things changed.

1. That is for debate but there are many games on GOG now that actually have DRM. Gwent being one of them.
2. People keep saying that Galaxy is not mandatory but it is now for most of the games if you want 100% game experience including achievements.
3. Galaxy is a really terrible experience and it doesn't look like it is going to get better anytime soon.
4. Almost Zero Linux support compared to Steam. I am a linux user and I deeply appreciate their efforts to bring gaming to Linux community. Especially with Proton, I can now play almost any game on Linux.
5. Terrible front page design. This has been addressed countless times but GOG openly refused to act on it even tho they promised in the past. You can read the discussions here
6. Removing game pages for classics like Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights. They didn't have to remove those pages. Steam doesn't. Just make it unsearchable in the store or even better put a simple note saying "you have to buy that game to get this game..."
7. After so many years, still has a fucked up review system. It is that horrible that even people here go to STEAM to read the reviews before buying the game here. This issue was addressed multiple times with ZERO response. Then, they "upgraded" the review system which made it A LOT WORSE, which I didn't think was possible.
8. 8 out of 10 times, the information on the game page is wrong. You may often find a pixel game requiring 8 GB RAM with i7 CPU and 50GB of space. You'll only know the truth if you go to the developers website or better to Steam where the correct information can be found. 8/10 ratio was taken out of the 20 games I checked in the last few months which 16 were wrong. This kind of neglect doesn't give me confidence to trust this company anymore.

Only thing I love about GOG is its brilliant community. I love people here, even tho most of them don't even know me. About GOG, I am voting with my wallet and I hope they can steer back to the right path again.

The thing that's been stopping me is my opposition to DRM. I've been thinking that I'll start considering Steam games as long as either: a) their developer guarantees that they will be playable without Steam, or b) they will run without Steam anyway and are older games that are unlikely to get patched again (and as such are unlikely to be patched to require it). I've also been testing some of my current Steam library with the Goldberg emulator (which is open source!) recently with some success, so I might also accept games that can be made "DRM-free" via tools like that.

Unconditional? No....Why? Simple,really Gog has not proven to be worthy enough...Sure, they are generous with free games but that doesn't mean it should be unconditional. The only condition is if they paid for my food, put a roof over my head and put clothes on me and I don't mean actually dress me. When that happens which is never then I would but as we all know that is a fairy tale. These are my conditions for unconditional support so, I think the point is made and the unconditional bit, solved:)

This!
Any time I want to buy a game on GOG for whatever reason, I open steam to find out stuff about the game. Usually check hardware requirements on Linux versions and mostly negative reviews.
Sorting the reviews by older date means absolutelly zero info.

GOG Including DLC on the search results is kinda misleading for me, beying hard to filter through. I believe a simple "remove DLC from results" button would solve this.

Gog has done their level best to bring quality games to us.
Seeing triple A titles from time to time is a nice surprise.
I will support gog wherever I can.

First off sorry about formatting your post above: I do it to organize my thoughts due to OCD/etc & hope it is ok. That said:

1. They likely want to keep the games here for those who might want to buy them, both to allow people to still play them and buy them if they want. They also likely are legally bound to do so for a set period, and also some devs might not want to sign if they see gog dropping devs left and right for various reasons.

2. True enough & agreed on the last bit about taking positives/etc away from gog users.

3. I did and I thank you for clarifying what you meant.

4. Fair enough.

5. Maybe but could they even patent/copyright linux improvements? Also to them it could just be part of luring in linux users and customers......with what else they do I wouldn't put it past them, tbh.

Thanks again for the reply, btw.

I can understand that and all, but it may not be entirely up to gog/gog's fault....that's all I meant by that, that some shouldn't lay blame where it doesn't belong or give equal blame to devs as well.


Ifg I may be blunt: Achievements were made to give dopamine/etc "rushes" to the new generation and get them hooked to a fad....that is about it. Yes, they can be fun to have, but they are not NEEDED to play/have fun with a game, and to me that makes the "galaxy is not mandatory" claim a valid one(for that point...some may contend MP tied to galaxy makes galaxy mandatory for that aspect of some games).

The rest of your post was mostly spot on/good, though.

Galaxy 2.0 is basically endorsing the idea that DRM is a fine thing, by sending the message that it's great to buy DRM-infested games so that you can launch all your many DRM-infested games with Galaxy 2.0.

So, your statement in praise of Galaxy 2.0 is undermining your own thesis in the rest of the same post, that GOG is great because it stands up for DRM-free.

As for GOG "not betting on a toxic policy like EPIC with its exclusive" - you make it sound like GOG had a choice to do that, but then chose not to. Yet that is not reality. GOG never had the choice to do that. GOG does not, and never did, have the financial resources to do that. Paid exclusives was simply never an option that GOG could have taken, period.

Whether they would have pursued that option if they did have the financial resources to do so is an open question.

And there are indeed games that are exclusive to GOG and can't be bought anywhere else, I.e. Swat 4, Heroes of Might and Magic 3 Complete Edition, etc. So that proves GOG has no problem offering exclusive games when it has the chance to do so.

As for your praise of GOG's curation: that's actually a horrible thing that no one asked for or wanted. Yet GOG continues to maintain it instead of doing the good thing, which would be to abolish it entirely. Curation doesn't keep bad games off of GOG, but it does keep good games off of GOG.

And GOG also wastes a lot of money paying curators to provide a useless service, when that money could instead be much-better spent elsewhere, like by fixing GOG's almost non-existent Crossplay feature, a fix for which has been desperately needed for years, yet is something that GOG apparently is never going to do anything about.

Having said all that, I still generally do prefer GOG to other platforms since it's the only viable option for buying DRM-free games in modern times.

But my point is that GOG is nowhere near so perfect or benevolent or problem-free as the OP is implying.

Yeah, it's basically this.
I'd prefer my games nice and DRM-free, too, I just can't deal with this anymore.

I've been thinking about checking out Itch and maybe Humble where possible, just for the added Steam key. That way you'd get DRM-free builds for a part of your library while still having the Steam build as a fallback option. I also did not know about Goldberg, that seems a promising option, too. Thanks for bringing that to my attention.

I can see your point, but I'm over that to be honest.

I don't want to get into the blame game for outdated builds, especially since there's a lot of behind the scenes stuff I don't know about. Contracts, ease of submitting patches, etc. I'm certainly willing to concede that at least some of the devs are to blame here, too, and to cut everyone involved some slack, because, you know, shit happens.

But it's not just about there being outdated games sold here, but also about the way Gog handles that situation. "Barely" isn't quite up to snuff in my opinion, especially not for a curated store. If we were to assign blame, it wouldn't be 100% on Gog, true. But I don't think it has to for it to be a viable point of critique.

Like, if there's a steaming dump on your kitchen floor, you can tell me how the neighbour did it and it's not your fault all you want, I'm still not coming around for tea.

Consistently selling games that are often missing years worth of fixes/features/content is not a good look for GOG though, and it'll only damage their reputation and discourage buyers in the long run.

Imagine being a new user here, buying your first game, downloading & starting to play it, then running into a major bug... and then discovering that the version of the game you bought here is missing a couple of years of updates (including a fix for the bug you encountered), and that this is far from an isolated case... would you be inclined to shop here again? Would you recommend GOG to others after such an experience?

Well, due to the licensing of things like the kernel, Wine, etc. any changes they make have to be shared, but this is not the case for other separate projects like DXVK/D9VK - if they were inclined to do so they could very easily have insisted on keeping them closed source and somehow tied them to Steam, but no, they actually use extremely permissive licensing (zlib/libpng license, e.g. https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/blob/master/LICENSE ).

And of course they're trying to attract people to their service, just as GOG does with their DRM-free selling point (and their other, former core values).
It's especially frustrating when you hold off buying a game for ages hoping for a GOG release. And then when it finally happens you discover that they're only providing the Windows version. And it keeps happening again, and again, and again. It's especially common with the bigger releases, e.g. BioShock Infinite, Dying Light, Metro 2033 Redux, Metro: Last Light Redux, Spec Ops: The Line, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, etc.

I'm still going to insist on DRM-free one way or another for everything I buy, even if it's via Steam.

Unfortunately the DRM-free builds at Humble tend to be neglected even more than they are here, as well as having much less consistency of packaging.

On a side note it looks like we've rustled some jimmies, judging by all of the "low rated" posts in this thread now :p Quick question for those who apparently disapprove of criticism of GOG (not that I expect anyone to answer): how does it help GOG/how are GOG to improve if they're only given positive feedback & told all is well when there are *major* issues with their service? relevant meme