GOG's current status reminds me of situations like restaurants that no one attends any more because the owners did some bad things to alienate & repel their customers.

Sometimes what happens in those cases, is that those restaurants have all of their managers replaced, and then they put up a sign in the window that says "Under New Management," and offer some deals to entice back their former customers who no longer patronize their business any more.

This strategy can actually work to reverse the fortunes of a failing business.

When the management is replaced, usually the public are willing to give the company a second chance, so long as the new managers take it in a different direction and do not repeat the sins of the former managers who had driven them away.

IMO, GOG should utilize this exact same strategy.

That might be the only way to turn things around, and make GOG profitable again, and thus hopefully to ensure that GOG will be around in the long-term future.

I'm not just making this thread solely & exclusively because of the Hitman GOTY debacle (although that's definitely a big one!), but rather, also because GOG has had an endless series of habitual & frequent debacles over the last few years.

Short of GOG replacing the management, I don't think there is any way to restore GOG's reputation back to having the good status that it once held many years ago.

What do you think of these ideas?

Put your money where your mouth is. Buy GOG/CDP shares if you want to change their management and tell them how to run their business.

Unfortunately, I don't the have the hundreds of thousands/millions of dollars to spare that would be required to buy enough shares actually to accomplish anything using that strategy.

Definitely. the boat needs to correct the course and indisputably part of it is to say goodbye to those that lost the compass. But when you witness the business stays its course without any concern...
[Kernel panic]
Something does not match :S

Would you let go of that troll already? It wasn't that funny the first zillion times, and it's ageing like fine milk.

And before you protest that you're not trolling - if you get served bad food at a restaurant, do you a) complain about it to the menager or b) buy the restaurant? Unless you're an eccentric millionaire, I'm pretty sure it's the former, so seriously - give us a break.

Start your own bank.
Start your own social media platform.
Start your own country.
Start your own game platform.

These aren't arguments, nor is your contribution anything other than childish sadism. The twisting of a virtual knife to get your rocks off. Just because you live a feckless life in your little box doesn't mean we all have to.

Is the current management of GOG the founders of the business, or did the old guard get replaced at some point?

The real problem is CDP's management, or in fact that CDP manages GOG. That's where these rotten changes of direction come from, and always have. Remember that it was CDP's game, Witcher 2, that first had GOG introduce regional pricing, albeit while fighting tooth and nail, temporarily and with workaround, and again CDP's game, Witcher 3, which was also in part funded with GOG profits, that caused them to drop the principle altogether (even if AoW3 was the first game actually launched like that), and again CDP's game, Gwent, that had them allow a fully DRMed game (since it has no single player), and also microtransactions, and it's that same CDP game that took over much of their server infrastructure and a good part of their coders, increasing their costs and leaving much fewer resources for the site. And in exchange they didn't even give GOG a temporary exclusive or anything.

As for people that have been around from the beginning, what I kept reading is that not the management, but pretty much all the early staff, the people who worked their butts off in those years when GOG really stood for something because they cared for that cause, have long left.

I say let GOG fall, let newer start ups do right where GOG has failed, GOG is never going to change, that has become apparent through out the years, with all these failed promises, like fixing the forums, no more rep, etc. etc.

I doubt changing the management would change anything nor do I think they would allow themselves to be removed.
So we let the building come down.

Actually, the very problem is that GOG has changed and continues to do so, in all the wrong ways.
And it would be nice if an original GOG shaped hole would be created and some other store would fill it, but I fear that GOG took that banner and ran away with it, because if that hole was to be left, they already left it long ago and nobody managed to fill it, and their failure despite several years of bending over backwards to cater to the masses and the trends of the industry would just tell publishers and indie devs that there's no room for anything even remotely resembling principles and actually scare them away even more from any others trying to become what GOG used to be.

Haha, GOG provides DRM free offline installers for thousands of games for 13 years but now they need to go out of business because of a couple missteps? Who do you think will pick up the DRM free mantle, Valve? Epic?

L-O-L.

this is horrible, this idea.

Hmmmmmm fair.

Yeah I will admit I am not doing well mentally so I am not at my best posting at the moment, helplessness and fear is gripping me and its not just about GOG, so expect posts like this I wont delete it or edit it since its dumb and revisionist.

I guess I feel like just letting everything burn down atm.

Yeah I guess it is like I said to velvet I am not doing good mentally at the moment...
so expect weird shit.

To call it "a couple missteps" is quite the vast understatement, which greatly downplays the problems, tremendously more so than they should be.

sorry to hear that. i had mental break a few years ago. one night i just stopped sleeping, and began averaging about 16 hours of sleep a week (still had to work and tend to wife and kids etc). went on for several months. don't know what exactly caused it. all good now but still bear some mild ptsd-like trauma from the incident. hope you feel better.