Calling people "consumers" is for me a clear sign that we're talking from a different perspective. What is a consumer? Somebody who buys something sometimes? That's everybody who doesn't live like a hermit in the woods. Have our species gotten a new name? Homo homo consumerensis?

You must be kidding. My backlog is that big BECAUSE I'm motivated to play all these games. Is it my fault that I'm not going to live for 500 years? Do you think that I have a daytime job because (for me) acceptable alternatives are only(!) a matter of choice?
Maybe plenty of people need companies motivating their life decisions (like gaming). Well... great for companies - but are we talking person-to-person or company-to-sheep here?

Isn't it clear that GOG doesn't aim at the "broad masses"? Statistics (and sales figures) show that a majority of people that play games don't give a damn about DRM.

so, an ex graphic designer says that GOG should be avoided at all cost...yet worked there for over 8 years??? if your first argument for avoiding a company are "ridiculous salaries" which are "half of what you can realistically get in other companies" you do not work in place like that for nearly a decade, unless:
a) you have some really weird fetishes, or
b) you have no bloody idea what you are talking about.

sorry, does not compute.

as for "outdated approach to online business" and "frightening lack of knowledge about situation and global trends in gaming", whatever it is that this graphic designer knows, it seems the rest of the world doesn't. According to CDP page, gog increased their net profits by a factor of 3x in 2017 and continues growing revenues every single year.... but what do i know, maybe if their "approach to online business" would be updated to graphic designer standards and they would learn a thing or two about these "global trends in gamin" (battle royale? always online drms?) then it would be growing every year by a factor of 30x...

Well, it is possible (in theory, I'm not saying that's the case) that working for those "other companies" would require moving to a different town (if not country) and for some health or family related or similar reasons that was not possible for the person in question.

Well, this topic did start with a review by a former GOG employee from an internal perspective who raised a perfectly valid point that was attacked by multiple people on here so that's the perspective I chose to defend (plus as a developer I'm closer to that perspective myself). Frankly it doesn't even really matter how good data mining is for the user in this context, the point is that data mining techniques and targeted advertising are pretty much a basic requirement with a service of this complexity and scale.

However, I still felt that in this context it is important to underline that reasonable use of data mining is actually beneficial to the consumer as well and not something that's in conflict with GOG's business model or harmful in any way. "Data mining" is a really dirty word that sounds bad thanks to nasty practices by various other companies like Google and Facebook. People connect "data mining" to blindly harvesting information, regardless of how private or sensitive it is, and risking that it ends up with third parties that can do harmful stuff with it. Meanwhile it's simply a modern approach to something that's just natural and common sense. GOG gathering and utilising data about their user's behaviour and preferences is fundamentally no different than observing customer behaviour to optimise the positioning of wares in a retail store (or heck, even on a farmer's fruit stand, just to underline how natural and harmless this is).

Well good for you, what I've been observing these last years is that people sit on mountains of games they actually have little interest in and that do little for them other than giving them a bad conscience for not playing them.

Right, GOG took in indie games, modern games, early access games, made Witcher 2 and 3 redeemable on GOG and developed the Galaxy Client because they want to remain the underdog and have no interest in becoming a serious competitor to Steam. And let's not forget that there's been shitstorm after shitstorm due to GOG allegedly neglecting the DRM-free mantra because they are "too greedy".

Actually it's pretty much common knowledge that in the gaming industry people generally earn much less than in other industries which share some of the same professions, be it programmers or graphics or UX designers, product managers etc.. The industry really is filled with people that only work there due to being really passionate about games or because they can't stand the idea of working on business tools that only accountants can get excited about etc..

And well, there are tons of reasons why one would stay for almost a decade at a company one has many complaints about. Heck, for all we know it might have been that person's first job and they only learned how things work in other places more recently. And frankly I know few people who have no major complaints about the company they work at and it's really common that people stick with the job they have instead of looking for new opportunities even if the latter would be most definitely beneficial to them.

And let's be honest for a minute here: many points that person raised in that review seem to overlap with stuff any GOG user can confirm. That GOG is reporting major growth doesn't automatically invalidate that person's arguments.

Basically all the cons are pros in my book.

But yeah, I'm possibly a bit weird.

You know so little about recommendations I don't even know where to start.

Genre is a ridiculously pointless feature. Even racing, a genre that one would expect to be well-defined, has genuine racing games, crime sims, the highly abstract Race the Sun and the surreal adventure Vangers.
Release year is ever so slightly better but only because it correlates with computer specs.

Raw tags are no better. I wouldn't play a crime sim like Carmageddon or GTA, but I love Antihero (a thieves' guild sim digital tabletop game), but I don't like Desktop Dungeons or Guild of Dungeoneering (also digital tabletop games) because they don't take the story seriously. I love Anodyne but not Undertale, Arcanum but not Baldur's Gate.

Ratings and purchase data are both bad in really weird ways. Ratings are very, very sparse. Purchases only go one way. Playtime through the client and achievements provide some feedback but it's not linear either. I can play an adventure game to completion by the clock and hate it, and I can win a singleplayer campaign on easy spending 1/50 of the time racked up by competitive players and love it.

Purchase data is additionally spoiled by availability (some games are GOG exclusives), release timing, sales, bundle deals and such. It's also very uneven, as some games sell stupendously huge numbers and others might struggle to sell a couple hundred. But recommending top-sellers isn't failproof: one, there's already a bestseller list/sort; two, discovery is one of the goals of recommendations; three, top-sellers are already well-known and more likely to be passed over out of distaste rather than obscurity; four, GOG has obligations toward publishers and their own business relation needs -- only a few games are runaway bestsellers and if they promote those to the exclusion of less popular ones, 90% of rightsholders (the indies, the noisy ones) will be dissatisfied with their games' visibility on the platform.

FWIW, the top 35 games by user rating are all RPGs. All-time bestsellers have somewhat more variety, but they include the blatantly mediocre Dragonshard and Demon Stone, longtime Soviet-style makeweights to D&D bundles.

Going by my discover queue and wishlist on Steam, it, with its vastly better data collection (because of their huge audience and a more invasive client, not through any failing of GOG), makes bad recs 87% of the time. Sure, they filter out the Mostly Negative trash -- so does GOG, by not selling it in the first place.

The TL;DR is that while spot-fixing recommendations is certainly possible (for starters, get rid of series content in "people who bought this also bought", and account for specs), making more sweeping improvements is hard, and even if they achieve an astounding success by data science metrics, your experience isn't going to noticeably change.