Yes, it was a rant and yes, people like to complain too. For many people you can never make it right.

There is only one thing I want to add: There is indeed a non-zero risk GOG makes the client mandatory one day and because of that it's fine to talk about this from time to time (of course not constantly). So, one just has to deal with the occasional outburst of negative energy. That is perfectly normal. I always advice ignoring or ranting (from time to time) and then ignoring.

I have not in my post "hated on GOG". In fact I am very happy with GOG currently. What I do not like is the constant stream of galaxy everywhere, including buttons on the download pages just waiting to trip you up . Whilst advertising is fine, an option to switch it off would be nice. Unfortunately its not just the advertising though is it. Look at the forums, and the wishlists, an increasing amount of posts and requests are for "steam"-like features. And with the W3 "flood" of people arriving this is only going to increase. In exactly the same way as you are tired of people complaining about galaxy, I am tired of reading about how xyz wants "this" steam feature. I am paranoid, and certainly have zero trust in anything, however this is a perfectly valid view-point considering how many high profile data losses regularly come around, and I wont "just go away".
So currently its great to have the new games coming out, but its also disconcerting to see this general attitude shift. You may also be correct in the "beta" phase part, that will need to be seen.

You should feel very "special" to just call people complainers for the 1 thing did wrong vs 99 good, because actually in my case I NEVER complaint about anything on GOG.com since I joined the website as a customer in all these years, until all the new really user unfriendly design, came to the website. You people that show yourselves like the really lovers of GOG and the proud Knights of Fair Justice for this website! and complain about complainers should, tomorrow, get some of your favorite features out from here, or any of your websites, just to check how you guys would feel, is very easy to give"lessons" to people when you simply DO NOT CARE about what is eliminated from the website.

And I also can speak also about how much resilience I have vs changes, with more than 10 years on STEAM and not even one complaint.

What is really tiring is you guys with a "damage control" complex, is funny that in all your gorgeous analysis you are kind of blind to not realize what THE WITCHER 3 is in GOG's hands, it is the HALF LIFE 2 of GALAXY, as HL2 was to STEAM, CDPR is trying to push their own platform through The Witcher 3, and they think the business for the big main audience of Witcher 3 is pretty much important that all these " strange people that do not like Clients" . So YES, is this, and also that GOG would rather much prefer all of us to use Galaxy, because it is data, it is research, it is control, and EVERY single company would crave for that... and this is NOT bad or good, is THEIR business, but yes it will never be mandatory, at least meanwhile people will COMPLAIN in one way or the other about what they want, ranting or not.

Actually what I am missing from both, the current website and the client, is the option to download all the extras with one click. (In the downloader links it is still contained.) I hope they add the function to both again soon. And I'm missing the box art.

Apart from that currently everything is fine.

I want to say again that my comment was in reply to you but was actually in response to a barrage of certain stuff over time which has been getting to me a bit lately so I hope you didn't take any of my ranting personally even if I managed to say something that sounded that way. Just thought I should try to be clear about that.

There were a few Galaxy ads that did have an [x] to turn them off which I did with a few of them even though they don't particularly bother me. Only turned them off as I'm already sold on and have Galaxy so it just takes up some space on the page that I'd rather let the other content slide into. I did notice that not all ads had this though including the front page one but again that doesn't bother me and it is rather small and non-intrusive IMHO.

Well the way I view it is that the average PC gamer out there prefers various modern conveniences/features that some of the other gaming platforms do provide or which would be convenient if they did, or even to provide such features in a potentially superior manner. Some people will word this in a manner comparing things to Steam but often using "steam" in a pejorative manner like just because something is a feature on Steam it is something to be despised and it is an automatic path to DRM and whatnot. That is very frequent in these forums and tiring I find because many people seem to be unable to separate the idea of a useful software feature and end user convenience from a specific piece of software that might provide that feature and bundle that particular feature along with all of the other elements of the particular software as if the separate bits that make up the software are all one package and that there is no other way for any other company to implement such a feature without cloning every other aspect of the way Steam does it and dragging in DRM and everything else. I'm not suggesting you are saying that, but it's a popular view to a vocal minority here and it is ludicrous IMHO.

People are not really requesting steam-like features or I don't think that is the best way of looking at it anyway. I think people are asking for features that they personally find useful and/or enjoyable in some way of which some of those features do happen to be provided by Steam in some form because Steam is the most popular and most evolved distribution platform and client out there right now.

The ability to take a screenshot in a game is a useful feature for example, and Steam has a unified key for that. Having a unified screenshot feature is a very useful and convenient thing which has nothing to do with Steam. Steam just happens to think so to and has that feature already along with 12 years of development under it's belt to figure these things out and come up with conveniences like that.

Steam has done a lot of things right from a convenience and user friendliness perspective - not everything by a longshot, but they have done some things really well and there is no reason whatsoever to avoid providing well thought out useful features of convenience optionally to people who would like to have such features. Cloud save games/settings is one example. There are very solid benefits to many users to having optional cloud save game support available. If we pretend Steam doesn't even exist and never did, from a purely technical viewpoint cloud saving (and I do hate the term cloud personally but it is understood by people so I'll use it) gives people the benefit to play their games on multiple computers/laptops and have their save games shared between them all and synchronized automatically as well as potentially sharing configuration or other details. That is a feature that can be implemented by a gaming client or some other software but it is indeed useful to people who have multiple computers like that. It is also useful if you put 400 hours into say.... Skyrim and have a catastrophic hard disk failure and do not have backups of your savegames. There are many other examples one can provide as to why that feature could be considered by someone to be convenient without it having to be a feature desired by everyone for example.

So people who have used such a feature anywhere, as well as people who haven't but are aware of the potential benefits may want that feature and may vote on it per se. The fact that Steam implements the feature should not be a reason to avoid implementing something of this nature also. If anything Steam has proven that the feature is indeed useful and most games I've seen use the feature responsibly and optionally also with the ability to turn it off. I'm not sure if any games on Steam make it mandatory or not but if they do it's up to their publisher and not something that is inherent in the technology itself. So while it is possible for a publisher to use such a feature in a bad way, and Steam permits developers to decide that doesn't mean that if GOG were to include such a feature that they have to automatically do it exactly the way Steam does it - although people tend to characterize it that way.

Similar mindset goes for many other features which also happen to be found on Steam, but there's absolutely nothing wrong with anyone wanting features like that on GOG, and GOG can set the bar higher to make the feature more consumer friendly and more useful to people if they choose to do so and that seems their intention with things IMHO.

Many people here just see a feature named and know or hear that Steam has that feature and go into burn the witch mode without even knowing what they're talking about or trying to understand the benefit, they just fear that because Steam does it it must be evil and bad and the path to DRM coming to GOG or other doomsday scenarios. There's a never ending supply of doomsday scenarios people can imagine though and they can attach them to absolutely anything at all whimsically.

For all the hate that some people do have for Steam and the alleged love they have for GOG, they are very distrusting of GOG though and assume that GOG couldn't possibly do better than Steam, or maybe they don't even want GOG to compete with Steam and try to reach bigger success, it's hard to say. I myself think that keeping the entire gaming experience on GOG stuck in say the status quo here in late 2013 and never improving the services or adding features that other platforms have that gamers want would ultimately just keep GOG in the little leagues and have little room for growth and never really be able to become all that they can become and to expand DRM-free gaming ideology as far as I think it is potentially possible that it can be taken.

You're right there, we will see a big influx starting today and we'll both probably feel more of what we feel already I'm sure too. It's ultimately going to be more people with equally split thoughts/feelings/opinions/needs/likes/dislikes/etc. or at least that's probably safe to expect. But then that's all part of this growth too, that that comes along for the ride for better and worse ultimately right? :)

One thing that we can probably all use more of, myself included - is to probably not let all of these things weigh on us and get to us as much as they do from time to time no matter what side of a given view anyone in particular has. Sometimes that seems difficult I think, though you probably would agree with that too I assume. :)

If I understand what you mean about data loss then I'd have to agree that frequent and ongoing breakages around here are not doing anything to keep people's heads as level as they could be, and it is somewhat infectious. I try to keep a more positive outlook about those sort of things more often than not but sometimes I get grumpy about it a little too.

If there is one thing I think everyone of all opinions on any issue would likely agree with it would be that having the website, forums, client, downloader and other software/services/etc. stabiliize and stay that way would be of benefit to all and help to avoid a lot of the frustration people feel all around. Everything needs to get out of beta (whether it is labelled beta or not) real soon hopefully or people will just continue to have a more and more poor opinion about the state of things and it's only going to raise temperatures more I imagine.

Hopefully things smooth out over the next couple weeks though. Lets all hope that at least.

This can become quickly a "only need to cater to the majority" kind of argument. I would always say there is no such thing as the average PC gamer anyway or if there was then the Steam example would show that DRM is okay.

With the same argument I could make the client mandatory too because the average PC gamer is not totally against using a client.

To cater to everyone we should hammer some immovable nails saying that the client must remain completely optional and that customers not using the client must not be treated as second class citizens (for example with hiding options to them or bombarding them with client ads).

Currently this is the case and therefore everything is fine but nobody knows if it stays like this and only time can tell.

What?

Whether there's client or not, it doesn't change your DRM free games.

I don't even understand. GOG doesn't even try to threaten you by not installing their client, unlike Steam who holds your games 'hostages' if you don't install Steam client, yet some people are bitching about GOG client.

Stupidity is everywhere, I guess.

It's not a matter of catering to the majority, but a matter of recognizing that as humans we all enjoy and gravitate towards convenience, but that the conveniences we all seek may be different because we all have different needs, and that by providing features that appeal to a greater number of people's needs, more people are likely to become customers and to enjoy their experience that much more.

On the large scale it's not choosing one group of customers over the other, however due to human nature some people will naturally feel that way whether there is rational reason to or not and even that is an oversimplification. I'm personally generally in favour of things in life that provide me or others with more options, more potential conveniences. I favour both and I favour choices over someone making the choice for me, but I also recognize that an option existing for someone else doesn't mean I have to choose the option or vice versa. At the same time excessive and unnecessary options can be a bad thing too and so sometimes removing an option can be for the overall greater good, and other times it can be a potentially bad move. It's impossible to make these choices all of the time and achieve universal approval from everyone too which in combination with some people being inflexible unless they get their own way 100% of the time makes it a difficult position to be in for a company like GOG.

+1

My plea to gOg is that alongside development of Galaxy, the website itself retain the ease-of-use from the past for those of us customers who forgo the new client for whatever reasons.

I guess sometimes you cannot have both (more options and more conveniences), especially when taking into account that it costs money realize both, and one may need to decide what is more important.

To avoid false fears and hopes we should rest the case a bit, say six months, and then look at it again. Maybe until then the client is not optional anymore for some games (because of the overall greater good or something related) or maybe not. Let's wait and see.

There you go again, assuming you know what was important to me (and others, albeit apparently just a few.) Sorry I have the "wrong" opinion, I'll get right on changing that. GoG's uniqueness to me, and why I bought here was, in order:

1) Old games available legally
2) The shelf, game boxes & manual sorting
3) Game extras
4) No client

Bonuses: No social crap & no indie games/half developed games to wade through

I don't give two shits about DRM. I own every game I've bought here (I think, they're in storage) physically anyway.

Again, not important to me. If you want to "own" games nowadays, you pretty much have to buy the console version and even then that's not guaranteed.

They're not threatening people to use their client? No, they are doing it passively aggressively by making it more complicated to download the files & by stopping all support on the downloader. (Not that I used the downloader anyway.) Oh, and by putting the Galaxy banners freakin' everywhere.

If you don't think they are going to do everything they can to herd all the cattle into using the client, you're... wrong.

No kidding! I found plenty in your post.

Yes sometimes things can be mutually exclusive, or resource limitations mean at least temporarily if not longer that the choice for A happens over B. I agree with you that in 6 months a lot will have changed, perhaps more than any of us could have estimated if they keep growing in just about every way as they have in the last 6. 6 months should be plenty of time to draw at least some useful conclusions in my own mind I think, and others likely will feel the same too.

I think one thing is certain though, we're going to have a crapload more games available in 6 months than anyone would have predicted not too long ago I believe. :)

1. I dislike Steam for nearly everything that goes on in respect to "administration" there.

2. GOG has been offering "my" really good old games at a time when nobody else could deliver.
3. In all these years GOG simply worked - no frills, no "like this and you'll get XY".

So, as long as this Galaxy thingie is purely optional I will be a customer here.
Change that, and I might have second thoughts.

I'm using it, but there are plenty of people who don't, and that's the nice thing about it. You don't have to use it.

Just one thing to add, as your typing me to death here :o) I agree that people gravitate to convenience, but there are platforms out there already for that purpose, e.g. Steam, and consoles. You can even get old games on them. So why do we need another? An example is Shinyloot, they came into the DRM free market touting its benefit, however after the beta stage realized that the majority wanted the convenience given by Steam, and they could get more games in. So they became a key retailer. If you look at their forums its pretty much a wasteland.
Am just saying the differences in setups are why people go to different stores.