My guess is that they noticed that many people don't read them anyway and better to test out a change in January in case it does have a significant impact. I often barely skim them and appreciate people in the forum thread pointing out some important detail of the two sentence post that I managed to miss. I've read a number of posts also thanking people for pointing out such details, and that is among those of us who care enough to read and post in the forum threads.

I think people worry because of the general trend of GOG getting more corporate, but I'm doubtful that a sentence or two of marketing speak is really improving anyone's life. With more new releases (and pre-release announcements) lately it takes more time. I see it as a good sign that they aren't stuck doing the same thing even though it doesn't really make sense anymore. Maybe they could do a few more multi-game articles so we could still hear "direct from GOG" but in a more useful way. Maybe even a monthly recap of new releases (only a few of us tend to check GOG daily so I could see something like that being helpful for many people).

I agree with Breja in the weekly sale thread that this format should be kept for the forum but the news link on the home page should just go directly to the game page at this point (ideally split to have a direct link to the comments as well for those of us who rarely look at the general discussion forum directly).

It's not like anyone ever read them.

Sure, we read them. It's how I was able to point out that Dodgeball Academia doesn't actually contain enough dodgeball. (Especially compared to Nekketsu Kōkō Dodgeball-bu).

Glad that it helped you and while i understand, i must say you are rather harsh in your verdict of this developer. They were working diligently to iron out performance issues and keeping it up-to-date since release. That's a redeeming quality weighing heavily in their favor, as others simply abandoned their product and moved on or vanished from the face of the earth. Based on their past experience it is difficult to understand why they made the same mistake, that is opting for Unity, once again. Most likely it's because Martha is also released on Xbox Series X|S, and PS5 aimed for release in Februray.

Graphics, setting (semi-) open-world/exploration, screams UE but that ship has sailed.

Sure, way to include a major spoiler in the game title itself!

"The Sixth Sense" = "Malcolm is Dead"

"The Usual Suspects" = "Verbal is Keyser"

"American Beauty" = "Colonel Killed Him", aka "Angela is a Virgin"

If we can't rebind them, at least I have a proven weapon against anti-rebind hipster developers: AutoHotkey!

But yeah, non-rebinds still piss me off!

Sorry, I was indeed a bit harsh, although I also meant it in general; I'll edit out my harshness... I guess I'm getting tired of my favorite indies being plagued with shit-tier performance, as Unity is so easy to screw up performance due to its piss-poor culling ability within the engine itself, as you need plugins to accomplish this!

It also sucks that so many indies default to that engine, especially since 75% let their ambition surpass that engine's capabilities, when URE could easily fit it perfectly, but they always bypass the best engine for the task in favor of "the popular underdog," vs "the big bad corporate monster AAA spewing engine!"

Unity is great for small 3D/2D games while URE is superior with large expansive 3D open worlds, sure you can achieve the same with Unity, but you require some serious concessions (And tempered ambitions) and culling tools to do it!
... Criticizes announcing spoilers while announcing spoilers... Thank fuck I saw those movies!

Thing is, zero-effort two sentence posts didn't use to be the norm on gog. This is just the next step in their constant dumbing down of news posts.

Check the news posts in the GD archive. Back in those days each and every gog release post would blow the official blurb out of the water. There was genuine excitement there - you read them because they were fun to read.

There was a noticeable drop in quality after the departure of their first PR guy, but it got really bad in 2017, when news posts turned from short essays into just 4 or 5 sentences, often with the most unimaginative, hackneyed descriptions imaginable.

Those 4 or 5 sentences got shortened to 3 or 4, then 2 or 3, then the obligatory newsletter spam at the end of each news post showed up and you could tell that eventually the newsletter shilling will eventually be longer than the news itself. Took only a few weeks until that was the case. Now they can't even be bothered to write a single sentence.

Like everything else about gog's decline, the process happened slowly and gradually. But the rot became apparent years ago.

If they have to make some cuts, completely cosmetic stuff is something I can get behind.

Re-writing that script they're allegedly testing, so that, instead of how it's currently implemented, it automatically copies the, let's say first couple paragraphs from the store page's description and pastes them into the opening thread post surely shouldn't cut that deep into the budget.

Thank you and sorry for going there. :) I do understand where you were coming from as we have had a similar discussions once before. You are also preaching to the choir here because i feel very much the same you do. One to many games ruined by this engine. It is particularly sad when you got a beautiful game with interesting and underexplored theme (albeit also not necessarily well executed to where it felt like it lost its plot a quater point through where it started becoming somewhat confusing). Great potential but marred by bugs and mainly the engine.

I hope you will share your experience if only in brief. As even though GOG is rather lenient, i had to request 4 times in the past two months alone, so will not add to their burden for trying it. That's where i wish they'd also release a free Prologue to at least see how Martha performs. :-)

Well, I like to pay potatoes as potatoes, as we say here. So there.

Eh, I checked a few and some are better but some are just the official blurb copied and pasted. I don't see what is better about reading it in a news post vs. on the game page other than the extra page load that they could get rid of by linking directly to the game.

Maybe GOG could require that the first paragraph of the game be suitable as a self contained introduction to the game that could be used in other contexts (maybe even make it visually distinctive). This would both be helpful to anyone who looks at the game (not just those who check the site within a few days of release) and could be used for a periodic new releases summary news post and email (and copied to the release news post if they don't link directly to the game). They could help the developer write something if needed.

I don't see GOG going downhill overall, I'll take the current refund policy over marketing any day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUB-wjXUREE

It's just great to read someone who has the same view with this engine, as there are an incredible amount of unity fanbois ready to chime in defending it as being my rig's fault! :)

Hell, even architect: Paris, has frame rate issues while in the menu, (45-50 fps) the dev's response? "Turn down the graphics," in spite of me having a 3900x and a bloody 3090, so I pretty much refunded it as they couldn't care less about the frame rate issues people are having!

As far as refunds are concerned, I usually won't ask for money for my refund, only for store credit, as that's where my money goes anyway, plus the refunds are almost instantaneous; and yes I agree that I would love to have more Unity-developed games come out with demos, also, I'll be sure to let others know of any performance issues!