Yeah ... there are some people who now spend most of their time criticizing, despising and insulting a certain publisher/platform/author/developer/game and their fanbase. There now are whole forums dedicated to only that past time. This cultural phenomenon hasn't existed 12 years ago, or at the very least wasn't so fucking popular. If you didn't like something back then, you didn't buy it and never looked at it a second time. Today, you go on forums for months and years to tell people what loonies they are to still stick with the thing that you hate. People are drunk with the power the consumer has gained through the internet. Building something and constructive criticism is taking too long for these people, they want to see the damage they can do with a variety of shitstorms. Your feedback is so welcome, chaoticlight!

I discovered GOG in 2010, and back then I had already bought four or five different disc versions of Beyond Good & Evil, among them the full priced 2003 original. But I didn't get the game to run in any of those versions, because the copy protection scheme was incompatible with XP and later Windows versions. What a relief it was to play that one again. I'll be eternally thankful. Back then, it was easy for GOG to break into these unchartered waters, because DRM really wasn't particularly functional. When DRM became functional and even convenient this last decade, GOG ran into trouble.

GOG has enabled me to remain a PC gamer even though I never touched Steam. They have reliably released my favorite genre, which is the point & click adventure game. I feel like they're getting less and less games, especially day one releases, which really isn't a fault of theirs. In this time of trouble, GOG needs our support more than ever. Next Monday, Return to Monkey Island will release on Steam; in some ways, it's bound to be the game of the decade for me personally. But I refuse to just hop to Steam. This is going to be GOG or bust, and that decision may cost me.

CPDR and GOG have come a long ways, from some dudes with fairly disruptive and novel ideas and flat hierarchies that bought the Witcher license from the author for pennies to a full fledged AAA business with suits, shareholders and plenty of crunch time. The growth pains have been evident, I could write 10,000 words about negative effects right now without any research, but here for once I'll just be thankful that they are still around.

I have profited a lot from stuff like their 1:1 euro to dollar compensation/offset program. That was just an insanely fair thing to do and I fully understood when they couldn't do it any longer. But I only heard complaints when it was shut down, I never heard people actually being thankful that it was here for so many years.

I got a GOG key for Broken Age long, long after the Kickstarter ended and the game came out. Double Fine could just offer it because GOG enabled it. Same thing with Shadowrun Returns, at first you'd get a barebone DRM free installer because the developer promised "DRM free", but eventually it would be on GOG and you'd get an extra key. Thank you GOG for that as well. I never took that for granted.

Also, just because people with a crossed out gog sign and the words "cd project red & gog are r*ssophobic sc#mbags" as their tagline are posting in here, people who think that positive sentiments can only be elicited by threatening violence, I'll have to add that GOG's support for Ukraine has been noted, and it's definitely not just the recent sales. The company refuses to co-finance the g*****ide of their neighbors for mere corporate gain, and I respect that immensely.

It does feel odd to thank gog for taking my money, but considering what the alternative world would be, yes, thank you gog, may you continue to exist for many years to come, delivering on drm free games.

I would like to see Conan Exiles (offline version), Resident Evil 2, 3 remake, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Monster Hunter World and many other AAA games on GOG, but you can have a lot of fun with what GOG has to offer. I hate running that garbage (S) and having to wait to update tons of gigabytes every time I want to play a game.

Such a positive post.

You might want to think about removing references to genocide though, ffs.

Why not call things by their name?
The organized killing of a people, committed by one group (here: RUS) towards another group (here: UKR) is usually considered genocide.

(quote)
"Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people—usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group—in whole or in part."
(end of quote)

And evidence for such killings can be found in all cities/regions freed/reconquered of the Ukaine, where the Russians had free reign over the last weeks and months.

The destruction of Ukrainian passports while handing out Russian passports to the people in conquered and occupied cities/regions, as practiced by the Russian invaders, is another (less deadly) way of erasing the roots of a people.