You can't really dismiss the impact of COVID like that, it ain't so black & white and there are many variables involved.

You say that, but how do you really know? How many sources do you have and inside information?

Most if not all here are just speculating, which is fine until some start behaving as if it is a fact and set in concrete.

So a good number making ASSumptions really.

It's only good to make assumptions when you make them I guess then ;)?

It is never good to make an assumption unless you have enough good reasonable solid facts behind it. ;)

The shallow approach just won't cut it,

That's not right; Linux Mint is one of GOG's supported distros and has been since the start:

https://www.gog.com/news/gogcom_soon_on_more_platforms
https://www.gog.com/news/gogcom_now_supports_linux
https://www.gog.com/news/ubuntu_1604_now_supported_on_gogcom

...

Also, seeing this quote from the second post: How things have changed since then...

Well they already said at least 20 times that the support was overloaded, between the holidays and the Cyberpunk situation, and that peoples had to be patient, what's really the uses of leaving open the 200 other threads asking about when support will answer. And it's not like it's the mods are doing support themselves and will be able to do anything other than waiting for an answer from support themselves.

That's called a mismanagement of resources. 1) There is no way they didn't know the game was borked at release. They share the building with the Dev team ands I'm sure many are friends outside of work.
2)Even assuming they didn't know, COVID has been around for nearly a full year, Christmas and the game release are not a surprise. When you have an expected increase in work load, you increase the resources dedicated to handling it. I've hired people for isolated projects in my business to accomplish one big project we knew was coming up. You beef up staff when you know they will not be able to handle the load.

They knew or should have known from the Witcher 3 release that this was going to be a huge work load on their support department. They should have extrapolated that by the way sales crushed those of the Witcher 3 at release that they would need a larger support department. But rather than actually do what is needed to reduce the backlog and overload, they just let it happen in a huge and terrible way and only put out a statement "poor us, things are bad, we're overloaded." Yet with proper planning they could have reduced the overload and kept wait times on tickets to a reasonable time (1 week, maybe 2?). But instead we have people waiting a month with no actual response because the management couldn't plan 10 minutes in advance, and they have difficulty managing personnel. You don't increase the forum mod team when you need more support staff for handling tickets. You reassign people to get the priority jobs done, and this forum has N.E.V.E.R. been a priority.

I checked my correspondence with the support, and I was wrong: they didn't dismiss me, even though they did claim my version of Linux is not supported. They were even ready to refund the game. (I didn't want a refund though, I can play it in Windows 7 or 10 if needed).

So, yeah, it was actually much better support than I remembered, but maybe I just wished they would have tried to fix the Linux version, e.g. by adding the missing file into their installer, or remove the integrated WINE which (to my understanding) could have fixed the problem as well.

And now for the life of me, I don't recall if I tried their suggestion about manually installing the missing dependency, albeit I think I had tried it and it just isn't available in the repositories anymore. Here's the reply I got:

Well unless there's bad PR and "damage control" is needed, it seems.

The main reason I hang around (after TinyE left) is to help folks play the games I loved. And in doing so, helping the underdog GOG and supporting DRM-free gaming.

Gog does not agree with my definition of DRM, given the DRM in a handful of games - notably C2077. And they’re doing their best to hurt their customers. They’ve lost their small company values.

I’m hanging out for a bit to see what becomes of this. But as each day passes, Im not seeing the friendly company. I can get better support, working forums, cheaper games elsewhere. Their goodwill points are rapidly draining. But I suspect they’ll try to spin this in their favor. Their next moves are critical for their company.

If I were a moderator I'd be closing many of these threads just because they're repetitive and there doesn't need to be multiple ones a day on the same issue. There should be one support delays thread, one Devotion thread, etc. And in fact there already were/are. People keep making news ones to get attention, and they should be closed.

Truthfully there were hit-pieces on CDPR and CP77. Had they not released the game so buggy, then they wouldn't be giving ammo to the outlets and could instead fly in the face of them and be the example of what all Gave dev companies should be and pave the way to things going better...

Kinda ironic CDPR/GoG did this to themselves. i wouldn't expect things to really improve for 6 months for reputation or sales or support. And that's too bad, i really wanted to root for CDPR.

I think it'd be better if they closed some of them(like less busy ones, or ones for which there are threads open already on that subtopic), and allow the others to stay open.

Btw why does it matter if a few(key word: few) make a few extra threads(GOG does it all the time btw)? If it's due to them "cluttering" the forum lists...there are extensions now to hide threads by keyword, if people want or need such.

=-=-=-=

There is speculation(mainly that, though), that higher ups might have did it so they could short the stock and make a ton of cash from such.

Then they should have stuck with preorders to get the cash they needed...

Also, got a message from Tauto. I'll post it here.

It's less "needed" cash(to run the company) and more "wanted" cash(because they likely wanted more cash).

Every forum I've ever used consistently has put a stop to multiple threads a day being started on the same issue. I don't think this is a GOG forum issue specifically, or a problem at all. It prevents clutter, spamming, repetitive content, etc. I think people are angry and want to vent and push GOG's buttons and that's fine, but keep it to one main thread on the issue like every forum ever would do.