paladin181: In a vaccuum, yeah. It's not a big deal. But in tandem with a forum so aged it barely works, a site that malfunctions if 20 people try to access it at the same time and all the problems here that never get fixed, it's just another brick in the unprofessional wall that serves as GOG's facade. These things shouldn't happen. CDNs have redundancy for a reason. Servers have redundancy for a reason.When you take GOG as a whole, this is definitely a good reason to consider changing stores. It's been a day and the problem still isn't resolved. I've been a customer here for over a decade as well, and this is the latest in a line of debacles. There have been many issues including DRM in games (which they NEVER fixed. See: F.E.A.R.), games being removed from accounts due to bugs, search pages that just don't work, and I don't know about you, but I can't access the my posts page for nearly 5 years now. This is a bad look, period.
Yes, I don't care that much about the quality of the forums, but I think they have a lot of technical debt on what is their core business value for a large part of their community (buying offline installers and backing them up) and they seem too focused on improving their Galaxy experience to address that.
I think that at this point, they need to:
- Put new features for Galaxy on pause and accept losses for a year while they really fix what is key to their differentiation from other platforms (purchasing games, downloading their offline installers and backing them up) for the future
- Put in place a system where they do some basic quality testing. They don't have to play all their games to completion, but they should at least test the offline installers for new games on an air-gaped machine for maybe an hour and make sure there are no glaring issues. For updates, they could potentially have system where they have x hours budget per year to test updates per game, where x would be dependent on quantity of sales for the game and developer trustiness (if someone has a good history, maybe they don't need to test it as often as someone whose history is more spotty)
mrkgnao: Fair enough.
I just wanted to make sure that you knew that when you buy a steam key from a key reseller (e.g. Fanatical, Green Man, Humble), which is where I buy most of my steam games, as it is immensely cheaper, especially when buying bundles, steam gets absolutely no money from this transaction, so if you were to do so, you would not be supporting steam with your money, for what it's worth.
I would have to research it, but assuming that they receive absolutely no money, that would potentially be acceptable for me. I could even hit their servers everyday to "make absolutely sure my games properly updated" and they could potentially lose some money on that.
Obviously, I couldn't advertise it, because other people might not be disciplined about not buying directly from the platform once they are on it (the loss leader effect so to speak) and I wouldn't want to throw business their way.
Anyways, you've given me food for thought, thanks.