Yeah, I should have said "when most people want something, you should at least consider it" not "when most people want something you should do it", thanks for stressing that out.

It's customers who are paying and playing their games, so they should listen to them. It has nothing to do with self-entitlement.

If somebody wants to see some self-entitlement evidence, they should visit occupy Wall St. or something like that. "We want jobs" is one of the examples.

I haven't read all the replies, and I apologise for that. For the original post, first of all, I don't thinkm that "self entitlement" enters into it. The relationship between a game company or game seller and consumers is ultimately two sided, and that's the way it should be. Complaints are a legitimate way to tell the company they could have done something better.

Sure it would be nice if people expressed their concerns nicely, but in any community of a thousand people there will be a small but vocal percent who'll cry very loudly, and another part who will usually be silent until they have a complaint. That's just the way it goes.

I dunno, I think we should let everybody know the ending was terrible with posted reviews and by telling our friends because that will hurt sales. But It still seems wrong to me just to ask for them to do it again because we didn't like it. Perhaps with disappointments like Dragon Age II we should think twice and wait until we've heard everything before making a purchase again. We should be cautious about the next title and wait until we're satisfied that we've heard everything. The only way to significantly alter behaviour in the industry is to vote with your dollars.

If I went to a restaurant and had a bad experience, I simply wouldn't go again. If I hated a film, I'd decide against seeing the sequel. And if I read a book and hated the ending I wouldn't write a letter to the publisher explaining how the ending needed to be changed simply because I didn't like it and they have my money. I understand how these things can leave a person feeling betrayed because they were promised a delicious meal, a thrilling movie or a thought-provoking narrative. But in reality we had succumb to the power of advertising. They sold us on something and we bought it, it's our job as consumers to buy smarter next time.

Anyways, great stuff guys. I've read every post and I've really liked the feedback to my thoughts. I've realized that there are more sides to all this than I initially thought.

It's being a responsible consumer - which is why I've come to agree more with the "Take back Mass Effect" movement. They paid for a game which game them a demonstrably sub-par experience. Same goes for people who bought outright buggy and non-functional games like Sword of the Stars 2.
There's a difference between blindly sticking up for a company and understanding that there can be fair and rational reasons for why a company does what it does.

Bioware/EA and Infinity Ward/Activision's stances towards their games and the customers who bought their games as of late has justifiably earned them scorn, and I don't think any sane or rational customer could defend the practice of day one DLC (let alone day one DLC on a shipped game disk); I don't think it'd be fair to extend that same level of scorn to, say, how GOG handled the Empire Earth giveaway.

Well, I agree. People who are shouting "give me my money back" because they didn't like one of the game's element (the ending, in particular) are silly.

But saying "The ending was so stupid I will never buy anything else from you unless I read somewhere the ending is fine" is rational, imho.

No, but I can voice an opinion that I believe they're wrong. I can't ultimately tell anyone what they should or shouldn't get mad at (I could, but I wouldn't expect them to instantly listen or agree with me), but I can still believe that they're wrong or unreasonable to do so.

People can complain about a lot of things, but just because the masses complain about something doesn't mean they're right. In the case of the Fallout giveaway, GOG gave away a game that according to their statistics, a large majority of their user base didn't have (I myself didn't have it until fairly recently). That's a fact. From a subjective standpoint, I can understand why people would be disappointed (I was), but objectively, I can't see a reason why they've earned so much venom over that.

(Now, TheEnigmaticT's comments on pricing, I can understand...)

it's possible that a lot of the user base didn't have this game, but it's one of the best sellers, which means most other games have fewer people who own them. The reason for the venom was that people who are GOG loyal supporters feel that GOG chose something which rewards noobs more. That would be true for most games, but it's truer for a bestseller, especially one which was here early on.

It's not that GOG is obligated to give more to loyal customers, but I think that GOG would do well to try that, because it's not the kind of store to offer huge sales with 75% or more discounts, which are a good way to make customers come and buy. People at GOG are here because of some notion that this store is special in what it does, and I think that rewarding them goes well with this line of thought.

you know. maybe we complain more, but that's probably because we now have a way to complain.
most of the time I play TD's (tower defense), recently Bloon tower defense 5 came out. This is the series that got me into the genre of TD's, I complain about it, and refuse to play it, because they completely changed the art style, and game style. It was such a drastic change that yeah, I complain about it, I did so on their site, because it's such a disappointment to me. I don't even care that they made it more about money, but the other changes just make it really hard to play, and I no longer enjoy it. (last version I played also didn't have a good balance between towers and bloons/creeps.)
they can't change the bad parts of the game into something better without feedback, even if the feedback is submitted in complaint form

And who are you to say that they could give away any of the others? These giveaways are not just their decision.

Things get better faster with feedback than without it. If you just stop buying a product that tells the company very little about what it should improve.

You say that based on what? I'm sure GOG can give away whatever it wants as long as it pays the publishers of the game. Even if GOG did get a special deal on this one (and it probably has) I don't doubt it could have gotten one for other products.

Because during the Empire Earth giveaway, TheEnigmaticT said outright that they couldn't just sub in another game for people who already had it; to do an outright giveaway they have to negotiate an agreement with the game's publisher.

If they compensated for everyone who already had Fallout, what other game would they give away? How many publishers would they have to negotiate to give those other games away? And how many people would complain that they'd already had that game? There would be too many possibilities to consider given the size of the catalog - at that rate, they'd might as well negotiate with all of their publishers to give the whole catalog away for free. :)

They don't have to compensate everyone.

If they gave a way a game that few people want, people might be more satisfied, and the publisher would likely be happier to give that away. Paradoxical, but I think that would work.

Somehow I get the feeling that people wouldn't be too happy if they decided tomorrow to release and give away, say, Daikatana instead of System Shock 2. :)