NP. My replies sometimes don't post if I put a bracket in the wrong place or mess up the editing as well.
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DRM mostly is useful in the minds of devs/boards right now because many people don't pirate either because they don't know how/don't want to waste the time/are paranoid about viruses or they are morally against it period(even for justifiable reasons like archival/backups/etc). If the majority of people did it then it'd likely be seen as a loss and dropped as a preventative measure.

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Bioshock did it WELL in that they had an ideology as a plot device and didn't push it as "right" to the player....it was up to the player to determine if they supported it or not. Nowadays games/some other media push an irl belief system and if you go against it you either can't finish the game or get punished/shamed in some way.
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Yeah Battlefield....because back then supposedly we had amputee minority women at the forefront of battles. TO the devs of that game that was supposed to be historically accurate and NOT pushing a narrative. :\

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As I said before those games(Those are about shooters/psychos, right?) probably wouldn't fly here, given today's PC culture and GOG trying it's best not to step on people's toes.

I'm not sure what can and can be said so all i will say is i hope they took my advice to heart and address a topic that comes up every month with a simple presentation or page/resource for users to refer to :) I will say there is a lot of people hard at work when testing games and the like

Well that much is good to hear at least. :)

As I stated when starting this thread, IMHO GoG needs to show more transparency. As it is now, the process only serves to sow confusion, anger, and accusations (real or imagined).

If GoG is indeed a boutique (Merriam Webster: 2 : a small company that offers highly specialized services or products), I would offer that from my experience personally dealing with boutique owners and living in a particular part of Southern California filled with boutiques: most boutiques are vanity storefronts run at a loss. Yes, there are very fashionable boutique wineries and clothing shops, but their business models are usually quite poor. I know of one fashion boutique that ran at a loss for 20 years only to find that the owner spent her entire inheritance on the shop; it was a beautiful shop, but it never made any real money. It simply fed her vanity for wanting a store that catered to movie stars and the wealthy (I've worked with many, many, many of these places run just like this... as business loses). So, when I hear that GoG wishes to be a curated, boutique experience, I'm immediately skeptical... and fear they may be looking at what's "cool and hip" instead of what makes the most business sense.

Again, I am not anti-GoG. In fact I want them to succeed and prosper, but I fear that what seemingly started as a vanity project to have direct distribution for The Witcher games has never really grasped the business realities of becoming a real player in digital distribution and is now trying to re-shape itself into an "exclusive" experience when they have neither the catalogue or resources to do it (and may in fact be alienating some of their core audience / customers in the process)... and even if they did that's usually a money-losing business plan anyway.

"Lot of people hard at work."

I don't know why, but I picture it something like this.

I hear they're paid in bananas.

Personally, I think GOG is shooting themselves in the foot by being too "curative", or at least badly managing the idea. In my opinion, GOG's best shot at becoming a 800lb gorilla is by giving indies a fair shot at the market. Some of these development houses will go steady and produce many B-Grade products over the years, bringing in modest dough...but on odd occasion, a breakout hit will happen. No one can truly predict them, but GOG can at least establish a good relationship with indies before someone gets lucky.

Provided GOG played their cards right, that may mean becoming the preferred partner of future major developers.

Cheers, really appreciate the answer! It's a damn shame that you couldn't see that plan through yourself (and I also appreciate that you still hang around on this forum, which already puts you a good notch over every other community manager since The Enigmatic T). You have inside knowledge, I don't and I'm perfectly willing to concede that I've been doing a grave injustice to hard-working gog employees by calling them every name in the book. Here's the thing though: For an outside party (be it as a user or a developer), gog seems incapable of conveying all this hard work that allegedly went into the process.

I've written a rather angry post regarding the standard rejection form letter and how it comes across as lazy, dismissive, even flippant and how it makes the whole process look completely arbitrary. And I'm just a random guy who is butthurt that his highly anticipated game doesn't get a release, I would guess that devs who worked for years on these things would take it much more personally. No matter how much work *actually* went into the process, this letter makes it completely void. And the standard "too niche" excuse has been a meme and a running gag on this forum for years now. In the Opus Magnum rejection gog went a bit out of their comfort zone and rejected it for "looking too much like a mobile game", which earned them even more ridicule, so they went right back to the "niche" argument.

It's no big secret that gog has a bit of a communication problem, but these problems really shouldn't extend to correspondence with prospective business partners.

These are love-boners, not hate-boners. ;p

Thanks bud, I was a fan of the service beforehand and will continue to support it. End of the day, i care about the preservation of video games, so i'll always stick around ^^ And i'll keep hoping for that Hogs of War windows 10 fix ;)

One question I'd want to throw out there is, why do people automatically assume, that every dev that has been rejected and said their game has been rejected because it was too "niche" is telling the truth?

For example, if the game was rejected because of technical issues or missing content in contrast to other platforms, the devs might not be all that willing to say that out loud. And GoG would be doing more harm to itself if they'd go and set the record straight by telling what they really said.

Mahybe because some of them have posted their rejection letters and they're mostly all the same thing?

Also one could just as easily assume GOG is trying to hide the truth as well.

Not only that, but what if GOG found some info about the developer that couldn't be completely proven as of that time, yet it was bad enough that they wouldn't let them on the store? It'd result in a mob at the developer's door because of something completely out of left field.

Of course GoG is hiding the truth, they can't go an tell people what they might have talked in private negotiations with potential developers and publishers. It would be very poor business practice from their part to start actually posting what they talk behind closed doors.

I meant hiding the truth for bad reasons, of course.

Also people keep saying that...that GOG/businesses cannot/should not ever release such info because it's a bad idea.....but not many explain how it would hurt them/why and offer proof to back said claims up.