"No proper data mining"? Unless I misunderstand what this means, I'd say "good for you, GOG".

Well, thanks for heads up, I guess.

That guy surely knows a lot about business administration for a graphic designer...

Anyway, I don't know jack shit but I shudder at the idea of what GOG would turn into if they followed this advice:

Can't say i'm surprised given what we heard about the CDPR reviews some months back. It's been showing somewhat here on gog with delayed updates, games being rejected sometimes for no real reason at all, installer mistakes, and other issues. It's gonna get worse if they don't take care of those cons.

I have to wonder if the user voted wishlists should be considered "data mining" in terms of feedback.

As others have noted before, they seem to be ignored even when they're completed:

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/this_is_new_i_think/post50

I know there's a thread for pointing these out as well some where....

As someone who has a glassdoor account, there is a loose base of questions if you claim employment at a company, but ultimately, short of making you post your EID, there really is no way to actually prove you work or worked for a company for that site specifically. Which means disgruntled friends and family members can probably skew a company's ratings if a former employee feels the need to blast a company via sites like it.

It's about GOG not taking the interests of its customers into account when they do recommendations (e.g. the games offered to you after you made a purchase). Often those recommendations for me are RPG which I almost never buy.

They could sort the games listed in the newsletter by popularity with other people who bought the same genre and/or release years and spread the delivery over several hours in which the early recipients which buy something indirectly decide what the later recipients will get.

The homepage is the least appealing regarding purchases compare to other stores (from my point of view). The main area is too wide and you have to manually check if there are new offers/sales on the side, the games below are unlikely to be bought be me. The GOG advantages are listed below that and the comprehensive view what's new _below that_.

The recommendations by that person are good. With ~150 employees, it sounds like GOG needs better coordination (1 real manager at the moment?). Losing 17% of employees per year is such a brain drain that a noticeable group of new hires is busy to get used to GOG's tools.

So it's a marketing fail, who cares? I can make my own decisions. Maybe they should sell a book "how to grow a spine, for dummies - caring about store recommendations is for jellyfish!".

Fewer games sold -> less market share -> lack of updates and AAA releases. With ~2500 games in the catalog, exposing the right games is crucial.

Sure, I'd like to see GOG live another day, but I'm not paid to do their marketing. And I don't think they'll change their strategy because some forum posters think they have a problem.
Actually, if they can make a good living doing their core business - less time/money invested in marketing is a good thing in my eyes.
After all: more customers -> support becomes more expensive or less quality (possibly leading to... less customers)

Well, I read it as "an inability to even collate their own data to present useful stats/updates to their own users". Something MaGog and Yepoleb's GOG Database are trying to address... and to a lesser extent my API scanning scripts. Not all data mining is "evil".

I agree with the person who wrote the review - it's not rocket science and yet they do not do it, probably because they minimize the importance of having stats-driven processes in place. Unfortunately, reality will hit them hard someday.

"Frightening lack of knowledge about situation and global trends in gaming..."

How is this a bad thing? Do we want them to create a game with microtransactions, useless DLCs, DRM, specific characters because some people whine constantly on social media (Kingdom Come: Deliverance as a recent example) and other shitty trends? Also, if you follow trends, how can you ever create a game that will be remembered many years later? Games are remembered and have a lasting impact because they brought something new to the table, revolutionized certain things.

The thing is exactly that you can't. Making good decisions requires good information and that's something you generally don't get on here. I get bombarded with offers that I have no interest in but manage to miss releases that fit my profile perfectly. When I joined GOG there were what, like 300 games on here, there were only one or two releases a week, sales were comparably rare, I could easily check out the entire catalogue in an hour or two and visiting the front page once or twice a week was all I had to do to keep up. Both, the size of the catalogue and release frequency, have grown several times since then but the channels of information have barely changed. Particularly the headline and banner system that used to get the job done back in the day has become utterly insufficient due to all the "noise" generated by content that I just don't care about.

Even if GOG is opposed to profiling its users with the help of modern tools that use all sorts of clever algorithms, whether it's for ideological reasons (unlikely) or due to archaic business sense at the top floor (more likely), there are even rather simple ways that could help immensely like configurable alerts for releases that accept parameters like game age, genre and some tags like "classic", "indie", "AAA" etc.. The fact that even rather trivial tools of that kind or introduced slowly and often suffer from technical issues is rather terrifying.

And I know, GOG's user base, at least the portion most active on the forums, largely consists of people who are convinced that these kinds of modern tools are unnecessary, "stupid" and even harmful, but frankly they are utterly wrong. You don't have time to keep up with everything on here, you won't always get you want most and some targeted advertising sure as hell won't result in the NSA getting your dick pics.

So you know each and every one one of them; and have come to the conclusion that they're WRONG?
My backlog is big enough for 2 lifetimes - tell me, how is targeted advertising a good thing for me?
These days, even a poor teenager can collect years worth of gaming for a relative small amount of money. The internet is full of great information to help make informed choices on how to pick the right games for you. Since when does advertising, targeted or otherwise, have anyone's best interest in mind? (except for those that are doing the selling)

In short: any form of advertising is only in the interest of the party doing the advertising.

No, I mentioned a large portion and it doesn't take a genius to notice how the GOG community reacts to these kinds of things - just follow any thread involving the introduction of new features like the Galaxy client or changes to the frontend (threads that tend to mobilise even forum lurkers and users who normally entirely avoid the forums). Plus, GOG's original target audience was a very specific kind of consumer, middle-aged guys that were gamers in the 90's who oppose many modern trends, thus a major portion of their user base is still bound to be opposed to many of the modern things that are necessary for GOG to remain competitive.

Well, for starters, your backlog might not even be that long because you might be sitting on games that you'd be more eager to play and the frontend could be doing a better job at motivating you to play these games.

Yes, and then people sit around on piles of games they don't want to play but miss out on games they would. In 2014 Ars Technica reported that 37% of all games owned on Steam remain unplayed, the number has only been growing since then. How is THAT good for the consumer? Wouldn't it be much better if people paid the same amount of money for fewer games that they actually wish to "consume"? That's beside the fact that people would be probably spending more on here if certain offers got better coverage. My spending on GOG has certainly fallen a lot over the years. Less because there's fewer releases on here that fit my profile, more because the store fails to inform me about them and make them attractive to me. I don't know GOG's numbers and I am extrapolating from myself and friends who spend less on GOG now than they used to several years ago, but that's at least some basis.

Well, good luck getting opinions on games you don't even know exist because you don't spot them in the first place. And even if you're somehow super observant and don't miss anything, there's simply too many games for consumers to form an informed opinion on each and every one of them. Plus, informing yourself through third party sources takes unnecessary time and effort. It simply makes more sense to have more helpful information in the very place where you can get the goods. And platforms like Steam and GOG have a better basis for giving you advice on what games to play because they have more data about you. Reviewers meanwhile blindly fight for traffic.

See, the thing is that with many businesses the two are strictly related. Some businesses make their main revenue through stuff that is not related to consumer satisfaction, while other businesses mainly depend on user satisfaction and when that is the case there's a major correlation between consumer satisfaction and revenue. And with a store like GOG that's certainly the case.

Opposite example: advertising stuff that a customer has no interest in won't make a sale. That's true for brick and mortar stores and it remains true in the age of digital distribution.

The simple fact of the matter is that any store should strive for having the consumer find the offers most suitable for him in the least time. It's not harmful to the self-proclaimed "informed consumers" and it's sure as hell good for the broad masses. Nobody is saying that consumers with your profile should have a harder time to research everything, there should just be better shortcuts for everyone.