It was actually a reference to "Revenge of the Nerds".

I have to admit this is not a biggie for me, especially as I can still see message reply and game update notifications by going either to the main message page, or my game account page.

Plus, since I use gogrepo, it catches any game updates anyway, even those which lack the update flag as GOG didn't feel it was important to add one, or because I already read the changelog and the update flag was cleared at that point. I trust more on gogrepo than the old GOG game update notification system.

What I am more angry about is how it so often times out when I try to go to the page which shows replies to my messages (the "your posts from last 24 hours and the last week"-page). I usually have to reload it several times before it gets there. If they fix that, i am fine.

[emphasis added]

What do you mean they never give a time estimate? They do say soon™, and for a number of months now also few weeks™ and eventually™.

On a more serious note, I'm there with you - no confidence what so ever.



Well, seeing what actual time spans GOG's few weeks™ cover, it's going to roll out as some sort of special Christmas event, after the Winter Sale, if even then. But without any notifications for game updates, because those are planned to come back eventually™; we can only hope that eventually™ falls within our life time.


The roll out of the New Account System begs to differ.


And the more I think about it, the less sense it makes that they did away with the current notification system from the site - the new notification system is exclusive to that Galaxy beta channel, plus the game updates notifications never worked the same way on the site and in Galaxy.
So why cut every site user from existing functionality? Because the functionality is still there, as evidenced by Barefoot_Monkey and BE. Why not keep the existing in place until they're ready to roll out the new one, instead of leaving their customers without basic and important functionality for nearly half a year now?
I hope it's not because they can't test it in the Galaxy beta channel while the existing one is active in the main channel, and that in turn they can't do away with it from the main channel without removing it from the site as well.

Well at very least we can tell they have made progress on the new system and that it does indeed work. It may not be available to everyone but that is indeed progress. There isn't much in the way of major bugs so I don't expect it will remain in beta much longer unless there is additional functionality that they want to add.

This could have been in testing internally months before being released... not all testing is public. But with Galaxy they now have a better way to allow that public testing.

Yea that I agree with.

But Galaxy didn't escape this fully either. We lost forum notifications too when this happened. I don't know why they didn't just keep the old system working while making the new system. I would assume they have an exact copy of the GOG website set up on a local server for development where they could have worked on the new notificaitons system without impacting the site.

Plus we didn't get the new menu system in Galaxy when the site did. This is probally why notifications were left working in Galaxy for the most part, we were left with the old menu. They have just now added the new menu system from the site with the new notification system, again only in beta on Galaxy. GOG did say they only removed it on the site due to the new menu.

If I had a dollar for all the questionable choices their dev team makes... I'd be a millionaire though. It's possible, based on their collected data, they knew a majority access the site via Galaxy rather than the website and felt they could cut it on the site until the new system was done without impacting the majority of their customers. Who knows.

As far as the standalone installers update notifications, I would not expect those to be included with the new system at release. It might be but GOG did say early on that they may be added at a later date. They probally want to redesign that from the ground up to make notifications automatic so that a staff member doesn't have to manually fire off the notificaiton like on the old system. This new system will probally hook into the new notification system rather than being built directly into it. Just speculation on my part.

But at the very least site users should get:

Friend request notifications
Forum notifications
Wishlist notifications
Chat notifications

Based on what Galaxy has on beta... as you said the updates work differently. They are not part of the notification system on Galaxy.

I'm using Barefoot and Adalia, without which the GOG website would be extremely unpleasant.

Yes I understand that, but I also know you use Galaxy so I was wondering if you have tried the beta. The new system works great (for the most part), and I expect it will carry over to the site without any issues when it's offically released.

Yeah, they have lost some key people. Balázs Török, the lead engine designer for The Witcher 3 at CDPR, a.k.a "m0radin" in the GOG forums was heavily involved in Galaxy development after he moved over to GOG from CDPR. He subsequently left GOG to pursue other opportunities at another game company some time around Dec 2016/Jan 2017 time frame. Some others have either moved on, been promoted or shuffled around to other responsibilities as well.

There are others working on Galaxy roughly since its inception however, but details are scarce nowadays even if you know where to look.

I am using the prerelease of Galaxy, but I'm talking about game update notifications that used to show up on the website and never in Galaxy. They still do not show up in Galaxy and likely never will because Galaxy's concept of a game update is "a game that you have installed right now has an update available through Galaxy" and the concept of an update I am wanting is "one of the many games I have bought from GOG has an updated downloadable installer available right now compared to the archived copy I have on my hard disk, whether I have ever installed the game or not.", but I don't think we'll ever see Galaxy indicate that kind of information, so Galaxy is basically irrelevant in that regard. The website notifications are what they broke and promised to fix, but that isn't something that can be done through Galaxy, especially for people that don't use Galaxy at all. :)

I thought you were talking about notificaitons in general? The site will use the same new notificaiton system currently being tested in Galaxy for chat, forum, friend request, and wishlist notifications. GOG staff have already said this. It will roll out with the release of the new Galaxy notification system.

The only notification that never showed up in Galaxy was the game updates for standalone installers... all the rest did. It didn't sound like you were talking about only game updates.

We can't easily peer inside, but I wonder how the developers at GOG have managed all along, whether they enjoy what they're doing and feel great about it (I hope so at least), or if they've had some demoralization from public reception and things being broken all of the time etc. I wonder if they are confident in themselves and plough forward full steam ahead to work on new features etc. or if they have low morale and plod along while contemplating other opportunities either within the company or elsewhere.

Being scrutinized by the public eye can be a brutal and very personal thing, which can leave some developers throwing in the towel and moving on to find something more rewarding for their time. Things seem to move so slow with Galaxy development, and ongoing job availability there that doesn't seem to get filled that it's hard not to wonder if their pool of developers is growing, shrinking or shuffling along.

One thing is for sure IMHO. They need to hit the ball out of the ballpark sometime before too long and score a massive home run. Be it with some major new features, updates or whatever, and hopefully to build and release stuff with the same philosophy as Mike Holmes of "Holmes on Homes" fame - "Make it right".


I was specifically thinking of installer download/patch notifications. But the general notification system is very wonky even in the current state, both on the website and in Galaxy preview. Chat for example notifies you that you have say "2 unread messages", so you click on that and are taken directly to those unread messages. While you are looking at those messages and thus now have read them, it still says "2 unread messages" and continues to do so until you reload the page again. It should automatically clear unread messages as being unread - when you actually read each message. If there are multiple people, then as you click on each one and are shown that person's messages each one should be flagged as read and the count decremented and notification updated.

But it doesn't do that, at least not for me on 4 separate web browsers on 2 operating systems, nor on Galaxy stable nor preview.

Well in my experience it has worked pretty well, as far as wishlist, forum replies, and friend request notifications. I don't use chat often but I've not noticed any major issues. Notifications seem to be pretty instant. You should report issues related to the new system here:

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/introducing_the_new_page_navigation_system_on_gogcom_09cce

As far as the site though that would still be the old system.... at-least that is what I assume Barefoot and Adalia is hooking into since it was removed.

Might be that they have liquidity issues. It occurred to me awhile back that they might be wanting to increase the number of Galaxy users to add some value to the stock so they can raise more capital. That might explain why they're crawling along at a snail's pace. Whatever the case may be, I think you're right -- they better have something good by the time the next E3 rolls around.

Hmm... to each his own I guess. I am using the vanilla GOG web site, and I feel I am pretty fine. I see game updates when I go to my account page (but as said, I don't care to even check them normally as I get all the updates through gogrepo anyway; sometimes I still glance what games have apparently gotten update notifications, to get an idea how many updated games will be redownloaded on next gogrepo run).

I see replies to my messages when I go to the forum main page. The only glitch is that trying to get to the "your posts" page takes usually one or more retries before it loads the page, I hope they'd take care of that.

I am still amazed people are able to post messages to the forums, considering how broken and "unpleasant" this all is to them, according to themselves. Yeah I've seen other forums with more features, but GOG forums and web pages are overall pretty ok, with glitches and missing features here and there. Still quite usable. It gets the job done, I can buy and download my games here, and I can write these messages.

CDP S.A. seems to have a lot of capital according to public filings, and GOG seems to be doing well under that as well. GOG probably wont get another big cash shot in the arm until either Cyberpunk 2077 launches in 2019 or thereabouts, or alternatively perhaps by millions of microtransactions in Gwent. Unless there are other unknown surprises lurking that we're not aware of. There are some hints in CDPSA's financial documents, but I'm not convinced on other unannounced titles yet personally.

When is the next E3?

E3 will be in June.

Did you happen to notice how much debt they're carrying?

CDP SA, or just GOG? I haven't looked at their results for a few quarters now, has something changed?