My comment was not about the testing, but about the first bit of your comment about rolling out stuff that may be very buggy. If the NAS was in testing internally for months, then what they rolled out is doubly disappointing. Same goes for the new navigation system which I should have mentioned along with the NAS.


As I've said before, the point is not for Galaxy users to have an equally bad or worse experience. It's offering a satisfying experience to site users, if for no other reason than to honour their statements and promises that this experience wouldn't change; it has, and for the worse.

Forum notifications are the least, if I had to put things on a scale. The most important is game updates, but that one has been pushed off their To Do list.


I'd not count that as a loss. And I still don't get why the new menu led to the removal of the notification system - as I said, the functionality is still there, and working almost exactly as before, as anyone using BE can attest.


I have to disagree, and we probably have to agree to disagree on this. Even if the majority accesses the site via the client, not caring about the negative impact on whatever number of one's customers the removal of basic functionality has for almost half a year now, with vague promises/assurances to restore it, is bad customer service. Yet at the same time, those negatively affected are somehow expected to be excited and hype whatever awesomeness GOG's changes are supposed to be bringing. That's not how it works.


You don't have to link/remind me what they said. I'm well aware that game update notifications won't come with the new notification system. And I consider it the biggest fail on GOG's part in terms of managing and prioritising; one doesn't do away with the most important part of existing functionality without having worked out what to replace it with, and rolling it out in a reasonable time span.
They killed the site notifications on April 26, 2017. A week later, GOG's official position on game update notifications was (and I quote) "That's a separate topic, and we'll be looking into this as well, but probably on a later date". Nothing further, no matter how many inquiries were/are made on it; I bet they've still not looked into it, and it won't become any sort of priority for the simple reason that it is functionality unrelated to the client.

Because GOG's "solution" is to use the client, even though it doesn't flag updates to standalone installers, and even though there doesn't seem to be any guarantee that installed games are kept up to date.


I assume that wishlist notifications are a complementary implementation to email notifications on wishlisted titles being on sale? If so, can they be turned off? Can any of them be turned off?



[emphasis added]

If GOG's devs are confident and in high spirits, I'm glad for them; I know how it sucks to do a job one doesn't enjoy. If they're demoralised, the issue lies with management, how they plan, prioritise and handle things overall. Things being broken all the time is not the fault of the customers/public, nor is it unreasonable that public patience and understanding thins as things keep being broken all the time. GOG's poor communication with their customers/users certainly doesn't help.

You yourself said that "What did just break" thread is a graveyard full of examples. I'm sorry if GOG devs have low morale, but I have a hard time being "Yeah, go GOG!" when things that I consider important to my experience go unfixed for months, if not years, while important functionality is killed on top, with no ETA of it ever being restored.

I dunno how GOG dev morale is, but was just speculating about things. I hope they're doing well in that department though.

The big thing they have going for them IMHO is Marcin Iwinski. No matter what they do, or what they might screw up over time, I just have to watch a few interviews with him and it gives me confidence that CDP itself are and always be the good guys so long as he's got a major role in the direction of the overall company, and it gives them some room to make mistakes in so long as the greater vision they have is in good faith best interest of the customer. It sure is frustrating when the day to day in your face type stuff is broken and not living up to the big picture view though.

This could be handled to a large degree I think by raising the bar of the quality standard of what they release publicly for the website and Galaxy up to the level of what the CDPR side of the company did with The Witcher 3.

When it comes to developing software, be it a game or a website or anything else, there are no such thing as unreasonable goals, just unreasonable deadlines. The best solution to unreasonable deadlines is to change the deadline, however that is not the only approach that is used for this scenario. The other solutions include keeping the deadline and cutting back on planned features and functionality for the deadline, or keeping everything but reducing the quality of the released product.

They do not generally give out clear public deadlines or ETAs, instead giving ambiguous statements such as the infamous "soon" response, which gives them leverage to push timelines out further into the future. That is often a fine thing to do IMHO, but then they also choose the other options at times also - releasing things in a state of poor quality or downright broken, sometimes appearing as if it's unlikely it was ever even tested properly, and/or only the slowest trickle of features/functionality as if they pared back what they might have planned initially. Perhaps this is because they have very big visions, goals, and intentions but the impossibility of predicting timelines accurately causes a perpetual delay in things happening.

Sadly, I think the best way for any company/project to deal with such uncertainties is to do what CDPR is doing concerning the development of CP2077, which is remaining as tight lipped as possible about it knowing as Marcin put it with a friendly smile in an interview "anything we say can and will be used against us", and then just not releasing anything at all until it is actually ready and tested as well as can be internally. That works well in game development I think, but perhaps it doesn't work as well with the dynamics of distribution online. Hard to say.

Regardless of how they screw some things up or make some things awesome over time though, I do look forward to the next major release of Galaxy, the website and any features they do manage to cobble together for us, but I hope they start setting a much higher bar on quality over quantity even if it means we have to wait longer. I'd rather be miffed over having to wait longer knowing I'll see a high quality result eventually than be miffed over a constant stream of updates that break all sorts of stuff including expected working functionality.

At the very least, having a way to allow public testing should lead to a less buggy version for both Galaxy users and site users where features overlap.

I agree that it is important to offer all users a good experience. As far as keeping the site experience the same, nothing ever stays the same... nor should it. Just my view on it.

Depends largly on if you are strictly a site user or both a client / site user. A client / site user isn't likey to need to game update notifications via the site. But I agree they are important for site only users.

Yea I don't agree with their reasoning either. I think it's just a matter of not wanting to do any extra work to make it functional since they knew they were replacing it.

I never said it was right or wrong simply that it could be their reason. It would not be the first time a company has done something like that.

Witcher 3 was also played by nearly 700K customers using Galaxy according to stats released by GOG. If even half of those users became occasional consumers at GOG, it's a good chance Galaxy users far outweigh site users. This will likley increase again when Cyberpunk releases. And if Steam is anything to go by, consumers tend to perfer clients over not having a client. But it does little to debate over such things.

I do agree that it's not likely to make it it at the release of the new notifications system. But we could be wrong, They did say "probably" so it's not set in stone.

I know you may not want to hear this, but I think GOG really wants to phase out installers eventually and I think they will likely replace them by allowing a user to create a "standalone installer" of sorts with a feature in Galaxy. Meaning you can still get installers but you would have to create your own via the installed game files.

I think GOG realizes by now that they can save a lot of time and resources by moving that responsibility to the end user. It doesn't mean the games wouldn't be DRM Free or anything, you could still get a DRM free installer for game perservation. You would simply have to use the client and do it yourself though.

This is me speculating of course, and I don't think it will happen anytime soon... but that's what I see as the end goal for GOG. Skeletonbow has also shared similar views in another thread.

From a business stand point though, I can't really blame them if that happens. GOG spends a lot of resources on standalone installers that could be eliminated by Galaxy.

Yea it's basically like "There are 4 new games on sale from your wishlist" (something like that). Which when clicked takes you to your wishlist. Or you can clear it with the clear button.

I think you may be able to disable them on Galaxy, it's kind of wierd how they have it set in settings... but not sure if they will offer that on the site.

Our hope is restored!

Notifications are back and work great. Thanks everyone for your votes and your words of support. Now Gog can mark the community wish as completed.

I wonder if GOG actually listened to it's customers or just realized, they fucked up.

Neither? They always planned to bring it back with a new system.

How do you know?

Because they said so? When the added the new menu they told us they were making a new notifications system to replace the old one.

I don't think it'd work as well for GOG. When they make changes, and receive feedback, zero communication, while things stay unaddressed for months, or years, is not doing them any favours, and while you may think that giving ambiguous statements that give them leverage regarding timelines is often a fine thing to do, those ambiguous statements have become a running joke, and often times a bad one; people get frustrated and expect the worst, and react accordingly, because on top of everything else, GOG has built an anything but flattering reputation - web design/development isn't exactly GOG's strong suit, and it shows.



Change may be inevitable, and I don't object change for the sake of objecting it, but change for the worse, even for a subset of one's customers, should not be acceptable, because... change. We're talking about the customer/user experience here, not the changes themselves, the necessity and quality of which are debatable. Customer/user experience probably plays the most important role in one's spending - a worsen experience leads to unsatisfied/unhappy customers, and depending on how unhappy they are and how many things they are unhappy about, unhappy customers spend less to no money while voicing their lack of satisfaction. If that's good business strategy and practice, then I learned something new.


Barefoot_Monkey restored it for the new nav-bar in a single day, and I'm pretty sure that he didn't invest a whole work-day to do it. Seriously, like how much extra work can it really have been that they wanted and needed to spare themselves from doing it so badly that they preferred to provide bad customer service for almost half a year?

And frankly, the new notification system is finally up. Johny. was super hyped about it and spoke of awesomeness (I'm still waiting for him to lay out what's so awesome about it). Well, colour me unimpressed; I see lots of visual fluff, and quite little in terms of functionality and usability that justifies the months-long wait.


Actually, it depends on whether said client/site user also backs up the standalone installers. Since such notifications are not provided via the client, their only source is the site. If the site doesn't provide them either, it's bad customer service overall.


I expect to see proper game update notifications for standalone installers only when, and if, they make it into the client, i.e. when and if they ever make that part of the client work like the GOG Downloader does. But I won't be holding my breath; that's probably coming a few weeks™ after soon™.


Will it come as Good news!™ or with a sorry for the inconvenience™?

There never was a "you may not want to hear this" for me; I saw the writing on the wall ever since the client was first announced. GOG wants, and does everything possible, to play in the big league (which, depending on the final destination, isn't necessarily a bad thing in and of itself), and I have no illusions as to what the place of users like myself is in where things look to be heading; it will happen as soon as they can go for it, and from a certain PoV, the old guard jumping ship on their own, little by little, is doing them a favour.
They've invested, and still do, a lot in the client and made it pretty much the core of the company's future success. Every little bit of change they've made to the site and how things work on it, is made with the client in the heart of every plan and decision - the site revamp, the unbundling, the NAS, the Galaxy-laden installers; everything, and more will follow.

But I'm not sue if you realise what picture exactly you describe here. It's an awful, not customer-friendly at all one, in which the client is certainly anything but optional, and DRM-free only in the letter of the term, and borderline at that - being basically forced to install and use the client, then forced to install each and every game, and subjected to creating installers on my own, simply because I prefer to have those stored locally; an option I was offered for years here, and one that brought me here in the first place. And assuming that, at that point, playing a game won't necessarily require the client, the next time a game updates, we're back to repeating the cycle above, and then again, and again, and again.
If I'm supposed to be complaisant and understanding that "GOG realises by now" how "they can save a lot of time and resources" by dropping support of things important to me, then GOG's not the store for me, and I'm not the customer for them. And if that's indeed where things are headed, I may even be more understanding towards those saying they'd go/return to Steam based on them at least being upfront about what they offer, and not putting on a good guy guise.


Well, the new notifications system is up now, and no option to disable this, or any other type of notifications. And frankly, I don't see the point of such a notification - one has to be logged in to get it in the first place, and if one's logged in they can check their wishlist on their own just fine - plus, without an option to disable this particular one, GOG has effectively put me on an unsolicited promotional list with no opt-out option other than clearing my wishlist.

I get a notification now on galaxy when a game on my wishlist is on sale. :D

It's a fair point, but I think that depends on the user. For me having to download & keep track of standalone installers for backup purposes is awful and not customer-friendly.

True, and I fully admit it would mean GOG has to break their "Galaxy is optional" sales pitch.

It's still very much DRM-Free.

That was just one possibility. Destro has also talked about using install scripts aswell, meaning you could just copy the game files from PC A to PC B, run the install script, and play without Galaxy. You would just have to compress it if you wanted it to be smaller on the hard-drive to archive it. I think that might actually be the more sensable solution.

Being complaisant and understanding no, perhaps seeing it from their point of view... maybe. Could you really justify as the CEO of GOG spending resources indefinitely on keeping employees to test game builds/patches, package game builds/patches, etc. for standalone installers with a base that will continue to dwindle in numbers as new and older users move to the client that offers much more added functionality?

Resources and employees that could be better spent in other parts of the company or even out right replaced? We keep saying GOG need to do more fixing the forum and website... imagine the additonal devs they could hire without that expense?

I fully agree though that GOG should be forth coming and say what they plan to do. Either way it has no impact on me personally, if they keep the installers that's cool too.

Even myself I wish they would fix the the Galaxy/Classic installer debacle. Either offer a simple switch that is remembered (hell I can even show what I think this should look like) or remove the Galaxy installers outright. By large I think they are unneeded. They would do better by putting more focus on Galaxy on the homepage.

I respect your comments and where you are coming from, BK - though what you have explained here isn't something that an average user looking for practical simplicity who wants to keep backups on their PC (one of the reasons many of us originally chose GOG) will understand or be able to implement.

Truthfully, I see the wisdom in what you are saying throughout much of your post. I also recognize the value in what Hyper is expressing. As you have already suggested, many of these dilemmas come down to who the user is and what their personal needs are.

GOG will make choices that will alienate some of its customers, no matter what. However, I also believe that it's possible for GOG to encourage a middle ground that's inclusive of both their older clientele and newer customer base. It will be interesting to see how things play out.

That is sometimes the case I would agree, and while I wish I had more insight into how and why GOG makes certain decisions, like others I can only speculate based on personal observations and experiences. It can be difficult for any company to find the right balance point between not sharing enough information and sharing too much information. It is very much a double edged sword.

They do read the forums though, and while they may not catch every conversation or comment I think they are generally well aware of collective sentiment regarding the decisions they make and what people would like to see, and sometimes they do respond and clarify things. Other times they may not be able to easily due so for reasons they can't get into, or they may simply choose to not communicate something calculating that the discontent from non-communication might be less than telling people things they don't want to hear and facing the potential lynch mob reactions that sometimes result from such.

It does, but I think that the main issue with that is that keeping track is cumbersome due to the way GOG handles these updates in the first place. If there were a nice automated, reliable system in place, things and the related experience would be different.


Another one bites the dust, eh?


Not when I won't have another option, and the client will effectively be used to dictate and manage how I use my otherwise DRM-free digital content that I purchased here.


That still requires the installation and use of the client to install any game one wants a standalone installer of, so it matters little what method will be used if/when the standalone installers are done away with.


I already can see it from their PoV; I did say that I have no illusions regarding the place of users like myself, and that I expect them to go for it as soon as they can, didn't I?


[emphasis added]

I can only assume that you brought this into the discussion because you wanted to inject some comedic relief, right? Right?

You yourself have said elsewhere that the client is built to mimic the site, with everything from the site embedded into it. So long as this is the case, the site will continue to get updates and revamps to better suit its use from within the client, and that is all the work I expect to see; whether that also translates into "fixing" the site is another discussion.

Do you seriously think that any resources untied from supporting standalone installers would ever be devoted to... fixing the forum? I don't believe you can give an affirmative answer with a straight face.
I can see only two ways for things to go with the forum - replaced with something new and different (and I do hope they think twice before building it from the ground up internally), or ditched. Till that decision is made, all that will be done for this forum is applying emergency bandaids that more often than not seem to break something else, like the recent fix for the security issue, that has broken a ton of basic HTML functionality that no-one seems to care to restore, and even GOG staffers use workarounds provided by users, like ZFR's one for posting multiple links in the same line in a humanly legible manner, to make news threads.

Speaking of hiring of additional devs in general - I have a suspicion that the requirement to move to Warsaw may be a much bigger roadblock than other expenses eating into that budget, i.e. even if GOG had a bigger budget for them, I'm not sure how much it would make things easier to fill positions, and I don't think GOG would agree to telecommuting; it doesn't seem to mesh with their culture and mentality.



Non-communication usually leads to hypothesising/speculating, and the longer said non-communication lasts, people move from speculating to believing that the reason for the non-communication is that what they initially speculate is true, and usually "things people don't want to hear". I don't see how this is better, or how it creates less, or (more) manageable, discontent.

As for the lynch mob reactions - while there are times they occur, I think that the reactions largely depend on the reasons/explanations/arguments GOG presents, how they go about presenting them, and what further actions they take or don't take - some example-cases: the unbundling of games sold as collections, the recent bundling of the client into the standalone installers, the removing of older patches for standalone installers on the site.

Possibly there is for sure some truth in that, but I personally don't feel any improvements they could make would be a drastic improvement over a system that directly integrates with the games like Galaxy. But that's just me.

I typically install all my games. Galaxy has delta patching now so updates will be a lot smaller in the future. I can easily see when an update is available as updates are disabled. I can then update and archive my installation or create a backup (if that feature is added) right after then move it to my backup drive.

That system for me would work far better than trying to keep up with installers, having to download entire games when updates release, trying to make sure those games play nice with Galaxy when installed, trying to keep up with those updates when Galaxy updates, etc.

I also have to be mindful of my bandwidth, so trying to also keep installers in addition to my already installed Galaxy versions would take far more bandwidth. I have the files already, it for sure makes more sense to generate a backup from those files.

Possibly. We really don't know GOG's motives. People see the inclusion of Galaxy installers as the final nail in GOG getting rid of them.

While I recognize the strong possibility GOG may want to move away from standalone installers in the future, I also on the other hand tend to view it as GOG wanting combine everything they offer into one single package for the end user. So yea they would probably prefer you to use Galaxy but they also probably want to remain fully committed to keeping games independent of Galaxy (outside of online play) which is clear because they allow you to easily disable the Galaxy install.

This makes the Galaxy bundled installers still very much future proof, and I do think that is important GOG... I don't think they want anyone to lose their purchased games because of what may or may not happen to them in future. While I also recognize the issues with Galaxy powered installers (the opt-out rather then in, and the increased size), if GOG was willing to make a few small changes there is no real reason the Galaxy installers couldn't outright replace the classic installers.

Let's not confuse ease of access for DRM. If that is the case then the GOG site also dictates and manages how one uses there DRM-Free digital content because it is a gateway between you and the content. Once you have said content, method of delivery is irrelevant (as far as DRM-Free is concerned).

They could host the compressed zipped files with those install scripts here on the site but still have the benefits of the new system that Galaxy uses. It shouldn't be that hard to have an system in place to automatically compresses the files from Galaxy's repo into an archive when a user goes to download a game from the site.

The only problem with this type of system is large games would not be broken up...

My point is though, there are probably ways they can utilize the benefits of the new system used by Galaxy without having to have someone create, test, and then upload the installers. We should not hold onto standalone installers for the sake of holding onto standalone installers if something that works just as well could replace them at the site level.

What that system should be I do not know, but I am sure a better system can exist... one that uses far less overall resources.

Well the web pages anyway... which isn't really uncommon, Valve does the same thing. So yes that may translate into some site fixes depending on what it is.

What I do know is that a portion of GOG's resources are currently being used to offer standalone installers for, as I said, a base that will continue to dwindle in size as GOG get's new users and older users either move to Galaxy or likely move beyond GOG. Not trying to be a jerk about it, but that is a reality we must acknowledge.

Where those resources could end up being spent would very likely be put to better use for GOG users overall, regardless of where exactly that is. If not right now, in the future for sure.

I'm fairly certain the forum won't be ditched, nor will it remain as is... but that's all I can really say on the matter unfortunately.

Agreed.