Well, if they didn’t / wouldn’t have fucked up CP2077.
I’m not surprised. Once they moved away from old games to stuff I could buy anywhere, I spent a ton less there.
Do we need to download our GOG libraries? I don’t want all those games to disappear.
Rather than spiral into wild speculation based on hearsay of a quote of a paraphrase of what somebody thought they heard, might as well go right to the source and view/listen to the actual presentation if you like.
GOG remarks start at 7 minutes in. They’re moving staff off of “online solutions” (Galaxy? Not sure what else that means) and removing GOG from the “Gwent Consortium,” whatever that is, and focusing on GOG’s core business of selling games, with a goal of improving GOG’s performance into 2022.
The thread title is inaccurate. They’re not “refocusing on a smaller catalog.” The quote (as quoted in the Verge and confirmed by my ears) is “GOG should focus more on its core business activity, which means offering a handpicked selection of games with its unique DRM-free philosophy.”
That’s how they’ve always described GOG’s core business.
Making their own client never seemed like a core competency. Development and fixes for it halted to put out the CP2077 fires but that too hasn’t yielded any fruit.
I don’t think it’s inaccurate. CDP is ending all the extraneous stuff the GOG team was working on and is refocusing their efforts back towards its smaller, more curated catalog of games.
“Refocusing on a smaller catalog” without mentioning what it’s smaller than implies that they’re refocusing on a smaller catalog than GOG’s existing catalog. That’s a misinterpretation of the news. And the size of the catalog isn’t what they’re refocusing on. They’re refocusing on games.
Fortunately, nobody has to take either of our words for it, since the actual presentation is available for all to view. (But the Verge story you linked also essentially gets things right.)
You won’t find the word “smaller” in either place.
Okay. Salute!
They’re focusing on a curated selection of DRM-free games, which will obviously be much smaller than their current catalog which is basically, everything.
“A curated selection of DRM-free games” is how they’ve always described what they do (ever since they started releasing new games and not just old ones). (And it’s absolutely not everything, much to the dismay of some GOG users.)
It pretty much is everything they can get the publishers to agree to sell without DRM. I haven’t seen any evidence or hearsay about GOG rejecting games for lacking quality.
I’m not making any judgements or assertions about their curation methods or criteria. I just think getting the facts of this story right is important.
They’ve always said they hand-pick the games. You may disagree with the accuracy of that phrase. But it’s not new. So it’s not “obvious” that the size of their catalog’s changing.
They rejected Opus Magnum at one point until people yelled at them enough. (IIRC the logic was that it looked like a mobile game?)
They definitely do. There’s a submission process with manual confirmation, and not every game gets in. Many smaller indies in particular.
Their catalog has always been curated. More or less loosely at different points, but they do reject stuff, specially if it doesn’t have a built-in following.
Now, what they mean with these news I don’t know, but it is true that ·refocusing on a catalog of curated games" does not necessarily imply a smaller catalog or more curation (which would raise costs, btw).
Sorting by rating and going past page 30 or so I see a lot of stinkers. It’s challenging to read their statement without coming up with the conclusion that they will end up with a smaller catalog.
Again, they didn’t say “We hand-pick our games according to what Stusser likes.”
We don’t know their curation criteria. If you had a store, it would have different games in it. Me too.
But it’s not challenging at all to just read the statement.
I will agree that if you didn’t know that GOG already claims to “hand-pick” their games, it’s a confusing statement. But no need to introduce words they didn’t even say, like “smaller,” into the thread title.
That’s fine for you to read it that way, and nobody says their curation process makes sense, but they do curate.
There’s a forum thread on GOG forums for rejected games (and these are only the ones the publishers make the rejection public and the community wants to discuss, obviously).
The process of submitting to GOG goes through a manual curation stage. That’s just how it is. Some amazing stuff like Opus Magnum and other great indies were rejected, but they kind of “recurate” if the community pushes enough on popular stuff (cause they are not stupid :) ).
I don’t know if it’s still true but for quite some time GOG was notorious for not accepting indie games until they were already popular elsewhere (generally Steam) which is not exactly a winning strategy if you want to make any money.
(Not directed at you, Mysterial, just more info:)
Literally the subhead on their “About GOG” page is “GOG.com is a digital distribution platform with a curated selection of games, a ‘you buy it, you own it’ philosophy, and utmost care about customers.”
It’s part of their existing brand. It’s not new.
We may not think their selection is curated well, or whatever, but that’s beside the point.