So would I. But I don't expect them to change course. They are too set on their downward course to listen to critique from customers.

Unfortunately gog has grown a lot and those of us who are in this post are very few users.

Perhaps you should take a look at this page: History of Successful Consumer Boycotts? To quote just one example of many that are given there:

[i]DECEMBER (2018): HSBC announced that it had fully divested from the Israeli drone manufacturer Elbit Systems, known for selling weapons to the Israeli military used in attacks on Palestinian civilians.

Elbit Systems has been the target of a long-running divestment campaign for supplying surveillance systems and other technology to Israel’s Separation Wall and settlements in the West Bank as well as for the US-Mexico boarder. The company has also manufactured the white phosphorous and artillery systems that can be used for cluster munitions. More than 24,000 War on Want supporters emailed HSBC asking the company to end its investments in Elbit Systems and other arms companies selling to the Israeli military.[/i]

This is a recent example of a major multinational bank that was forced to change policy, following a protest by 24,000 consumers. That isn't that many. There are almost 9,000 votes on the Devotion wishlist request and clearly GOG is much smaller (and has thinner profit margins) than HSBC in 2018.

I will add a link to this page to the first post later, as a permanent answer to those who keep claiming (erroneously) that consumer actions can't possibly have an effect on a large corporation. It is utter bunk and provably false.

Just because there are 9.000 votes doesn't necessarily mean anything to be honest. This attracted a lot of people outside of GOG's, let's say "core" userbase, that may have bought the game here but likely aren't typical GOG users. This wishlist entry was linked on Reddit in different gaming subs and probably other places.

With the introduction of Galaxy, and releasing Cyberpunk and the Witcher 3 GOG has grown significantly. My gut tells me there won't be a huge decline in revenue, and it will probably even increase, but when CDP releases their financial reports we will know more. As they say all publicity is good publicity.

Not that I have bone in this fight...

lets hope the people who stole the cyberpunk source code can fix all the bugs

Yeah, because God forbid this dump actually attracts new customers... xD

You didn't took the best example

That is a PR joke.
It is plain to see how this message was made to suggest that company in question "doesn't" listen to feedback. It was done to make sure any "feedback" will not fall upon them "again" and then they would NOT get called out with "but you listened before".
Of course they would deny it. Why wouldn't they? If they would admit they listened then they would set a precedence allowing MORE of such feedback to show up over time.
This PR statement is pretty obvious attempt at panicly distancing yourself (said company) from any responsibility or admitting anything officially.
At least that's how I see it.

Also, about the second paragraph and "policies" - I don't know the details but from what was written in this thread it seems like they had a deal signed long before they made this PR move - which means they DEFINITELY KNEW about all that *before* yet didn't act on their "policies".

By that same logic, you could say that signatures on any petition don't mean anything, because you don't know who the people are who are signing it and whether they are truly committed to the cause they are supporting. Yet, petitions and protests can and have achieved results. You can say that letters written by Amnesty International supporters don't really 'mean anything', but again, they have a track record of achieving results. Sure, it's not every time, but they would argue the results they have achieved justify the effort, if there is a chance it can work.

I agree that we don't know the exact numbers and we don't know how many of those 9000 are boycotting. But, my point in mentioning that figure was that it seems likely that there are more people boycotting than have signed up on this list.

Absolutely. Of course they are going to reel out some PR piece to deny the consumer action played any part in their decision. It is clearly in their interests not to acknowledge or empower the boycotters.

And of course, I have no expectation that GOG will acknowledge this boycott, even if they eventually end up conceding to some of the demands. And that is A-ok with me. I'm not doing this for acknowledgement - I just want to see the results. That is all I care about. If they release Devotion and we see a broader change of course, then I will be quiet and start buying again. If they feel the need to release some PR statement to save face and deny we had anything to do with it, fine. I couldn't really care less (and we all know how hollow their statements have become anyway ...).

That's explained in the article, Elbit just recently purchased another company that was manufacturing cluster bombs, something that wasn't the case *before* hence why, based on what they said, HSBC decided to stop their investment. We will probably never know for sure but I doubt that a bank would stop this kind of contract because of 24k signature, not even from customers, but from a pressure group, especially as they didn't stop any of their other investments in the region.

I also think that more people left GOG due to their development than the few that are listed in this thread. Us forumites are only a small fraction of the GOG customers. So anyone who decided to leave who wasn't active in the forum before won't suddenly use the forum just to say that he leaves. Also some forum users will have left in frustration without saying so in this thread.

And there are obviously boycotters who dont even know this thread exists.
And supposedly GOG banned many "outspoken" posters after the Devotion U-turn. Its going to be harder to post here for someone banned. And they may be less willing too.
Then there are boycotters who (for some reason or another - like: not outing themselves as a boycotter in the forum, disliking the OP, not wanting to get downvoted or hated by fanbois) do boycott and know about this thread but dont want to post here.

It's a lower bound. What we know is that there are at least this many people boycotting. There is no way we can really know the actual number, although if we had some plausible estimate of the % of GOG users that use the forum, we might be able to make a reasonable estimate (if we assume forum users are a representative sample).

So, ironically, those that are pointing out that only a very small percentage of GOG users use the forum are actually implying there must be a high number of actual boycotters ;-)

Many years ago (2013?), when GOG released some information about its number of users, we were able to calculate that significantly less than 10% of the user base had ever posted on the forum.

Additionally, when GOG leaked the names of the 50 users with the largest libraries at the time, only five or six (IIRC) were very active forum members, and the majority had never posted even once on the forum. Of the five or six, I believe only two are still active here nowadays (but I'm not following the forum too closely).

My guess is that some might want to go with a company that(as Lift said) was less misrepresentative about what it was and what it's intentions were from the get go.

As for the DRM aspect: some of us shop here fully or in part for convenience(i.e. one doesn't have to strip the DRM out of their games like with Steam games and the like)....and I am guessing that perhaps that user decided the convenience(having the drm mostly stripped out as with GOG installers) wasn't worth it anymore in the face of all the lying from GOG, so they decided to just go to(or back to) Steam.