Thanks for posting this, mrkgnao. What you describe certainly sounds like DRM. I will post in the 'single-player games with DRM' thread and see if anyone can confirm it. If so, I will also add it to the first post here.



This is another good point. This protest is focused on DRM and censorship, and I would agree that deleting legitimate negative reviews would fall into the latter category.

Unless anyone on the boycott list has any objections, I will add this as an item on the list of grievances?

Thanks guys! As far as I am concerned, there is no prospect whatsoever of the protest ending, until GOG starts taking its customers' concerns and its obligations towards DRM-free seriously and starts correcting the issues with DRM and censorship on their store.

and while it's partially out of scope of this discussion it's important to mention it applies to all kinds of media
just make the official distribution method the best one

do you know all these terrible music streaming services with abysmally bad players and haunted by constant library removals? if they 1. provided a plugin for your favorite player 2. refused to sign exclusive and regional licenses and 3. allowed you to upload your own files to stream them too it would be so much better experience!

what about video streaming services? pay upfront, then you can check what's in tee library, translation quality is often bad, subtitles are terrible, video quality isn't great and not only they use DRM but also use device whitelist, and anything outside of that list can only play ultra low quality
wouldn't it be nice if interfaces were easy to navigate, libraries publicly available, translations and subtitles high quality and you could play the media on any device you own?

why would I want to pay to go through all these hoops if better alternatives are free?
GOG was the option even easier than pirating games for the long time with extra layers of convenience on top so you could just download your games again easily, but with all the nonsense that's happening... it's not looking good

The censorship on the forums and reviews has gotten out of control, clearly GOG no longer stands for free speech, I won't purchase another game from them for the remainder of the year, will re-evaluate in January 2023.

That didn't start with Blade Runner. It's been going on since at least the release of Lust from Beyond: M Edition, for which my legitimate review which did not violate any of GOG's review guidelines, and also many others' legitimate reviews too, were unjustly mass-deleted by GOG.

In fact, I posted in this very thread at the time when that happened.

The quoted post is making it sound like it's a "new" thing, only starting as of the Blade Runner re-release, for GOG to mass-delete legitimate reviews. But no, it isn't.

Accordingly, GOG's review system is completely illegitimate, and it's not actually a review system: it's more of a curated-by-GOG , advertisement system, falsely mis-labeled as a review system.

Meaning, GOG manually deletes negative reviews that are likely to lower sales of a game because the reviews are so truthful and compelling about why the game is not worth buying; and conversely, GOG leaves up positive reviews that paint a game in a favorable light and therefore serve as advertisements that will increase a game's sales.

Positive reviews wouldn't be advertisements in and of themselves, but when they are coupled with the fact that GOG manually deletes negative reviews, then that very dubious behavior on GOG's part is what transforms the positive reviews into advertisements and not reviews.

I never meant to imply that this was a new thing. On the contrary. One of my reviews was deleted as early as 2012 without any explanation.

did you contact them about it?

No.

If US guys would only know what their "free speech" means and what not...

keep up the good fight fellows; my internets gonna be shakey for a while so I might not be around to keep updated, or more correctly bumping this to the top of the threads consistently. :P

Havent paid for a single game on gog since this all started, now I am "unsubscribing" from their newsletter spam, one free game that I care about a year is not worth it.

GOG is litterally just a worse steam at this point. Worse because they acually had somewhere to fall from. While steam started as a trash fire, Valve keeps on doing good things for Linux.

Translation: "I'm a part of this group theoretically boycotting GoG over DRM! Yet, I support Steam, which is DRM itself!"
That's some grade A hypocrisy.

Yes, it’s a funny turn around, as GOG drop Linux support steam is investing heavily into it both software and hardware. Will be interesting to see where epic goes, maybe they will want to compete with steam deck (unreal deck??). Could be an interesting clash and would hopefully bring prices down on handhelds.

Please remove my name from the sympathetic list (28). Makes no sense to me anymore.

Agreed. Most of my gamer friends in the IT industry choose Steam, not because of DRM-issues, but because they can actually play the games they buy. They all use Linux.

Thanks for posting and I fully sympathize. Would you like your name to be added to the boycott list?

No problem. Thanks for supporting the cause.