Hope so for sake of those who already bought it/ planning to. Looking through the feedback on Steam threads looks like the devs got fired and the publishers basically pushed the game out the door... which from what some say the early 'demo' is exactly the same as the final game.

Wow, another one? And here I thought Blade of Destiny HD was the minority with someone publishing a demo or alpha marketing it as a full product.

oh wow, truly a disgrace to release a game in this state

I buy from GOG not only for DRM free, but also for the fact that GOG sells complete editions. I am open to GOG selling newer games, and I know that QA on newer games can be harder, but this is getting increasingly concerning. If I can no longer trust the good in GOG (I know it's just a name now) or even that games will be complete. Then half my reason for following gog goes out the window.
This is what I started to get concerned about when they started selling DLC, incomplete games.

Big difference tho. Blade as far as i know is actually complete in terms of story & main features. Its however buggy & had missing spells, graphics etc.. and its actively being patched up from the mess it was at launch.

I hope people who bought this will get their money back from gog, and the game will be removed from the site.

Heh. Guess I got an iffy feeling about this game for good reason. Frankly, at this point I'd think GOG ought to consider delisting the game and simply refunding people who bought it.

It's one thing to sell games of questionable quality/worth - hello Daikatana, MoO 3! - but selling half-baked and obviously incomplete products is just bad form. Somehow I doubt the GOG staffers fully played through this one before it popped up in the catalog so they may have been caught unaware. At least I hope so. Otherwise I can't think how they allowed this game to show up here.

Imho i doubt any digital gamestore will playthrough every game to the end - unreasonable to expect as such. Maybe the publisher misrepresented the game ?....

Undoubtedly, marketing people are hardly known for their honesty.
It's the downside of selling day-one games, and why I am questionable about it.

This whole fiasco reminds me at Hero Academy Steam..

In Store Page it reads : Single & multi player..
In game : Multiplayer only + One turn challenge without AI (What The HELL)..
Steam support: We cannot refund your games according to our policies and agreement, all question regarding the games must directed to developer or publisher...
Robot Entertainment forum: "Hero Academy is Multiplayer Only games"

That's the last game in Steam I buy based the fucking store page information..
Until today that fucking games still in my library as a warning for me to never trust Steam, Developer, Publisher for justify a purchase decision...

Maybe even GOG staffs are caught by surprise. Usually when people are talking about "unfinished", they are referring to the state and overall quality of the game. With this one it is literally unfinished.

It could tarnish the indies.

We'll probably see more of this in the future (not on GOG, hopefully, but as a general phenomenon in the business).

With free (or cheap) design tools and middleware, crowdfunding, and easy access to distributors even for self-published products, it's currently easier than ever before to overestimate one's ability to create a finished game, or raise adequate funding. People can say what they will about publishers (no one really likes them, they are often seen as unnecessary greedy middlemen, and there are cases where that's actually true), but it's often _not_ a bad thing to have a project overseen by someone who knows how finish things, who can spot problems in the production process at an early stage, and who can make necessary cuts in time, even though they hurt.

There have always been myriads of failed game projects. However, ten years ago, those would simply have vanished, or perhaps released as freeware when the devs gave up. Today, it has become viable to throw such products on popular platforms, riding the wave of indie popularity, and wring some money out of a project that ought to have been either completed or canned.

I wonder if distributors can protect themselves (and their customers) against this. Obviously, distributors can't _possibly_ play all their releases to the end, to check whether they are as completed and self-contained as the publisher may claim. In fact, the industry standard is to not playtest releases at all, and simply check whether they run - GOG is probably the distributor that does the most playtesting in the entire business, but it's just impossible to do it for each and every product. But I wonder if it might be possible to put a clause into the contracts that obligates publishers to inform about an incompleteness of the game, this way they would at least have good leverage to do something for the customers when an unfinished game slipped through. And, if we _are_ looking into a future where unfinished "grab the money and run" releases become more common, then being a shop with a reputation of protecting their customers from such shenanigans might prove to be a useful asset.

Perfectly stated. And in my communications with Judas I had suggested that GOG implement contractual bindings to prevent this in future (if they didn't already have such). Granted that even this isn't a foolproof solution, since in some cases getting restitution would be like extracting blood from the proverbial turnip. But it would help indemnify GOG, and hopefully have a chilling effect on unscrupulous devs/publishers pursuing this tactic in future.

Looking forward to seeing what the official GOG response is, now that we know one is coming soon.

That's true, but GOG releases far fewer games than other distributors and claims to be selective about the quality of the games they choose to offer, so they should be held to a somewhat higher standard. I read that you can "finish" this game in 4 to 5 hours, so apparently they invested less time than that to figure out whether this game is worth selling.