A few days ago, digital distributor GOG introduced profiles. One might imagine this to be a good or neutral thing given the fact that they’re a Steam-like feature that brings the DRM-free service more in line with what’s clearly popular/familiar to the masses, but there’s actually been a bit of a backlash. This backlash is rooted primarily in the fact that it’s currently impossible to turn off invasive features that broadcast each user’s number of games owned, as well as total play time and number of achievements (which are only counted if the user in question uses GOG’s Galaxy client). In the wake of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, making information that had been private for a decade suddenly available to everyone and anyone at a click went a long way toward shattering people’s trust, and yet this isn’t necessarily just about the profiles and lack of privacy.
This isn’t the first time GOG has found itself embroiled in controversy; there have been enough blowups causing rapid, angry posts by the community since I joined in 2011 that I’m finding it difficult to recall even a fraction of it. It always plays out in the same basic way, though: GOG introduces something new that seems to innocently overlook an obvious problem, the community points out the issue on the official Forum thread, a lack of communication from staff members causes the thread to fill up with angry posts from people who feel they’re being ignored, and an employee eventually shows up to placate everyone with apologies and promises of a compromise that has a 50/50 shot of never materializing. Take, for example, the decision to include the “optional” Galaxy client into game installers. This was ostensibly for the sake of convenience, but it had the side effect of bloating file sizes with an unnecessary installer. Eventually a compromise was reached that allowed users to choose either “classic” Galaxy-free installers or those that include Galaxy, but a feature making it possible to set the classic installers as the default (which would be useful to avoid accidentally downloading the wrong ones while backing games up) has yet to become available. The default installers are always the Galaxy ones, with the classic installers being hidden away where those not in the know aren’t likely to look. I can’t and won’t speak for other forum posters, but the prevalence of decisions like this have started to make me wonder if they’re truly innocent mistakes.
Take the picture above, which was their olive branch after they abandoned their principle of not using regional pricing. That was just one of many principles that GOG stood for when I first joined, and its loss was initially sold to users as “good news” (which has since become a recurring forum joke). Other principles lost since then have been the pricing scheme—back before they changed their name from Good Old Games to GOG, all games were $5.99 or $9.99—and extras like guides and wallpapers. Basically, the only principle left is DRM-free, and even that’s shakier than one might think; GOG used to sell DLC for a game called Gremlins, Inc. that only worked with the game’s online version, and arguments could be made that CD Projekt RED’s GWENT is itself DRMed. Even if you disagree on those things being DRM, though, there’s no question that GOG has given up on the majority of the things they once stood for, and it’s difficult to give them the benefit of the doubt given how much has been thrown under the bus.
With that tiny slice of history serving as a bit of context (and remember, such things are a regular occurrence on GOG for some reason), let’s get back to the profiles. Going to my activity feed, I can currently see the games that the people on my friend list have recently played, the achievements they’ve unlocked, the store page reviews they’ve posted, and milestones for how much time they’ve played in certain games. There’s no problem if they chose to share this information, but profiles are set to public by default. That means that I have no way of knowing if these are details they’re willingly sharing, or if they’re simply unaware of what’s being broadcast out to others. Even in a perfect world where everyone was aware of the changes and changed their settings in the short time between profiles being announced and launched, though, the “private profile” information can conceivably be used to harass. While the GOG forum is one of the better forums I’ve seen out there, it’s as prone as any to creating festering resentments, and these sometimes manifest in ugly ways. It’s not inconceivable to imagine someone creating a script that watches someone’s game count to discover patterns in game purchases, and the other stats can be used to detect how often one uses the Galaxy client. For the potentially harassed, there’s no way of avoiding something like this; these details are accessible even while using the most restrictive privacy options, and it’s mind-blowing that it didn’t occur to anyone that this could be turned against customers. Even those not willing to go through the effort of deriving more detailed information from profiles can, at a glance, determine a poster’s involvement with the store from the number of games owned. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how this could play out: “Your opinion doesn’t matter because you only have X games compared to my Y.”
The most insulting part of all, however, is that they were warned that this would happen ahead of time. Shortly before the profiles went live, a forum thread was posted to announce the new Privacy Settings. This wasn’t an “official” announcement thread, so it didn’t go up on the front page for non-forum users to see. For those who don’t frequent the forum, then, the first mention of the new privacy settings came in the form of the profile launch announcement, meaning they had no way of knowing that they needed to change their privacy settings until their public-by-default profiles had gone up and blasted their details to everyone on their friend list. It’s not like GOG lacked the ability to send out emails explaining the new privacy settings, as anyone regularly bombarded with their emails about sales can attest, and this makes their failure to communicate the new privacy settings to their customers all the more baffling. Especially in light of a completely different email they did send about GDPR-driven changes. Setting that aside, GOG was warned about how the profile rollout could go badly, and they chose to go ahead anyway, ignoring the community’s advice and creating an entirely unnecessary brouhaha.
There’s no reason to expect that this will play out differently than previous GOG controversies. I expect the forum to continue barraging the profile announcement thread with replies until GOG figures out a way to placate most of the angry posters. Most likely, they’ll come back with a way to make profiles truly private, but will end up leaving the minor inconveniences unaddressed (for example, clicking your username in the top bar now leads to your profile page rather than your library). “Two steps back, one step forward” is the way things have trended for a long time now, slowly morphing the store into something completely unrecognizable from its 2011 incarnation, and while this particular controversy will no doubt blow over like so many others have, history has shown that it’s only a matter of time until another completely avoidable blowup occurs.
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