Hey I'm looking at the front page and a game caught my eye called The Divine Invasion, I look at the suspiciously positive reviews for what looks like a pretty unremarkable game and decide to have a look at what they've worked on before this.

There I notice they have do not one, but SIX games that are marked as in development/early access... How is this ok on gog? They release a game, abandon it and then they go and make a new early access game? Most of their games look like asset store prefab maps too which just adds to the insanity.

This is just the first one like this I've come across and I wouldn't be surprised if there are more "developers" like this on here.

Wow.

Many obviously fake reviews on those games.

All of those games only came to the store recently, all at the same time.

I agree many of the reviews do look suss, and the games have a formula sameness to them I reckon.

Maybe they were built with the assistance of ChatGPT. LOL

I would normally buy those type of genres, but I have mostly held off because I don't get a good vibe at this point.

I've actually heard of We Are The Dwarves, so I'm not sure if the dev is actually just shelling out shovelware, but their newer games do seem to look cheap and rushed. Also the reviews may be legitimate because people on Steam seem to have the same positive opinion of these games. Although I am starting to question GOG's quality control.....

The fact that GOG allowed such bare-bones skeletons of "games" -- failing IMO in most cases to even achieve the minimum threshhold of a proof of concept -- pretty much killed any legitimacy GOG's curation might have had.

After this...

... I have absolutely no idea what can get a "game" either accepted or declined by GOG, but...

... if these "games" made it to GOG, then...

... A-N-Y-T-H-I-N-G can.

And those reviews are just the icing on the cake. Something really weird is going on with these "games."

That makes one wonder how the "curation" of GOG works.


It's not just about 'bad' games and I really encourage supporting devs who have a promising product to give them a place on this page, but so many games from so few small devs ... not even big companies han handle the production of so many games at the same time.
I guess someone knows someone who knows someone inside GOG.

I grabbed two for 1€ each during a sale, which looked interesting enough. But I doubt that I will ever see a finished version of them.

And I like the fact that on Steam you can buy a bundle of all their games (there are 23 of them) for -92% :) so for less then the full price of The Devine Invasion (which is £19.50, the bundle is £17.50) you get that and the lot. oh well.

Yeah it is a bit suspicious. Many of the 'review' accounts on the developers games (Atomic_Steel, BrianBells, colorado2015, germanbig, Samuel10005), etc, all using the same single . as their review title were also all created in Dec 2022. We Are The Dwarves is also filled with accounts sharing the same bot-like username pattern (eg, aqw1894, xcvbdfg765, fghj54671, hjk.b, hjkasz, jkltyu, qweras900, sdffgh298, tyuiqwe80), all leaving 1-2 sentence 5* 'reviews', all accounts were created in Mar / April 2019, bought between 2-4 games during that time-frame (based on reviews) then all seemingly abandoned with zero activity since...

I posted a thread about it before I saw your one:
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/evidence_whalerockgames_uses_many_fraudulent_reviews.
It was originally a wall of text, but I replaced that mostly with an image.

I attached the image to this post. Matching dates to the reviews, it is obvious that they are heavily manipulating all of their games reviews and scores.

They keep having 80-90% sales here as well.

There's always shady devs. I am just wondering how they made it to GOG in the first place with all our curation going on.

I wasn't fuming when this devs recent 'games' got released here, but I certainly wasn't happy.
Take Selaco for example, and the lengths the devs had to go to finally get a response from gog, after months of silence...or other games being 'too niche' for a release here. Some of which have quite a few wishlist upvotes.

WhaleRock being an ukrainian studio surely had something to do with their games making their way to gog, I somewhat understand the teams decision to release some of their games here. But the bar shouldn't be lowered this much, most of their new games are cobbled together messes that will never get finished. I'm not saying they are trying to scam people, but those fake reviews make them look rather shady.

All this wouldn't be as bad, if only every other dev/publisher would get equal treatment.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want shovelware/abandonware/quick cash grabs/asset flips etc. on gog, but if this is how it is going to be then why not release other 'niche' or subpar games here.

Simply don't buy them.
I wish all solutions to problems were that easy.

GOG is likely cutting this particular dev some slack because they're Ukrainian.
Is it a litte excessive to have and sell that many games in development? Maybe, but it's of no real concern to me at least since I don't pick up games that are still in development on principle.

Remember these guys?
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/release_buddy_simulator_1984_from_feardemic_80762

They also have six (6) "Coming Soon" titles here on GOG (and 1 EA title - though not on GOG)...plus that one ("Buddy Simulator 1984") that got released, only to get pulled from the store again, two days later.

Edit: https://www.gog.com/en/games?publishers=feardemic

In case you're wondering: "Bloody Hell Hotel" isn't shown on the publisher's page here in the shop - yet it is shown on the publisher's homepage as published by them...

If you follow the link here, https://www.gog.com/forum/polyclassic_wild/a_scam, you can notice that at least 3 of the reviews on https://www.gog.com/en/game/polyclassic_wild are copied and modified from reviews on that other store. Each of those original reviews were posted on the same date (31 May 2021).