I'd imagine most people playing games on Steam would just normally play it instead of going offline, or w/o DRM, leaving the game AFK overnight, etc... Of course I don't have the numbers, but neither do you. But do you honestly think most people do not just play their Steam games just directly through steam?

In my experience of reading the reviews (yes, I actually read the reviews), if the review is well constructed with little to no spelling, syntax and grammatical errors, if they do have show a very low amount of hours in the game, they will be upfront with the reasons why. By the same token, if someone has hundreds to thousands of hours in a game but 1 or 2 sentence in their review, I don't take it seriously and it's probably a 'joke' review.

Just because a reviewer's game time may not be reliable doesn't necessarily mean its not useful. When used in conjunction with reading a review, I find it helpful. Not all steam reviews are reliable either; do you advocate getting rid of all steam reviews just because it isn't perfect as well? i hope not.

Compatibility of the game matters; especially if its an older title. I need to know does this game run on W10? If so are there any issues I should be aware of. Has the gameplay mechanics held up after 28 years??

For a game that is 28 years old, these are the questions that matter to me, not some guy that has thousands of hours into a disc version of a game they play on their specially made DOS PC.

Sure if they bought a GoG version later w/only a couple hours and the review states everything checks out good, that's great but you are giving very specific examples which are more exceptions than the rule. Again, very specific examples. You don't need to be an expert in Doom to find out how to configure it properly; most if not all of the pertinent info is already catalogued at pcgamingwiki.

[url=https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Doom_(1993)]https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Doom_(1993)[/url])

if not you can ask on the forums.

A game is competing for my time; my time isn't infinite and it doesn't care when a game was made. I'd trust someone's review that isn't tainted by nostalgia. I played Deux Ex when it came out and I thought it was the best game ever. Could I recommend the game now to people that never played it?? No, I can't because it was 20 years ago. I could only offer that I enjoyed the game immensely when it was released. I would have to play the game again or recently in the past to see whether or not the gameplay mechanics, user interface, feels outdated.

Early reviews are fine as is because that's what the dates are for. I usually always sort my reviews by most recent 1st.

Personally I don't care much about Steam and the only games I have on there don't need their client. I thought your question was about adding that to GOG though which makes less sense due to the offline installers (plus also people with their Galaxy profiles disabled may show blanks too)?

I agree compatibility information is useful, but I also think you'll find the majority of old games on GOG pretty much are repacked disc versions with a NoCD and one or two minor tweaks. Nowhere is this more obvious than FEAR which amusingly still displays the Securom disc based DRM error message in the GOG version under certain circumstances. As for whether gameplay holds up, that's a very relative thing that doesn't change much at all with disc vs GOG versions. And no-one with disc versions "builds a specially made DOS PC", GOG uses exactly the same DOSBox / ScummVM that disc users were using which is why I think you're over-estimating the "differences" in gameplay. Many GOG tweaks (dgvoodoo2, ScummVM, DOSBox, Residual, etc) don't come from GOG, they come from the modding communities who make them for everyone without differentiating between stores.

I can totally recommend the game as I have played it over a dozen times now including last year. Aside from hardly anything (beyond graphics) about single-player FPS mechanics changing much since the mid-2000's, the plot was probably more relevant last year than on release. :-) But this is exactly where "nostalgia" is so variable and pointless to try and exclude from reviews as people can and do play an old game more than once (including recently).

On the flip side - a quick look at 3x 1* Deus Ex reviews by people buying it recently for the first time includes "Now you just cant get a game without XP, or choice this choice that, FPS's used to be all about action and excitement, not RPG style grinding and decision making" and "idiotic conspiracy theories" and "save-scumming is possible". I'm not trying to sound funny, but when "Nostalgia reviews are useless. Listen only to our reviews as newcomers to the game when we say Deus Ex is a bad game because it's not Serious Sam, there's too much conspiracy in a conspiracy game and 90's FPS's had quicksave and I think they shouldn't" then "nostalgia based reviews" are the least of GOG's worries... ;-)

You missed out how Steam can also forget hours played (presumably database errors etc) - I've quite a few that were over 100hrs and now only show 40-50

Positive nostalgic reviews played 20 years ago isn't some sort of counterbalance to recent negative reviews that are badly written/supported.

And you make it sound like a lot of newbies to DX didn't enjoy the game due to non-sensical reasons; i gleamed through the reviews by most recently 1st, and a vast majority of new players seems to have liked the game. I mean it is sitting on 4.7 verified and 4.9 overall.

nostalgic reviews are pointless, at least for me. if you find them useful, that's fine too.

My point was it's hard to define exactly what a real "nostalgia" review is when half the stuff dismissed as "nostalgia" is either reviewing a game out of context of its era ("I bought this 20 year game just now and I'm downvoting because the graphics look 20 years old. Anyone who likes this is being nostalgic"). Or ignoring the fact people can feel fondly towards old games (nostalgia) AND have also replayed them more than once, the latest replay has been quite recently and isn't based on some distant childhood memory, but you will often see people still try and dismiss that solely based on when the first play occurred.

And hours played has almost no bearing on "how well a game holds up" as it's equally valid to observe that a game can have such unusably bad controls that someone only puts 5 minutes into it before giving up (see negative reviews for Litil Divil), as it is to observe that someone with 500hrs in a game is qualified to talk about it "because 500hrs = authoritative". But there's zero way you can tell any of that in many GOG reviews in particular, including mine, because my game time will always show 0.0hrs due to not using Galaxy at all. Even for other GOG users who do use Galaxy, half the stats displayed today will be missing because Galaxy has only existed halfway (2014) through GOG's lifespan (2008-2021). And even then the stats you desire may not even show up in reviews for the many people who have their profile set to private. I do "get" why you are asking for it, but it's something that's far more relevant to new games on Steam than old games on GOG that come with OFFLINE installers that can't be measured "The Steam Way" by their very nature.

Indeed. Another thing I forgot - it's also possible that someone else living in the house (eg, brother) has played all 20hrs that are visible and the person who bought the game / writing the review hasn't even started. :-)

I say it time and again:

GOG should tie both reviews and the (shitty) forum rep system to at least one valid purchase. That would both stop the downvote bots and the troll accounts for "reviews" (rather bombings) like "all VNs are child pr0n" or "Tonight We Riot is communist propaganda". Serious customer could still voice their complaints, people (who are actual customers here) who own non-GOG versions of games could still review.

Id rather they tie the trolls, the rep system and the trolls money (which would inevitably circumvent what yer on about) to a poo filled missile and launch them at Milton Keynes!
Aye.
Theres also the games that dont shut down properly for whatever reason and steam keeps tracking the time played.

That's why the standard to review any should be a proper gauge like "100% Achievements Completed"!


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/ducks for cover

LOL. "Thanks for the unlocks permitting 'proper' reviews, Steam Achievement Manager!" :-)

On Steam I do think it is a good idea, but it primarily works because by default every game on Steam has its executable-is-running time tracked unless someone goes out of their way to run a game without the Steam client (for the few games that will run that way). Of course this can be gamed on Steam by someone too simply by launching the game, ALT-tabbing out of it and leaving it run for 2 weeks in the background to jack up the "hours played". Even though that's doable, it'd take a LOT of people doing something like that in order for it to have any impact, and Steam already also has measures in place to discredit organized armed assaults on their review system. :)

I don't think GOG is likely to implement anything that might greatly reduce the number of reviews they receive however. There are some games that have very very few reviews despite being in the store for quite a long time, so putting additional barriers in place stands to leave some games entirely without any reviews at all.

Even though the number can be gamed by someone easily if they choose to do so, I do think it would be nice to have that information visible in reviews if the person is playing the game in a way that the play time tracking is available and works, and if they've authorized using this information publicly (privacy agreements).

With the GOG store, I'm not sure how useful the info is though due to the relatively low number of reviews which are of a high level of poor quality overall. My preferred way to read reviews on games sold on GOG, is to go look up the game on Steam and read the reviews there, using the filters provided on Steam. It's not always a 1:1 comparison as the game on Steam may not be an exact copy of the one on GOG as well as other factors, but it is the best overall thing I've found out there that provides me with something useful so far.

I don't think the review system is a very high priority or important thing for GOG though, much like these forums. The only way that I know of, is playing the game and having a firewall that is default outbound BLOCK for all traffic either on that computer or on a router in between that computer and the Internet, or by playing the game on a computer that is not connected to the network at all.

Any game (or other piece of software) installed on the computer can have telemetry gathering built into it for anything from debugging purposes, statistical data gathering about things like what type of computer systems and hardware users are using the software on, how users are interacting with the software itself and other things. They can even have it there by accident, such as a few years ago Microsoft VIsual C++ was generating binaries that had telemetry baked into the runtime startup libraries by default until it was reported to them and they updated it to not do that.

There's no way to stop any program from communicating data with the Internet except for disconnecting it from the Internet, or firewalling it with a highly restrictive firewall and possibly causing problems for the software or other things running on the system that require Internet access (or having to adminster a draconian firewall with fine grained rules very pedantially).

Even if a game has no telemetry right now, the next update of the game could have it built in either on purpose or by accident (such as developer features being left enabled accidentally in a consumer build... shit happens...)

The only safe assumption is that all software is gathering telemetry at all times, unless methodically proven to not be the case, or by blocking network access.