Cav's Place

It’s entirely understandable to no longer want to put all this effort into maintaining something intended to bring together and reward active members of a community that those in charge of the site it’s built around, or even of its parent corporation, seem set on destroying, on the forums that those same people seem set on killing, the result of this being that the currently active community is becoming more and more just a bubble of sycophants, with ever more of the, shall we say, more discerning members leaving or being more or less explicitly driven away or silenced. If anything, considering the increasingly heavy-handed moderation and seeing the recent statement about the staff’s view when it comes to external links and the resulting closure of several other long-running threads, it was perhaps left a little late.
Still, that makes it no less sad to see the end of the fourth incarnation of The GOG.com Community Giveaway. There are talks about a fifth incarnation, with Doc0075, who donates such a large part of the games and also makes his own huge and interesting giveaways, stating that he intends to launch a continuation, but past experience makes me think that he won’t have the time to manage it the way The Community Giveaway should be managed, and perhaps even more so that his desire to create positive interactions will result in a leniency that will rather negate the activity requirements that define The Community Giveaway and also bring changes that will actually push things in that same direction desired by the staff and alienate those rightfully calling out GOG.com for all the rotten moves they’ve made and continue to make.
Then again, under such circumstances, I couldn’t in all honesty say that I’d truly still want something like this to continue on the GOG.com forums at all… But it would have been nice if it’d have been moved to the alternate forum… Though I’m not sure that such a thing would have been desirable for those who are still active there, since I was made aware that it’s not open to everyone, the remaining active members being careful about who else might be allowed to join, so I won’t even link to it now.
The thing is that finkleroy is not pulling completely away, as the hosts of the previous incarnations did, but instead actually moving the giveaway elsewhere… The first problem being that he’s turning it all into a single giveaway, regardless of the store the games are on, not even separating between DRM-free and the rest, and the second is that he’s moving it to Discord, where dozens of those who are eligible for and active in the current GOG.com Community Giveaway, myself included, stated that they won’t be active. It is, of course, entirely his call to make, seeing as he won’t be taking any of the remaining donated keys, but creating something new, for the new community he intends to form there, but my first problem with the idea is that it’s a chat service and I have absolutely no intention of ever being active on something like that again, and others are bothered by the fact that, at least in many cases, making an account requires a phone number.
Either way, what the future will hold remains to be seen, and this is such an inconsequential matter compared to what’s going on in the world these days, or even compared to all the problems and rottenness of content distribution and rights, or even to that part that refers strictly to gaming. It’s only a minor matter even when compared to what’s been going on with GOG.com for so many years now, as I already mentioned. But maybe that’s just why I dared to write this quick comment about it here now, instead of, for example, the brief and entirely inadequate comment about the inappropriate and actually counterproductive and, in the longer run, harmful measures taken in order to supposedly mitigate the rising prices that I otherwise had in mind.