GOG user profiles are now live according to a news post on the digital distributor's website.
GOG is a digital distribution service with a focus on DRM-free gaming. They launched their Galaxy desktop client last year, and since then the company has been hard at work implementing more robust user features for both the website and the desktop client. Privacy settings for the new user profiles were introduced last week. This allow users to control who can see their activity feed, friends list, and their owned games.
Profiles are split into four distinct parts: your feed, profile, games, and friends. The feed is just like a newsfeed on any other social media site; you'll see status updates from friends, the games they've recently played, or other things like recently unlocked achievements. The profile shows your own activity, like the games you've recently played and the accomplishments you made in them. The games page is simply a list of the games you own on GOG, along with statistics like time played and unlocked achievements. The last bit is the friends list, which is exactly what it says on the tin: a list of all of your friends on the service.
"User Profiles was one of the things that our users were asking for as a GOG feature," said the company's Senior PR Manager Łukasz Kukawski in an e-mail to TechRaptor. "For us the one main reason for them is to allow users to connect and be closer to other people they know from GOG. Profiles allow you to see what your friends are into, what kind of games they play, what games you can play together, and even discover some new games for yourself. It’s all about building even stronger community, [a] community that loves indie and classic games and share the same values towards DRM-free gaming."
Some of the functionality provided in the profiles is dependent on use of the GOG Galaxy client. For example, the website won't have any way to know what achievements you may have unlocked in a game as there's no built-in way for games to communicate with the digital distributor. That's kind of the point of the whole "DRM-free" thing; even their flagship desktop client is totally optional if you want to play some games you purchased from the Polish digital retailer.
I asked Mr. Kukawski how the feature would be expanded going forward—would we be seeing things like customizable widgets, badges, or other bits of digital decoration as one might see on Steam? Unfortunately, it's "just too early to reveal anything" at this point in time. For the moment, users can utilize background images from games they already own (bonus content often included with purchases at the website) as the background of their profile. Hopefully, we'll be seeing the feature expanded in some interesting ways in the coming months and years.
Disclosure: GOG works with TechRaptor for affiliate partnership and GOG provides a monthly giveaway to our Pack Hunter members.
What do you think of the new user profile feature at GOG? Is there anything you would like to see added to dress them up a bit? Let us know in the comments below!
