---1 The Issue I see are the discounts, if you wait you can buy a game for 50% or 75%, this means 4 games instead of 1, or you pay by windows that subscription service and can play new games anyway. So after time you do collect a huge pile of games you didn't even play. So to buy a new game at launch , it has to really, really stand out.

---2 In case of Cyberpunk, I liked GTA and Saints Row more. By witcher I liked somehow only the second game, 1 and 3 are kind of average. Witcher is kind of dark souls for casuals. I had even more fun to play skyrim and assasin creed. And that's my issue, their games aren't really something I see to buy at launch. There are too many games, and some I see to be superior.

---3 Witcher 4 just doesnt sound to be ground breaking, only 1 playable character with the skills you already had in previous games , an original story is nice, but you don't have that much connection to it like by W3.

It's like to send you on adventure in middle earth after the ring is destroyed.

In W3 you had literally the Sauron/Mordor chase after you, now we have a story that takes after the all evil in the world was destroyed. Its kind of hard to build there a connection to the IP.

---4 It reminds me of Game of Thrones season 8, where they used all the book material and needed new writers to continue the story, fans didn't really like it.

---5 We have seen recently a lot of big AAA and AAAA titles to flop. For Various reasons.

You guys are really out of touch, if you think any of this would be a solution to the problem. It doesn't matter if they are at loss or not the management would rather die than to consider any of what you wrote there, because this is exactly what every company does with multinational reach. Laying off people is a very common practice, whether you accept this as a fact or not. It doesn't matter which industry we are talking about or whether the discussed business entity makes profit or not. Regarding Galaxy: unless they manage to hire people at lower cost compared to the past and said people will fix the issues with Galaxy or just scrap it and build something else from scratch etc things will stay exactly the same. Again this is very common phenomenon and doesn't matter which industry or company we are talking about, the root of this issue is almost always the size of discussed business entity.

I don't know where you got that "all evil in the world was destroyed" thing, but that's not how it works in this world. Hell, it didn't even work like that in Middle-Earth, but it super extra doesn't work like that in the Witcher. Plus I guess you must not have played the expansions. Somehow they continued well enough in those, and I'd argue they were even better than the base game.

You do realise the games were all new material from the very start, right?

More good news. Wheter you like the game or not have absolutely no impact on how successful it will be.

My point is, W4 doesn't looks like a strong IP.
And something should be done about it.
But what?

Can't they present characters that are more interesting?
And story with a better plot?
Like some cool bad guy or some other playable characters?

W4 is NOT an IP (unless you are defining IP in a very strict legal sense); it is a game in a series. The IP is The Witcher. The Witcher is a franchise, and W4 is an installment in the franchise.

As for the other questions:

No one knows yet how the characters will be presented; the game has not been made yet.
No one knows the story or the plot; the game has not been made yet.
No one knows the antagonist(s) or whether there will be multiple playable characters; the game has not been made yet.

What exactly you don't like about W4 story and characters?

Perhaps waiting for them to present any story at all before you start criticising it might be a bright idea.

I think you're being a contrarian. You're saying layoffs are the normal way to go despite me saying earlier that they don't need bizdev marketers/salespeople. It'll have to be a 2-pronged approach of replacing management and downsizing because GOG management has been making bad calls since 2014 with only 3 good years that were only because of CDPR releases. I've also mentioned in multiple threads that besides Support and graphics designers that the rest of GOG doesn't really do anything that customers can see on the front-end and there may be some fat to cut there.

For your reference, Valve makes $10B net profit/yr with 400 employees. GOG can do more with less if daddy CDP just invests in better infrastructure to let devpubs manage their own store pages better.

There will be no management replacing, no one really can do anything. Besides referencing Steam is pointless, since they are in a quasi-monopoly situation and I heard their customer support is largely automatized, tho supposedly there are still real people. Neither of these can be said about GOG.

Also, many long awaited games have been released on GOG especially in the last 3 years, like Skyrim, Fallout 4, RE Trilogy, Uncharted 4, God of War etc, so it is not like the situation is irreversibly bad ever since 2014, not to mention Cyberpunk has launched in 2020, so that was surely a good year for them too.

Me: "Here are GOG's problems, here's what I think the sources of their issues are, and this is what they should be doing to get out of this mess."

You: "No way it's gonna happen, bro."

Riveting discussion.

Right now, I put Witcher 4 right next to GTA6. Both are upcoming games from developers I trusted in the past (CDPR and Rockstar); but both developers have done things in recent years to make me wary and in both cases both studios have had major people leave who I feel were important for previous successes.

I really don't have enough information to really say one way or the other if I expect either game to be a flop. But I will also note both Witcher and GTA are such massive tentpole franchises that I cannot foresee a launch so badly disruptive that either IP's parent company will be in trouble.

Why speculate about games that are not out yet?

Caveat, who is working on a project wont matter. For openers, none of us talking about it will influence the game. Plus the game will sell to a legion of pleebs without any care who made it. Good or bad. Its a cash grab.

Because when a game is out, facts get in the way of speculation.

Ah, I see ;)