Yeah, this shit’s just weird all around. Don’t ask for money, but swap the site to invite-only because people aren’t giving you money? Calling it invite-only, but offering no path or conditions for getting an invite? Calling it invite-only but saying that it will at some point be open again? Giving no explanation as to when or why it might open again? If it costs too much money to be open why would it open up?

Just weird. Use your words, people.

They do occasionally ask for money, but their messaging was always a bit weird.

While I agree their communications could be vague in some respects, I feel like the actual issue was that they were too specific in one way. They’ve been clear for a long time that further donations go to buying games from GOG so they can put them on the site (they were clear that they have enough recurring donations to cover the site itself.) The fact that they do this is why they update so much faster than everyone else, since other sites have to wait for games to appear elsewhere and few people bother to distribute updates outside of major ones.

But I think that this meant that there was a lack of urgency that deterred people from donating. If they just said “give us money if you want us to keep doing this” I suspect people would have donated more.

I wonder what happened, though? Something made them change course over just a few days - as recently as March 11th, they were posting updates on their Mastodon account.

Even weirder, the site now has a link to a changlog, listing games they’ve uploaded but which are not available to anyone except people who were invited.

and can make contributions to this endeavor

maybe they want to make it like a private tracker ? e.g. you can only download if you contribute too