It's funny I thought the exact opposite. I understand Brazil is a fairly large market and all - but of all the markets to offer full language / support for it seemed like a lot of time / effort / money for a marginal benefit - especially for a small (ish) central European niche (ish) company.

As translating the game card information and answering few emails probably requires only one person, it can be assumed that their sales in Brazil are very close to zero, if it doesn't even cover the costs of one guy translating stuff full-time.

Sure, the decision to include it in the first place does seem a bit odd considering the other languages not yet supported, but now that it is included it seems odd to drop it.

But I think Gede raises two good points;
The fact they are updating icons and dropping the Brazilian support in the forum (I know this effects elsewhere) might mean they are doing some kind of preliminary work on the forums.
Or perhaps the one Brazilian speaking staff member they had has left and it's not worth replacing them.

They do have more than a single Brazilian guy, and they are probably not about to leave or be fired either. Though the original community manager, TioJason, has already left quite some time ago (he was very nice, sent me a free gog goodies package that never arrived, but he's not to blame on that one).

I'm guessing there are some administrative aspects to maintaining the Brazilian store that are taxing (possibly as in "Brazilian Government Taxes", maybe?) and they are not selling enough to justify it.

But that's just random guesswork on my side.

Also, PT-PT is a WAY different language than PT-BR. Hell, even inside Brazil you'll run into some fairly different variations of the language from one region to another (nothing as serious as the differences between PT-PT and PT-BR, though).

Fair enough.
I do seem to remember people saying you have some fairly harsh taxes on games over there so perhaps it's not worth complying with or whatever from GOG's side to keep maintaining that aspect of the site.

Actually, as far as I know, PC games DO pay way less taxes than console games over here, and those are the harsh taxes you heard about.

For example, that Street Fighter 30th anniversary compilation costs about 90 BRL on PC (I payed even less because of a Green Man gaming 25% off promo), but I've seen it for about 150 BRL for the PS4 on a store.

And games like God of War may even come closer to 300 BRL.

On the PC, generally speaking, only Bethesda games are always priced the same as the console counterparts.

More recently, though, due to the rising difference between BRL and USD, games have been launching way more expensive than in the past. Which is awful.

Also, anything with Nintendo slapped on it, specially the Switch, is a criminal offense in terms of pricing. I'm yet to understand the logic behind the 80 USD SNES mini costing 999 BRL here officially.

So about four real to each US dollar.

Four reais (plural :P ). But yes. T_T

If you say so. I do not know a single word of Portuguese, Brasilian or not.

The Portuguese-language bits of the site specifically targets Brazil (as the major Portuguese-speaking market), not Portugal, or really the Portuguese language as such (the need to support the language is a side effect of supporting the country).

Again, I think this highlights a problem with GOG trying to maintain direct control over everything. Valve outsourced this stuff to the community, and built a system to do it. Sometimes doing things "the best way possible" is taking a hands off approach and building the tools the community needs. Showing that GOG is way to simplestic (& probably outdated) with it's backend applications.

https://translation.steampowered.com/

1) "Q: Will there be any rewards for translating?
Participation on STS is entirely voluntary."

Nice. So people donate their time, effort, and linguistic talent and get nothing out of it - but a corporate entity is making even more profit taking advantage of this voluntary work. No thanks!

Translating something like Steam is very different from translating an open source software or whatever.

2) This also explains why Steam store has so unbelievable clumsy language from time to time, if the language is not English. Some people do word for word translations, completely ignoring the fact that you really don't translate like that in any real translation project.

I honestly have no issue with that as long as they are upfront about it and people are willing to volunteer their time to a project. They are not forcing anyone to take part.

I mean, I have donated my time on a number of GOG related things already wihout being paid for it when asked by GOG, but I did it because I wanted to help and because I felt I could contribute and help deliver a better product for the community.

No system is perfect, but I would argue having something is better than having nothing.

You've obviously never seen the Steam translation for the 'Party Hard' site. It didn't even make any sende. Pretty sure a lot of people didn't buy it, because they feared the game would be as bad as the translation.

And... it's dead.

It probably happened a bit earlier and I hadn't noticed, but the PT-BR language is out and the forum is archived. T_T