This, I despise such practice, that is really misleading.

those should be outright banned

That's on Microsoft/Windows, HDDs are measured correctly in gigabytes(GB) but Windows shows them in your face in gibibytes(GiB) and misslabels them as GB, if you open the properties of your drive you will see it shows both the actual size in GB and the GiB Windows uses everywhere else.

EX Windows properties: SSD WD Blue 500GB = 499.971.518.464 bytes (or 499.9 GB) | 465 GB (actually 465 GiB)

That's gibibyte. The only company that insists that this is a gigabyte is Microsoft. Pretty much everyone else has moved on (although it took Apple nearly 20 years).

There really should be laws against this as not only is it anticonumer it's actuazlly also anti-retailer.

Lets say I had a business and that business was I dunno a massage parlor; but because there was a major player that dictates terms in the market my massages could only be provided by the major player and therefore as an addition to the cost to which said addition was my cut/lifeline.
Suddenly it's not your business it's their monopoly and you are being kept around only to make it so anti monopoly laws can't touch them.
Essentially your business makes you an accessory to a crime.

Sell incomplete, buggy mess of a game fully priced, through preorders too, after hyping it up for nearly a decade! Cyber something, or whatever junk that was, as an example...

Taking orders from political personnel and adjusting the selling/distribution of certain video games accordingly.

Mixing work with entertainment, during working hours at that and/or slightly misplacing company assets, potentially conflicting with budget a tiny bit (first floor office parties in a certain company) - as a foreign company's game guide book reveals; game guide book that should had been included in game's extras for free, exactly like said game's all previous titles in the same series, but was sold separately and pretty expensively, at that (guide priced almost the same, as the game in question itself)

Deceiving people, by starting out as a "consumer friendly, small time company", catering to niche gamer needs and establishing beneficial policies all around them, then suddenly becoming a cheap, lesser quality rip-off of big time sharks.

- Any and all similarities with real people, projects, places, orgs etc are purely coincidental, this is a work of fiction, philosophical hypothesis and mere arguments, for conversation's sake and points' presentation convenience, strictly.

And at the same time labeling the game as something it isn't. Labeling it as the next big open world RPG when it is actually just a GTA-ripoff.


Also:
- sneakily adding DRM bit by bit to games on a 'DRM-free(TM)' store.

I feel sad. Especially this, can evolve into the last nail in the coffin. And into a bad meme; drm-free advertizing cosmetics, that you can only receive through logging in game from client and locked behind DRM.

Also:
- bringing censored games in a store that tagged as "in progress" the wishlist entry for bringing uncensored games.
- refusing to bring games that exceed a certain amount of votes and that real "many gamers" ask for them; even if their devs reach GOG for partnership like, thrice (ex Agony Unrated)
- bringing incomplete game packages (hexen 2 portals of praevus, heretic 2, dungeon siege expansions etc), where and when it was all about "bringing complete packages"; plus, advertize them falsely (commander keen isn't the "complete" package)

Pretty much most if not all, unofficial or core policies of old... Even the good old cordial bond between community and the Board, is now gone. No transparency, not even communications or announcements come, especially around hot potato issues, anymore. Too bad "silence equals to admitting guilt", as people say. Had i known that spending money would help transform good old people into modern scoundrels and slowly transmute their business model, plus modus operandi, into a sick joke of its former self (almost the complete opposite) and into other companies' faked lookalike, i would have never abandoned jolly rogering and stopping somewhere to shop; plus offer my trust, love and support in the process. I feel like a sucker. Or a cheated man. After all, from that place in Europe also hailed She...

The unfair marketing practice which I dislike the most is is a phony release date in order to get money from pre-orders to help fund development, or just make interest on the money before the game is actually released.

I have seen this many times. And you don't need to look far to think of a game which had several release dates which were cancelled.

Do you know how to tell whether a release date is serious or just a grab for your money long before the game is released? Just see whether the publisher is purchasing advertising time in the lead up to the supposed release date. If you don't see any advertising in the months leading up to the release date it's a good bet that the game is going to be delayed and selling pre-orders is a way of getting your money months or even years before the game will actually be delivered.

Sales rep for an ISP.

A very bad ripoff, i might add.

This seems to be similar to what Trooper said in post 10, but I hear ya.

(Sadly even without such shenanigans, part of that space loss will still be lost due to other factors.....i.e. some space will always be lost due to how the drive is formatted[the size of the blocks/sectors, file system, etc])

***

To be fair, no one can(afaik) sell digital versions of Portals of Praveus and Heretic 2 legally, and i'd rather a store sell the other games in the meantime than not sell them at all.....still, I hear ya.
(this is more an issue of the rights holders being the ones to blame, rather than GOG/other stores selling the games)

No one could sell Hellfire either, but GOG managed to bring a complete, Diablo 1 package. Somebody who wants to do something, well, they never accept the word "cannot". It's actually a matter of "want not". People who want to help and service their clientele, always find ways.

Didn't GOG not get hellfire until some time after it released the main game? I believe that was the case, anyways.

GOG still has to work within the confines of the law(unlike say y'argh matey type sites, which usually don't care about such things).

As to collections like Commander Keen and Heretic/Hexen: it is mainly up to the rights holders if a complete package is put up for sale or not.....even if every game store on the planet wanted to release fully complete collections for those games they cannot do so without the consent of(and files from) the rights holders.

In a nutshell, I put the blame and fault for the collections not being complete mainly on those holding he missing bits back from sale.
(of course this is not me GOG is blameless re: anything....GOG has gained several other negative aspects over the last several years)

I hate those "since women earn only 80% of what men do, we give women extra discounts on our products" that e.g. Finlayson pulled off here a few years ago:

https://www.iltalehti.fi/talous/a/201712112200596607

So yeah, one of those shitty woke #metoo marketing campaigns that favor women and try to remind men what shitty people they are.

However, some people complained to the authorities that the campaign is actually discriminative towards men, so in the end Finlayson said they offer the same discount to men too. Maybe that was their plan all along, just to get to the headlines and then back off as soon as someone complains, as long as they get to the headlines.

It was just a cheap marketing tactic trying to ride on popular political agendas. Since Finlayson makes and sells textiles, it is obvious most of their customers are women anyway so I guess they figured it wouldn't matter even if men, which largely are not their primary customers (unless their wives have sent them to buy some linen), would get angry and vow never to buy anything from Finlayson stores, which is what they wouldn't do anyway.

So it is a bit like some army surplus store, whose customers are 98% male, would say men get a 10% discount on all products because universally men pay much more alimonies than women, which is unfair. They know it doesn't matter if their female customers, if any, would get mad at them.