So right now GOG has arguably some problems with their game release pipeline. The flow of releases is not what one would want ideally and more importantly, a lot of very good games get rejected for often seemingly flimsy and arbitrary reasons. This is a problem that Steam used to share, however they later "solved" it by starting Steam Greenlight. Greenlight however has been something of a disaster and at this point is nothing but an annoying choke point that at the same time will almost always be overcome given time and in the end has resulted in everything getting through eventually and poor or abysmal games flooding the Steam marketplace. So to carbon-copy Steam's "solution" is hardly a good idea. But the core idea of partially user curated release selection isn't bad and would go some distance to overturn some of the site's more absurd rejections.

So here's my idea:
1. A section of the site is created where every game GOG rejects is presented. Similar to Greenlight the publisher/developer is then allowed to write a small blurb presenting the game and attach a trailer and some screenshots and what not. Only already released games would be allowed though since this is not an Early Access site.
2. Every user of this site is then allowed to vote for the games they want released, just like Greenlight. However, to prevent people just voting for everything all at once and the function losing its purpose you should be limited to a number of games that you can vote for at the same time. Anything between 5-10 active votes for different games should be good. However unlike the wishlists you should be allowed to remove your votes if you so choose.
3. Also, to avoid people or developers themselves to just creating hundreds of dummy account to boost the vote totals of a game, "vote power" should be weighted based on library size/money spent. This number could possibly be capped, as a person with 200 games is just as much an established user as someone with 1000 games, but some amount of weight in necessary to avoid abuse. Also, if library size is used for weighting, any free games should obviously not be included.
4. Every week votes are tallied up and whichever game is in first place that week is getting prepared for release, maybe at a set day later that week (like Friday is "user-selection day" or something like that, or maybe Sunday since no one usually releases games on Sundays otherwise).

Well, this is my idea atleast. Something like this would of course be a major undertaking for GOG to set up so I wouldn't expect anything to be implemented anytime soon, but I think this would solve what I consider to be a major problem the site has while also avoiding the flood of trash that Steam is getting every day. Now, feel free to poke holes in my idea.

No thanks. I actually think we're good here.

...because God knows what GOG needs are a million and one Unity Asset flips submitted by Digital Homicide.

The community wish list is GoG's version of Greenlight.

I think we`re good.

While that would be certainly interesting option since the wish list is practicaly just a placeholder without any use at the moment its questionable if and how gog could implement something like that since they aren't very good in app/website development. It would definitely be interesting to get a chance to back some very good games that were denied in the past (most of my wishlist basically).

Well, they wouldn't actually ever reach the site if GOG only selects one game from the list each week (since I'm assuming the user base of the site wouldn't be interested in voting for games like that). Besides, if a game is fundamentally broken or poor on a core level, GOG can still of course elect to not include it on that list either. The problem with that is you can literally spam votes for thousands of games which diminishes the value of the wishes, it's flooded with games that the devs have never actually pitched to GOG and have no little to no chance of getting released, the standings are public which makes it easier to game for people who want to actively manipulate the vote, the votes aren't weighted which encourages dummy accounts and since the selection process for why certain games are let in through wishes and others are still rejected is so opaque it makes the wishlist feel a bit useless. These are all things I believe my idea would do better than the wishlist. The wishlist still serves a purpose though since it can suggest to GOG where they should best focus their energy when it comes to pursuing games that devs and rights owners are unwilling to release on here, but for games that devs already want on here it's not particularly useful.

Ditto.

Next might as well be early access, followed by crappy third party releases, followed by paid mods, followed by... er, wait. This is indeed sounding too familiar.

We are living the dream over at Steam. :P

Living the dream, eh? And you have to be asleep to believe it.

Hm, early access already happened at least for three games on gog so it wouldn't be anything new really. Just that gog themselves decided that the games had enough content to be released here in that form. But Steam form of early access is not good since its not controlled by anybody and companies can do what they wan't.

Sure, the "get free copy" thing is a concern, but I wouldn't worry too much. First of all, since every user only have a limited amount of votes and they can only place those votes on a limited number of games at a time, if you only vote for games where the devs offer free copies some games that you genuine want here gets nothing. And I would believe most people would rather want a game they really want to play but will have to pay for over a game they don't want to play but is free. Also, a release pace of one game per week is too slow for an "offering free games strategy" to be really efficient. But more than that, if GOG doesn't allow developers to know which users vote for which games, there's no way for the dev to verify anyone's claim on that free game after release. Sure, a dev can still be like "now that we're on GOG, everyone who this weekend posts in this topic that they voted for us gets the game for a free" and just take it on faith that people are truthful, but since people aren't that honest dev will get hundred, if not thousands of people claiming that they're eligible for a free game with no way of verifying if they actually are, to the point that doing it would be a net negative for the dev.

I would say that I do believe a rejected tag for rejected games on the wishlist would be a generally good idea. But one good idea doesn't exclude another.

I honestly don't see the point on GOG.

I never understood these ideas, "hey, let's make GOG more like Steam", as i don't see any logical reason. If you are having a small shop, you would not benefit from building an Walmart-sized store next to an Walmart. You would either want to specialize on some products or develop in another area.

Same goes with GOG. They probably can implement all the Steam features. But there's absolutely no point. They don't have the user-base in order for those features to work as they do on Steam. Same with releases. If you want an store full of games, go on Steam. GOG are more picky with what they sell, and often for good reasons. They don't have the user-base to make a much bigger number of games profitable.

Steam Greenlight started to works just because there are many users, there are bigger chances of those game to be voted. Same goes with Early Access, works great in some cases, like Endless Legend for example, but same deal, if those developers would had few users interested in their game, they wouldn't have gotten an useful feedback. Just because they had a lot of users with ideas, they were able to implement those ideas in their game.

Just to make a quick idea, Deus Ex have 210 reviews on GOG, and over 3000 on Steam. And it was added later on Steam than on GOG. An indie developer will always prefer the place that gives him more exposure.

GOG does not have to give any explanation for their rejects. In many cases, they would probably not be profitable, or the games would have some problems that could be tricky to repair. Steam does not really care too much about that, that's why you have thousands of games there. The bad part it's that you might get a game that do not work too well. And the size of community helps with that, as you will read about these problems in forum posts and reviews.

Considering GOG's focus on older games I think the average GOG user doesn't mind waiting for a full release.

There are a number of reasons as to why GOG has relatively few of all indie games released on Steam, including the fact that many, if not most, of these developers have no intentions of delivering their games DRM-free.
That's obstacle #1, and its a very big one, that includes Early Access games as well.

There's also the issue that continuously updating games is easier through Steam, at least that's what I've been told by developers, however it probably comes down to money and time as usual.

Lastly, indie games that are offered DRM-free can be sponsored through kick-starters, like Age of Decadence and many others. So if GOG users want to sponsor a game, which is what Early Access is all about, we already have the means to do so.