Thanks for sharing that.

Always good to hear from the horse's mouth.
Many great points.

I'd love to know too

For example Beyond Blue, the devs intend to release here, but a year later still no GoG release.

Exactly.

My view, is they would even be worse than Steam and more like Itch.io, though probably not quite as bad. At least Steam has a big number of AAA games to help combat all the crappy ones.

EDIT - And can you imagine the big sales. Hard enough now to wade through 99 sales pages or more as it is.

A tough ask no doubt. I don't know that they even have the time to pause and reflect right now, with their tail chasing their ass.

They certainly seem to need more employees.

Who wants to move to Poland?

That would indeed be a factor.

And certain markets. Take China for instance, with a huge customer base.

Thanks.

I do think for games that are not no-brainers to list, the subjective tastes of the curators do play a bigger role than they would probably admit.
And also GOG have sometimes justified rejections based on what they thought the audience would not be interested in.
And they later had to admit they were wrong :-)

See VNs, see HOGs - it took GOG ages to realize that even people who eat shooters on nightmare difficulty and 200+ hours RPGs for breakfast might occasionally be interested in something more casual. A lot of old grumpy gamers here that I know - me included - had a lot of fun with the Artifex Mundi games for instance - and I really hope they will bring another batch (a dozen or so...) sometime soon - cheesy stories, nice artwork, puzzles that are either mindbending or silly - I love this shit. :-)

VNs GOG only embraced because Valve in some bout of madness tried to remove all the (mildly) "adult" stuff, before they did a complete 180° and said "anything goes unless it's outright illegal". But that first "get rid of titties" announcement prompted GOG into "we'll have you if Steam doesn't" when before that they were like "our customer don't want that". Now there's a constant supply, even if it's a small trickle compared to Steam of course. Which probably means the stuff sells maybe not tons of units, but well enough.

I do think curation is hard, because you'll never satisfy everyone. For every game released somebody screams "why is this here when game XY was rejected". On the other hand curation on GOG is necessary, because GOG actually supports the games they sell - you want to get it to run support will try to help you (and right now they are rather quick again - had a minor thing with Galaxy - not even a plot stopper, just a UI logic thing - and got an answer within a few hours).
And also I think while the build process for the offline installers - the reason why I use GOG in the first place - certainly has been automated more since they started, I do think there still is quite a lot of manual work required - for dependencies and stuff like that. A game is not only the game files, they also need to check VC-dlls (possibly special versions), PhysX-Drivers and stuff like that, and install those if necessary. I don't think that can be automated easily, and then it has to be tested - on a clean PC, or several, every time.

So what Ye-Olde-Red-Dragon proposed is simply not possible for GOG - on Steam the devs push their game through the client by themselves, no need for building and testing standalone installers, and support from Valve for getting single games to run is pretty much unheard of. Both approaches have their ups and downs, certainly.

Thanks for this.

I presume there's a centrifuge, and a bucket of darts involved. And possibly a monkey.

You forgot alcohol and a blindfold.

And a blindfold.

Once again, great response.

Curation certainly wouldn't be an exact science, and like you say, probably effected by the odd bias.

I am sure there are more factors than those you and I and others have already listed.

I think reputation of provider was mentioned, and of course that could come from a variety of sources.
GOG seemingly avoid controversy etc if they can, and so probably just politely refuse a provider, without necessarily saying the real reason why.

There are certainly some game providers here, who don't appear to provide their product here with good intentions. Just an ultimate lure to buy (again even) at Steam due to frustration.

We have incomplete games, that are quite telling when more advanced versions, sometimes complete versions are available elsewhere. Bugfix updates are missing in many cases, that do exist on Steam etc.

GOG rarely ever seem to bother defending themselves, which can of course look bad in the eyes of some, whose imagination runs riot, always assuming the worst. Look at the ridiculous over-reaction by a good many about the Devotion game, and people are still posting about it. I'm even beyond rolling my eyes now ... just mild background noise.

It doesn't make sense to alienate providers or customers, but sometimes I guess it can't be helped. At the end of the day, GOG are a store that wants to survive, and from what I have seen, will try to stick as close to its DRM-Free mantra as it feasibly can, while still providing great games. Clearly with MP for instance, it isn't always possible.

GOG are on a journey.
Providers are on a journey with GOG.
Customers are on a journey here with both.

Where we will end up eventually, is anyone's guess.

I don't attribute deliberate ill intent by GOG, just possibly bad decision making sometimes or market forces and survival. At the end of the day, all the GOG personnel are human just like the rest of us. So mistakes happen and shit happens, and flaws exist that can be taken advantage of. Misunderstandings are in abundance. None of us are perfect, and some of us live in glass houses.

Absolutely, and even more so when people are forced to work from home (which hampers communication) and possibly with kids around who need help with home-schooling and stuff... I've been in this situation for months now.

People always assuming the worst and malintent - that's a sign of the times I guess (I'm still more of a Hanlon's Razor guy). But GOG could and should work against that - and the best and easiest way would be to make it more visible that there are actual people at work, and it's not just an anonymous company moving in mysterious ways. And that is easily done by encouraging the employees to be more present here on the forums, taking part in (harmless) discussions or forum games.
That the community would cherish that is easily seen: Almost every Blue post that is not about some announcement or forum policing is high-rated - people are grateful when GOG staff shows their faces here. And it creates a consciousness that we are dealing with normal people here, gamers, and not just some faceless storefront out for our monies.
It used to be like that in the old days, when people Firek or Judas would join discussions or silly fun. Nobody would expect staff to openly talk about internals, but showing some presence and at least acknowledging some of the community's worries would at least lessen the distance between the company and the customers. Without communication there's too much room for speculation and wild theories - things people nowadays seem to get easily obsessed about.

I feel the radio silence policy has lessened a bit in the last few weeks. I really hope GOG can get their act together and work on their communication more. Neglecting communication turns the relationship between parties sour - making it even harder to re-engage in talking with each other.

Yep a bit more transparency and communication could go a long way to greater harmony, and may even mend some fences and build some bridges.

I guess having GOG employees openly chat in the forum, has its challenges. Being a GOG employee doesn't automatically qualify you as the brightest spark in the room.

Sometimes saying nothing is better than saying something.

Communication is a tricky business at the best of times. That relies as much on the talker as the listener. Some are only good at one, some at neither. And of course, that is complicated even more when you have people here from different places around the world. All too easy to mis-communicate.

Honestly GOG have to be admired for tolerating such an open robust forum. I don't recall ever coming across a forum as tolerant as this one.

Well, I guess 'curation' includes a guesstimate of the revenue the game in question might bring. By gut feeling of the employee who happens to be tasked with the decision. Then a decision, whether the employee in question likes the developer/publisher. And then the roll of a die.