Hi, welcome to the forums. :) This sort of question gets asked fairly often for the most part. The way that games show up for sale on GOG is basically one of 3 ways:

1) The game publisher/developer contacts GOG and initiates communication about wanting to sell their game on GOG, then GOG decides whether they would like to sell that game in their store. If both parties want to do this, and the publisher agrees to providing their game DRM-free under GOG's standard requirements and they can come to a mutual agreement, then the game may appear in the GOG store some time after that. Games almost always will require some amount of tweaking at a minimum but may require quite a bit of work to make them available on GOG such as would be the case with most new AAA titles that are generally very tightly integrated into Steamworks. Such games would require removal of Steamworks and either ship standalone or integrate with Galaxy APIs as optional game features.

2) The same as #1 above, however GOG takes the initiative to reach out to the game publisher and/or developers themselves. GOG has been around now for 8+ years or more however and if there is a game publisher out there or a developer that's alive, then GOG has probably already reached out to the biggest of them and probably a large number of smaller ones with popular titles too.

3) There is significant demand for a game (usually very old games) by the GOG community but after years of trying to track down the rights owners and sort out the plethora of ownership and other legal issues, GOG may purchase the rights to the game outright or fully license it and publish it themselves, such as the case for the SSI gold box D&D games and many other old D&D titles.


In all cases, regardless of the game in question, whether it is old or new, unheard of or highly popular AAA title, if GOG can't track down the rights owners of a game and get them interested enough in sorting out any legal issues and negotiating terms, or if the legal owners are simply not known, or if they no longer have the game source code or assets anymore (they've been lost in a fire for example), or if the publishers/developers simply do not agree to GOG's terms and conditions (such as DRM-free for example), or if GOG doesn't agree with the publisher/dev's terms, or doesn't think the game is a good fit for their curated catalogue, or doesn't think it will sell in volume to be worthwhile, or a number of other things - then the game probably wont show up in the GOG store.

GOG continuously goes in search of old titles, and talks to all the big AAA companies at tradeshows etc. so they're constantly trying to bring new content old and new here to the store. I too think it would be great to see more brand new AAA titles sold on GOG, but until the AAA game publishers start embracing DRM-free gaming readily it is just not going to happen. That is the first major roadblock right there and that is something largely outside of GOG's hands other than to keep communicating and showing statistics of the success they have already. By doing so over the years, that got GOG to bring on board:

- Disney / LucasArts
- Bethesda
- Warner Brothers
- various others

Those companies haven't embraced the GOG business model with all of their game titles old and new of course, but they've managed to get these companies to stick their toe in the door which is a good start. There is a distinct increase in both the number of big name publishers/developers, and the number of big name games coming to GOG over time, and so we're rather likely I believe to see this trend continue far into the future until perhaps we can start to even expect some good number of AAA titles will come right to market here on GOG on opening day. There is a lot that has to be done to get there both from GOG's side of the equation and from the pubs/devs, but it's an ongoing work in progress and each company and even each game is a whole new negotiation each time around.

The bigger problem I believe is that the majority of big name games made in the last 8 years or more are heavily integrated with Steam, and the publishers can't just throw their latest Steam binaries at GOG and say "here, tweak this and ship it". They need to actually allocate several engineers perhaps for several months to re-engineer various parts of their game(s) to make them GOG-shippable, then GOG may need to work with it after that to get it into GOG supportable state (installers, etc.)

It's just not as simple as a mind change and a signed contract and GOG downloading an EXE and shipping it. It's much more involved than that both on the legal side, and engineering, and the publishers wont come here unless they think the return on investment they'll get from GOG is going to be high enough to justify the engineering resources put into the game to make it ready and then to support it after also. But they're going to compare the effort from doing that, with other potential things they could have those same engineers doing instead. If they can allocate 10 engineers to write a whole new game or do something else that puts out a 200% ROI, but they only estimate getting a 30% ROI from GOGifying a game, then business sense would suggest they'll do the 200% ROI thing.

In the end it all comes down to business ROI and risk management, and while ideology is strong on the customer side, it is rarely a big part of the business decision making side of things with the big guys out there anyway.

That's an excerpt of what I think. :)