Or in some cases they might be offered by a profitable publisher GOG didn't want to refuse.

But some indie games releases from a new company puzzled me deeply. It's like the devs were friends with GOG management or something. Some even with 0 or just 3 votes in Community Wishlist.

Again, I agree - it looks nice, colorful.
Yet, in all honesty: so do others. It's really not a standalone feature of this particular game.
He likely requested...
That's the crux here.
Well, if that publisher's games are usually profitable...
Not just you. :)
Don't go by votes on the Community Wishlist - seriously.
Those mean nothing!

Games get released here first and foremost when the devs/publishers have an interest of releasing here and when GOG sees a market for the game (which we as customers don't necessary have to recognize immediately, or be part of ourselves), and if they manage to get it to run on modern systems (in case of old games).

And if these two (three) prerequisites are met - a game gets released here.
Whether it has 0, 1, 362, 4973 or 40963 votes on the CW.

1. By that I meant that good profitable publisher might have a very niche or unsucessful game no one really wants, but that publisher has a long standing relationships with GOG and most of the other games are decent. So refusing a *bad game* might bring some stress into such business dealings which GOG might want to avoid.

2. Yes, nothing to add here ;)

3. Their meaning is probably insignificant. Sometimes, they surely hold no significance to GOG when it comes to curation. What I meant was that having 0 or 3 votes in the wishlist is unlikely since GOG users are quite loyal. Whenever a new game is released, at least one user would ask for it to be offered on GOG, create a wishlist, vote and ask others to do the same. Having 0 to 3 votes in the wishlist might not mean anything for potential sales and the GOG curation team, but it always amazes me how sometimes a new game is released on GOG which was not requested or voted for by GOG users prior to its release.

"Good games' is subjective. If curation meant allowing in any game someone in the world thought was good then it wouldn't be curation at all. Which is maybe what you want, I dunno.

I will say the curation aspect of GOG is currently rather pointless. They let so much in it has the same discovery problems Steam does, so why bother? Might just be a way to limit their work though, rather than actual quality curation.

I have always said, and I will continue to say that GOG's curation should be scrapped.
DRM-Free is NOT the standard, so the few DRM-Free stores that do exist, should not act as gate-keepers. Every game deserves to be preserved DRM-Free. What is good or bad is for each player to decide. No one else can be the arbiter of that.

You can vote for the game in the community wishlist. It's currently sitting at 20 votes.
https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/donut_dodo

As I said in my previous post, GOG clearly release games here in measured numbers. In other words, only so many at a time. Presumably that is all they can keep up with. It would then be necessary for them to have some kind of priority, which in many cases could only come from curation.

We certainly don't want all the crud turning up here, and the majority of that would be DRM-Free. I don't want GOG to be another Itch.io or be the mess that is Steam. While DRM-Free is not the standard for AAA or AA games, it mostly is for Indie Games, and there are an awful lot of them.

So while I agree in a theoretical sense that only gamers should be curating for themselves, GOG have to deal with the reality of the real world and running a store and making enough profit etc.

In the end GOG are somewhat responsible for what turns up at their store. Look what happened with Hitman GOTY. I personally think that was rushed and not curated properly. GOG certainly did a backflip after the backlash, and I bet they don't want that to happen again, so they need to curate more carefully, even from AAA and AA game providers.

So every potential game for GOG needs to be investigated properly. And of course that takes a lot of time.

GOG are really between a rock and hard place, where they can only please some customers some of the time.

Making games is challenging. And anyone who successfully releases one has my respect. However...

Donut Dodo is not exactly a game I'd be crying over not getting.

Fallout 4
Delta Force 4-6
Comanche 4
F-22 Lightning II
WH40K (pack coming soon)
Mass Effect bundle or Epic's Legendary.

It's not just Donut Dodo we're talking about, there are tons of great indie retro-inspired titles that would be amazing to have on GOG. Games like Steel Assault, Castle Crashers, and boatloads of amazing shmups like Gunvein and Drainus. There are legions of fans just for that one genre alone, and GOG isn't catering to them one iota.

I'd imagine they're just sitting and waiting for Bethesda to give the go-ahead on a Fallout 4 launch, twiddling their thumbs while approving all the NSFW games in the meantime. It's as if they're saying "Yeah we love old AAA games from a decade ago, but we don't care about the 8/10 indie games that are coming out every month or so, no those don't have a place here sorry".

That has already happened.

In fact, the majority of GOG's catalog is already crud.

Those who are saying GOG curation should be abolished are 100% right. GOG will be full of crap games with or without curation (just as it currently is with curation).

So the only thing that curation actually "accomplishes" is to keep good games off of the GOG store. Therefore there is no sensible reason to keep "curation."

Indeed, there are quite a number of subpar games on GOG. Ideally the company should go one way or the other, either curate the site with games that achieve a certain quality standard, or don't curate at all. The former would actually make GOG stand out compared to Steam and Itch.io, which are largely hands off and suffer as a result. People like to think that a free-for-all approach is better by default, but it really isn't. Because for every decent game released on Steam, there are about 200 other subpar games released alongside it. Retro gamers love to point out that such an approach was the reason the video game crash of 1983 happened, too many games of middling quality that oversaturated the market to it's breaking point.

Heck GOG should have it's own seal of quality, spotlight indies that make something truly special and not just a quick cash grab with low effort pixel art.

I agree, deep discounts do more harm than good. It makes games disposable, and overwhelms the customer with too much choice that may hamper his passion for the hobby. I can't help but wonder if it influenced the industry's preference for microtransactions and DLC. They certainly can't survive on selling their games for $10 or less, they have to find a way to make that money back.

So? Don't buy them. Just ignore them.

A game store with 200 games I don't want for every 2 games I want is better than a game store with 20 games I don't want and none I that want.