Those look fun. I was initially put off by the simplistic look of The Quest, but after having read up on it a bit, I'm sold. Voted.

I was assuming your earlier posts were done half in jest, but I suppose I was wrong.

Telling people to apply for jobs at GOG if they have any criticism is hardly a practical advice, and you know that very well. What you're really saying, I think, is that it is not our business to tell GOG their policies are wrong. And GOG does have the right to set their own policies as they see fit, as I've already said before. But it is our business as their customers to tell them if we don't agree with them, especially when GOG itself has claimed on our behalf that we are not interested in niche games such as these. Customer feedback is not without value, even if GOG may choose to ignore it.

It's not actually impossible to find forumites declaring something too niche to sell on GOG: http://www.gog.com/forum/general_archive/who_would_buy_a_snooker_game has a couple.

Partially, yes. Though some of the forumites might indeed have the required set of skills, I doubt they actively criticize GOG's actions on the matter in question. I believe they would know it isn't always a simple decision and many factors are to be accounted for.
And yes, there's that added touch of "What would you do and how do you know it would be a good/sensible thing to do?"
Good. No, really, that is very good.
Except, you know, we currently only have the dev's part of the story, not both. I do not know what GOG's reasons for declining the game were and if "too niche" was the real reason behind their decision or there was something else. I would listen to what they have to say as well.
Heh. You know, I once tried to trick a blue into talking about their game selecting criteria... boy, was I naive. They just don't tell.

Then again, who knows, maybe there is a future GOG Team member right here, in this thread. :-P

Maybe not impossible but very hard. I wouldn't have found it.

Interesting...I have exactly the opposite reaction as I'm surprised at the number of games I find on GOG that aren't on Steam! I always thought they more or less mirrored each other when it comes to old games, but GOG seems way ahead. My perception these days is that Steam is more of a platform for indie developers--and mods, etc. I got quickly tired of Steam mods because of the fact that if you use any of them then when you start a game all your mods are automatically checked and if there's a new version of a mod it will download and install--without asking. Sometimes it would take minutes to load a game--I stopped that very quickly. Nexus is my go-to for Mods these days.

I think that GOG specializes in old games (as "GoG" implies), whereas Steam really doesn't. Recently for instance, in a case where the games are mirrored, GOG ran the 6 Space Quest games in a sale for ~$5 IIRC, and I checked Steam and they wanted $19.99 for the same games. Only difference is that the Steam version SQ1 is the VGA remake; whereas the GOG version of SQ1 is the EGA original. Bought the GOG package and picked up the SQ1 VGA version for a song elsewhere and saved a lot over the Steam version...

I think it all depends on what you are looking for.

Hope no offense taken by the dev, but looking at this thread and reading between the lines...

My guess is GoG rejected this game because they didn't feel it would sell enough given the $19.99 asking price.. They probably had a lower price in mind after reviewing it. Was it "too niche" for $19.99? Would it have been "too niche" for $9.99?

So the question I ask, "Is this a game that should retail on GoG for $19.99?"
And let me stop you before comparing it to some of the "bad" releases...does it compare favorably to a middle-of-the-road $19.99 game?

It looks like a decent game..is it $19.99 decent? I don't know...and that's probably what GoG was thinking...

You are right, too! GOG has many great titles that aren't on Steam yet. I think they get some good timed exclusive agreements in exchange for getting them to work on modern OSes.

I was speaking of indie games. Lots of times GOG gets them, but later. These days, I mostly just hold out until I can get them on GOG, though.

Isn't price just a question of negotiation, though? If there is a game they would be interested in carrying for a lower price point, I see no reason why they wouldn't simply say so.

In this case, and in many cases, no...
Unfortunately, GoG isn't usually in the position to set the price (unless they are somehow approached first). So once the game is up on Steam or one's own website for $19.99, it's not really feasible for GoG to ask for the price to be lowered.

So I doubt GoG would even ask for it to be lowered when it is clearly already set elsewhere. It's what you get by being the 2nd (or 3rd or 4th) largest online retailer. The rare exception being games that GoG themselves are involved in getting to work on modern machines. In that case, GoG might actually be involved in the price negotiation.

If you have read what I wrote you surely know that I'm very sceptical about these positions. I guess what a single or a small group of persons can do will always be suboptimal in every regard. Noone can predict the future, not even marketing gurus. So why should they even try?

So I would say: you are approaching it from the wrong angle.

Only sales and profit counts, only the opinion of the customer matters, nothing else. Zero jobs for accepting/rejecting potential games on GOG are actually needed if you would do the following:

1. For all games where GOG is not sure they must be on GOG: Have a dedicated section on GOG for very soon to be released games of this category.
2. Collect binding (that's actually the innovation) pre-orders from GOG customers.
3. If a certain threshold is passed, release the game on GOG and execute the pre-orders.
4. If the threshold is not passed, do not release the game, cancel the pre-orders.
5. All valid games (not against laws, for Windows/Mac/Linux, ...) can take part.

That way the customer is the boss and decides what comes to GOG and what doesn't. The threshold is chosen so that GOG can have high hopes that the games makes actually profit for them.

And here is the wishlist entry for it:
http://www.gog.com/wishlist/site/numbers_of_binding_preorders_decides_about_the_acceptance_of_a_game_to_gog_and_nothing_else

I'm just saying it's a two-edged sword. In short, cutting out the b.s. GoG has said they don't currently think your game is good enough as it stood when it was reviewed for the price asked in their curated store.
"It's not you, it's me"
"I just don't think this is working"
"I don't dislike you, I just don't love you"
etc etc

And price is just part of the equation. I followed the link and the game is clearly still under development. My suggestion is you could always consider re-submitting the game later after it has been updated and is in a more final state as well. Maybe it's fluid unfinished nature played a role as well as they have accepted unfinished games in the past which never exactly were finished. Of course, if later the price changes, that could play a role as well. There are a lot of factors. There are also a lot of indie developers and games.

I guess, in short, I'm saying what I've said in a number of other topics just like this...
There are many factors. GoG judged it unworthy as it was presented. There are many factors to the decision and I'm not going to call that decision unwise or "frustrating".

They aren't going to tell you to resubmit it if the price is reduced; or to resubmit it when X is finished, because then its as though they have accepted it conditionally. Just like when job hunting, one rejection from a company doesn't mean you can't submit another resume later. And just as with resumes, if you receive a reply, it's almost always, "You are a qualified candidate, unfortunately you are not what we are looking for at this time". They don't tell you exactly why you are rejected and try to let you down easy.

At the end of the day, I'd guess they compared it to similar games already in the catalog aka Legend of Grimrock and the sequel; and decided that it didn't bring anything new enough to the table (at that price range) to be included.

If you feel the game has increased significantly in value at some point, compared to its state when originally submitted, by all means, you should ask again.

This requires legal work.

This breaks approximately 117 customer protection laws, paypal tos, sets off all the scam alerts ever and then some, and most importantly kills customer goodwill.

And binding? Seriously? Consider The Game That Shall Not Be Named. How many people do you think signed up on GOG just to vote for it? Now it's cool if it's only a vote on the wishlist (all publicity is good publicity, just ask Justine Sacco), but how are you going to enforce payment?

What if the game ends up sucking or a scam (e.g. Dark Matter)? Is it a scheme for "I love it so much I'll buy it again on GOG" headcases, hype-eaters, and pirates? Because GOG's core business strategy for indie releases is neither -- it's advertising releases and making people buy their first copies here, the oft-mentioned boutique approach. The feedback interpretation they use has to accurately portray the tastes and interests of that group first and foremost.

What on earth are you smoking? How can anyone with a brain working full-time decide that to give up the freedom of contract and put it up for an e-vote is a good business decision?

So you do trust GOG to make decisions which bring them profit. But... that's what they've been doing from the start! That's what they are doing right now!

---
As an example, let's consider two examples of games I actually like.
Here's Creeper World 1-3. 1 and 3 are great games, 2 is okayish. However, they cost 9.99, 9.99 and 14.99 respectively. Only 3 looks at all semi-professional, 1 and 2 look like flash games (and in fact require air).

Do you think <span class="bold">looks</span> like a 9.99 game? Especially with the air requirement? [url=http://www.gog.com/game/defenders_quest]Here's an air game which is sold on GOG. See how professional it looks (and the graphics were in fact reworked for a 1.0 release, way after the sales of the content-complete build had commenced).

Note that I'm not asking whether the game is worth 9.99. If you think it does (I do), go and buy it from the dev. But GOG isn't in the business of hosting installers of games I personally happen to like from elsewhere -- I can do it with MEGA for free -- it's in the business of recommending new games to people. GOG can't recommend new games for people to buy and try if they open the floodgates. They're working in the niche that Steam has forfeited by choosing an alternate, mutually exclusive strategy. Once they abandon that niche, they might as well resell Steam keys.

So while the Creeper World games are good, the fact is that they aren't going to show up here other than in a bundle for 9.99 total, with 1 and 2 thrown in as an afterthought. And that's okay.

Now consider DROD. Graphically, these games do look kinda amateurish, but way more stylish and less cheapass-looking than CW, with an incredible community and software infrastructure supporting it. Every puzzle is painstakingly handcrafted, and there are hundreds of them in each game, close to a thousand in TSS. And here are the prices, GOG vs directly from the dev:
1+2+3: 9.99 for all three vs 9.95 each.
4: 9.99 vs 19.95
RPG: 5.99 vs 9.95
5: 19.99 vs 19.95
(Which reminds me, I need to renew my CaravelNet sub.)

TL;DR buy DROD.

@RWarehall,
game is finished. The game isn't Early Access and the negatives reviews aren't about the game being unfinished (usually it's because it's not Grimrock, or too combat oriented, or both).

It's not because the game is finished that I can't make updates to make it better. I spent years doing that on my other games, responding to players feedback... Usually, it's seen as a pro, not a con... :-)