What I'm saying is...
You submitted the game in a certain state. I'm not going to use terms like Early Access, or complete, or whatever because they mean different things to different people. I've played Alphas that played better than some people's finished games. You know which release state (version) you submitted.

If at some point you can look at the current build, and looking back at the submitted build, say honestly, this game has significantly improved since then, at that point maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to re-submit it. And I say this because I did look and see the constant updates.

Because at the end of the day, GoG decided the build they originally saw would not be a fit for the catalog. Maybe they would reconsider a game after it has improved. I don't know, but you wouldn't either without trying.

It was not a question of quality. As Manutoo pointed out earlier, GOG gives stock explanations with their refusal, and they do let the dev know if the quality is not there. He was refused because, in their words, it's "too niche for our users". That's all. If they had misgivings about the game not being up to their quality standards, they would have said so.

@RWarehall,
ok, I see better what you mean now. Thanks for the tip, and I'll remember it if the game gets significantly bigger ! :-)
I'm having the idea of adding a Rogue mode to it so if I ever manage to do that, it could be the addition that makes the difference. (the idea has been implemented in my brain by Rogue fans in the Steam forums... ;-) )

Say what you want, its semantics. GoG was being nice. Overall, it's still a rejection, so on some level it did not meet GoG's quality standards given the overall picture including price, and thus expected sales.

"Too niche for our users" is GoG's way of saying "You are a nice guy, but..."

the "quality standards" could also just as likely be who-ever received the game to go "nah, don't like this". It is very unclear exactly what those "quality criteria" actually are.

I think this is complete nonsense. It is quite a standard contract in business. One party promises to buy a product at a certain price if a certain condition is meet, the other party promises to sell a product for a certain price if the same certain condition is meet. This is quite a normal thing.

Foremost it requires work. A programmer who actually programms a bit. Not much more.

I think you have not understood me at all. I exactly do not trust GOG to make a good prediction of what I want to buy. I could not trust them less. Right now they decide what is on the menu. I propose that I decide what is on the menu. If you cannot understand the difference I guess I cannot say anymore to make it clearer because I already made this point extremely in the last posts.

If there is one point I stressed a lot lately here then that it might be better to let customers choose instead of letting GOG employees decide. Why can't people understand that?

GOG would decide for a threshold which makes the release worthwhile for them. This would be just a fixed number depending on their operating costs, just a requirement, no direct decision for or against any game. The customers would decide what they want to buy. The game would be released exactly under the condition that enough buyers gather together. Good example for something similar would be [Groupon](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupon) who also do not break about 117 consumer protection laws.

NO. Customer rights != B2B contract law. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. Literally the first thing I learned when I got hired by a law firm is to never fall for noncompliance clauses (like a penalty for not buying something you expressed an intention to buy) in my private life because those are strictly a B2B thing and the local equivalent of FTC will wipe your company off the face of the earth if you put one in a contract with a human.

Again. You say you'd graciously allow GOG to set a number which makes a release worthwhile. Good.
Why do you think this number exists at all?
You want to set a "you must be this tall" bar.
When set too low, it allows in a flood of crap.
When set too high, it prevents obscure good games from being released.
Why do you think "too low" is lower than "too high"?

And if you do allow for GOG to release games out of their own free will, disregarding the small number of votes, then, okay, the threshold is $TEXAS now. Happy pledging.

My ideas for today.

If GOG wants GOG can of course use their gut feeling for deciding which game comes here and which not - after all it is their business. But if they are clever too, they will also use some statistics to check if they are on the right track.

What would a statistical test look like:

1. General threshold too high/low

Just accept some games randomly (throwing some dice) and see if they fare equal/better/worse than the manually selected ones. If they do not fare much worse, you could save the work for selecting because there is not much additional value in it. Also the difference in income for a randomly selected game versus a hand picked game kind of tells you if your acceptance threshold is too high/low. Depending on how much profit you make you could then estimate if the profits get more when setting the threshold higher or lower. This could gauge the overall acceptance rate.

2. Harden yourself against bias

For each game you release rate the game on a number of characteristics (niche - mainstream, low graphics quality - high graphics quality, short game - long game) which you think are relevant for the financial success and should determine the acceptance rate and then when you have the sales data correlate the sales with the initial judgement. The correlation formula (if there is any correlation) should give you naturally an estimate of the expected financial success for the next game that asks to be published. Also it is an indirect way of taking the customer into account. In particular make sure that some characteristics like genre etc. do not play too much of a role, otherwise you might be biased in this regard. If a game is profitable it should be on GOG regardless of the genre, niche/mainstream, ...

3. Do reject games only temporarily

Based on the knowledge of 2) you can surely instead of just rejecting tell developers/publishers what are the missing pieces for making their game a financial success. So instead of just rejecting it write something like:

"We are sorry, we cannot release your game XYZ right now. In our estimation the publication would be a high risk. Your game is very niche. While this is not a bad thing per se and many good games are niche, this together with the problems in stability of your game and short length severely inhibits potential sales. A more smooth and longer experience might be better suited. In case your game gets further development we would be happy to reevaluate it and consider it again for a possible release on GOG."

Or something along these lines...

I have been playing this game (Fall of dungeon Guardians) since it came out on steam. Yes I bought it on steam. I would have preferred a DRM free version from GOG but if they don't have it steam it is. I find this game far superior to legends of grimrock 1/2. The combat system is vastly better. Its much more tactical and less twitchy. The puzzles make sense and their map and secret system is also far for enjoyable (and fair)

In short its the best DM type game out there with modern interface and excellent graphics and more re-playable.

What is GOG waiting for ?. If they wait till everyone that wants to get this game gets it on steam its far too late. If they want to sell these games they have to jump on them on day 0.

That is one of the worst thing about GOG. They do not bring games to market or they don't bring their DLCs or they are slow on updates (or by the time they do bring them I finished playing the game 6 months ago). The competition (steam) does none of these things. The DRM free only gets you so far you have to at least not suck on other things too.

To say one or two good things about GOG: They are still much smaller than Valve. They may just not have the cost structure and the resources to bring out as many games. It may be Valves strategy to just outpublish GOG and given that they start from the pole position they may well succeed, as your example seems to indicate.

However I agree that it looks like GOG never invested much into getting Indie games here. It may even be smart. GamersGate for example did just bring every possible game and nothing good it did to them.

Let's say there come another 200 really bad games to GOG, what would be the effect? Not much additional sales from these games but maybe even less sales from the other good games which might then be more difficult to find. You don't really want to have too many bad games in your catelogue, do you?

The question is how can they have more good games faster and how can they avoid more bad games (if they want that)?

They have to think about that. It's in their own interest.

GOG's curation, although flawed like any curation inevitably will be, is very good. It''s part of what makes GOG a better place for consumers. If a game is on GOG, chances of it being trash is pretty small.

Saying that GOG only cares about games that will make them a lot of money is really unfair. Just recently, they published all these D&D games, which is not something a strictly money-driven company would even consider doing.

The Community Wishlist serves the purpose of giving GOG a decent idea of what users would like to see on the store. It could be improved in many ways, but it's a much safer system than something like Steam Greenlight.

Direct democracy on the internet does not work. Through online polls, we've seen Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf be chosen as the most beautiful man on the planet, the L block be elected the best character ever, many trash games be approved for sale on Steam and many other examples of ironic/biased/terrible decision making.

The Community Wishlist is a far better system than Steam Greenlight. There is enough of a disconnect between it and the actual store front to prevent certain unhealthy practices, like developers/publishers giving out keys in exchange for votes.

I hope GOG stays on course and doesn't give in to what obviously seems to be a vocal minority. It's better to miss out on a good title now and then rather than to have a bloated library infested with scams like Steam. If anything, they should create incentives for GOG users to participate more on the Community Wishlist.

Another +1 for GOG's curation.

Have they skipped games that I would buy? Of course. But I think they probably have pretty good reasons for most of their skips and those reasons become increasingly apparent as time goes by and the games get feedback from elsewhere. WHY NO SELL ON GOG? Oh, it's actually shit. Have their been mistakes? Only GOG could say. :)

I like this idea quite a bit. Curation doesn't have to be everything or nothing, and this would seem to strike a balance quite nicely between providing ample offerings while maintaining quality standards for what is offered and making sure the site doesn't fill up with dreck.

You are not reading me. GOG tells the developer the exact reasons why the game was refused. They have stock templates for this. Someone whose game didn't have high enough production value got a refusal that said so. Manutoo got a rejection letter that said his game was too niche for us. That's the reason why his game was refused, not quality. If quality was the problem, his template refusal e-mail would have said so, because that's what GOG does. I don't know about anyone else, but I find it strange and somewhat unsettling that a game like this gets rejected at GOG for being too niche.