Voted.

I agree at least a little bit more of transparency would be good.

Bare minimum a list of rejected titles, so people can try to persuade GOG / Rights Owners that their rejection may have been too early / eager (thar's how we got Huniepop here, so it might as well work for other titles, but this is hard without a basic list of titles, even if for the beginning it would just be titles that got a close "No", rather than a big one).

Well i've voted, fat lot of good it'll do though, it's not like anyone in charge actually reads the forum or uses the wishlist.

"Too niche for our customers!"

said a company that sells A boy and his Blob xDDDD

And yet another guy throwing out a random title for some unfathomable reason to prove a point that's moot to being with.
It's starting to get tiresome.
And what is niche about a classic platformer?
A boy and his blob

"Too niche for our customers!"

The proper way of proving that wrong would be to buy the rejected games somewhere else and showing buying details here then.

That sounds like a good solution. That way everyone who wanted to buy it here could do so but without bothering all those who don't want to buy it or be bothered by it.

I don't know, maybe the fact that nobody's buying it.

Games can flop, yet that doesn't mean they're niche.

Niche games are does targettd to a niche audience. Basically, even if they do well, they won't sell that much. But there's also a myriad of reasons why a game can flop, even when there should be many puzzle platformer players. A price above expectations could be one. The oversaturation of games is another, that I think is spreading through every game genre. Most people have huge game backlogs because of sales culture, and that same sales culture is decreasing lauch purchases, except for heavy marketed games, or critic favourites.

And that is why I think targeting a niche market is a good strategy. They're usually more faithful and there's less saturation. It won't make anyone rich, but will probably work out for the developer (a distributor of digital games should care either way).

Sorting GOG's game list by bestselling shows that there are several other games that sold less...

deleted

So you agree with me that games like Legend of Grimrock are not niche just because they're not bestsellers on Steam?

I can't say first person RPG games are a niche on GOG. Or dungeon crawlers.

Legend of Grimrock was a huge success in steam.

Release date: Apr 11, 2012
Price: $14.99
Score rank: 93%
Userscore: 95%
Metascore: 82%
Owners: 930,685 ± 21,344

It's very thin the line between flop and huge financial success. And more often than not it's not just about good games (although bad games seldom are). If a game like Thomas Was Alone (not in GOG because it was to pricey for the "gog of yore", and Tom Bethell thought it deserved his price tag, as far as I remember) made it, any other good game can. With the proper critic/youtuber push.

Just for reference:
Release date:
Nov 12, 2012
Price: $9.99
Score rank: 93%
Userscore: 95%
Metascore: 77%
Owners: 812,239 ± 19,945

I miss-wrote. I meant the Fall of the Dungeon Guardians not being niche just because it doesn't sell.

dungeon crawlers are definitely not a niche on GOG.

Still why bothering with niche at all if niche would not imply that the chance of flops is much higher?

I'm sure many a good game that GOG rejects will be financially successfull. For GOG only the money should matter, they should only reject games where they think that there won't be any profit. (And actually how can they know that.) Being niche is surely one aspect but in the end GOG is just guessing (and replying with generic statements - it seems).

The better approach would be to improve the guessing, possibly by taking customers preferences into account better, possible by letting customers decide partly (or fully).

GOG's acceptance is frustrating because it leaves out many successfull games. I don't really care about the explanations they give, but I care about the mistakes they make. It's kind of frustrating for the consumer but even more so for the developers of good games.

Apparently, after Cinders, we won't get Solstice either:

https://twitter.com/TomGrochowiak/status/694825237532262400
(check the conversation, not the initial tweet)

Additionally, a Boy and his Blob is a remake of a classic game.

I thought one of the things the GoG community kept demanding was more classic games.

It's only a remake, but it's entirely possible the developers or publishers wouldn't give the rights to the original, or that the original is so outdated that even GoG's team can't make it work anymore

The new version may have been their only option. Better to have a remade/re-imagined version of a classic game then have none at all