I've been in and out of the Community Forms before. Recently I've been cleaning up old CD's (games) to par down what I have physically and convert them over into GOG.

I was going to add, but found that my wishlists, were already listed by others; Star Trek TNG: A Final Unity & Star Trek: TNG: Birth of Federation.

What I'm wondering is, how many votes need to occur before a game is put into GOG? Or considered to be put in GOG?

A Final Unity has close to 5000 votes and it's been a request for many years. But it hasn't made its way into the library yet.

So does a wishlist item have certain criteria met before it can become a GOG game? I didn't see anything mentioned to this and thought I would ask.

If GOG ever officially explained its procurement system RE wishlisted games, I've never seen the post.

Basically we treat it as a "we hope GOG sees this and the game ends up here" sort of thing. So it's ... yeah ... it's a list of customer wishes. GOG's not obligated to do anything about our wishes, and it may/may not be a regular thing for staff to check them. Who knows.

I think they still occasionally look at the more popular wishes and the staff responsible for approaching publishers directly do try to get the ball rolling, but ultimately it's always up to the owner of the IP whether anything happens. A lot of requested games WON'T appear here until the IP rights are sorted out, or the owner lets the game be resold again. I'd say as it stands now more games arrive by the publisher approaching GOG first rather than the other way around. But that's just my guess.

So don't hold your breath waiting for a wished game to appear. You can of course persist and petition GOG yourself to get some movement, but wishlists are very passive and not guaranteed to get any traction imho.

There is no correlation whatsoever between votes on wishlst and what is added here.

It doesn't. It's just a symbolic heads up for the occasional "hey gog, did you know this game is popular ?".

It also allows gog to say to a publisher "hey look a lot of people would like this game", allowing the publisher to answer "lol don't care".

It's an element of conversation. Like a poll on a forum.

(Some people seem weirdly bitter about the existence of the Community Wishlist. :P I like it as something quantitative to rally around.)

The wishlist is useful for GOG knowing what games would likely be financially worthwhile to bring. Granted in the case of old games it surely corresponds with what games have already sold well in years past, but I think it can still be somewhat meaningful today. IMO Lucy Dreaming showed up thanks to the wishlist votes rising quickly, and Return to Monkey Island may have been helped by getting 2.5+k votes in a quick timeframe. I believe the first Huniepop showed up too thanks to gather 1k+ votes in a short timeframe. He was already interested in the game, but I believe Stephen Kick of Nightdive Studios was spurred on to work on re-releasing System Shock 2 by seeing the high number of Community Wishlist votes (I recall reading that in an article but I don't have a source; somebody can correct me).

Here's the key thing: if the publisher doesn't want to release the game here, or GOG can't figure out (like who owns what part of a game) or fix (like getting multiple parties to cooperate for a re-release) the complex messy legal situation, the number of votes absolutely does not matter. It seems the Dwarf Fortress devs don't want to bother with a GOG release unfortunately despite the votes steadily rising, EA's license/contract with Tolkien Estate or Middle-earth Enterprises expired so they can't sell Battle for Middle Earth anymore, Microsoft doesn't want to bother putting the Fables here, Black & White rights are split between EA and Microsoft, etc.

Now of course things can change and wishlist entries might help slightly depending on the situation, but if GOG can't convince a party or parties to release here, there's nothing they can do. GOG remains of course much smaller than Steam so they are a low priority for many devs and pubs especially AAA ones.

In years past technical issues were the holdup for some releases also, but I don't think that's really the case anymore.

edit: here's a fun thing: browse the Wishlist sorted by "most voted (ever)". Is the number of "completed" higher or lower than you'd expect?

Some games don't have (m)any votes at all when they're added. Was just checking the list to see if Lollypop was completed but it only had 109 votes. I didn't add in the votes for the CD version because I figured GOG would have chosen that by default.

Both entries on the list need to be marked as complete.

I think maybe GOG can use it in negotiations with publishers to show interest in a game. But other than that it's a minigame, there's no threshold that a game must reach to be included.

With what's listed there its actually a good haul. A good few of them are in IP Hell, so I see why they're not here, and most of the others that are unfulfilled are controlled by very DRM Heavy companies.

The wishlist works in the same way god works.
You have to believe in it - then it will fulfill your wishes/prayers.
And just like with god, you can affect the odds to your favour.
Simply make a wishlist entry for every game that ever existed.
Then let people know that you created these wishlist entries, so those who are interested, can vote for the games they like.
After that - whenever a game finds its way onto GOG - the voters/believers can praise the mighty wishlist for it.
While ignoring all the games that don't make it here, though also being on the wishlist.
See? Just like god.
Always praised whenever something good happens - but never blamed when something bad happens (or simply the good thing one hopes for, is not happening).

;)

GOG made a thread recently where they talked about the Community Wishlists, and how even they (GOG Staff) use them to vote for games they want at GOG.

They talked a bit about the process of acquiring such voted for games, all the issues involved, including licensing and tracing current owners, and even the difficulty in getting some games to work on latest Windows etc.

In any case, it was clear, that the number of votes does not guarantee anything other than how hard they will try to get such highly voted for games. They made it very clear though, that the votes do matter.

So it is all down to degree of difficulty, whether we get highly voted for games here.

P.S. You would of course need to couple that with certain agendas GOG might have ... like variety and not too much of one type of game at a time, etc. All that means is a likely added delay in some or many cases.

There have been a few games they changed their mind about but the only one I can think of is Opus Magnum.

This one?
Quite sure Grimoire is another.

Or the granny dating game, which I'm not sure anyone asked for.

Which was a mistake, it turns out.

I'm just glad the authors of Hatred directly insulted Poland, so it'll never come here.