Starbound I'll get some day. Ashes of Singularity looks interesting but I'll wait. If there's something I might even consider now is Curious Expedition as long as it doesn't have unfair difficulty.

I really hope they get The Long Dark, that game oozes survival atmosphere.

This is FAR from Greenlight. If you have compare, compare it with Steam Early Access, except here you get a better refund policy.

Ooh! I've been eyeing The Curious Expedition and hoping it would eventually come to GOG. Can anyone here recommend it?

Correction, Steam has Early access and gog has Games in Development :)

Essentially the same with addition of 14 days refund + curration on gogs side. Otherwise they are essentially the same thing.

Though still no refund quarantee in case the game fails.

Which is why I need to be able to reject the game at that point and get a refund.

It's bad enough that steam murdered the PC middle market with their steam sales, and murdered PC quality standard by selling unfinished games with no guarantee of completion... now other platforms are trying to get a slice of both pies.

I'd rather GOG built up a userbase on being a moral and pro-consumer store, rather then cheap short-term profits via whatever's hot at the moment. Early access proved it's not a healthy model, and unless devs agree to recomp GOG on refunds, or the in-dev refund policy is like Steam's AKA consumer unfriendly, then GOG is putting itself on the edge of financial drop with the possibility of losing a bunch of money if a developmental game is dropped.

If you want extra $$, then take a section of CD Projekt RED that isn't doing much at the moment and give them a smaller budget to make a smaller scale game.

I'm wary of early access, but it could be a good thing if handled properly.
I do hope you're really careful choosing these titles.

That said, the ones you picked as a start look nice!

Also, will we see D:OS2 in this section? I'd like not to have to use Steam for the beta

I'm interested too, but frankly I would be fine with an arrangement that for the beta games, the Galaxy version is updated more often, and the offline installer is updated less regularly.

That even though I don't even use Galaxy at the moment, but I feel if I really wanted to get into these beta games which need constant patching, I would probably opt to use a client for them, simply due to auto-patching.

As a defender of most of GOG's practices...

Offering Early Access games for sale is one that I disagree with.

Completely agree that GOG is in a damned if they do, damned if they don't situation, so I'm not helping things any. But I'm clearly in the damned if they do camp.

Curated lol. Do some of you even know the development hell that is Starbound?

I'd add
7 Days to Die
Empyrion - Galactic Survival
Novus Inceptio
Planet Explorers
Rising World
PULSAR: Lost Colony
The Universim
Vortex: The Gateway

These all look interesting - 7D2D is actually pretty good as it is.

I am not a fan of this.

Ever since that poll GOG had a couple of years ago, it was just a matter of time for Games in Development to be introduced. Enough people seem to be interested in this, and even though I'm not going to partake, I hope this is a success move for GOG.

But I have some concerns, about this and in general about GOG.

For starters, I have to agree with vivalanwo regarding the refund policy - it's just too short to be an effective means of protection for the consumer. Games in development often change direction, and what may be appealing at the time of purchase, may no longer be after several updates well after the refund period. What happens then?

And there seems to be no measure in place in case devs abandon their games, in general or worse here on GOG (we already have cases of finished games where the devs/pubs treat GOG users as second class customers).
And as MaGo72 pointed out, Project Zomboid is a prime example of a game that had its non-Steam version abandoned.
So I have to wonder, in general, how committed these devs are to support, update and finish their games in par with their Steam versions, and if there are any clauses binding them to not abandon GOG users after having collected their money.
And before anyone jumps in to say "no-one's forcing one to partake" - true, but I'd think that at least one reason people support games still in development is because they want to see them finished.

Of equal, if not more concern is the strain this new endeavour will put on GOG Support and GOG staffers in general. I only hope that GOG is fully prepared and will manage to deal with the increased workload, and I sure hope that standalone updates of fully released games won't suffer from delays introduced by games-in-development taking priority.


On a side note - I see that the pages of the Games in Development include a link to each game's specific forum. Since this feature is clearly nth difficult to implement, I'd say it's high time it's added to all game pages.

Cool. Early Access on GOG.