But this isn't a "one time accident". It happens constantly. Bad and broken games are approved and the good ones are rejected all the time. Approving half-finished, bugged games is not a matter of taste and banning whole genres from the site (without telling anyone about it, because "MYSTERY") is ridiculous and in my opinion is, indeed, "extreme".

That argument doesn't really hold. GOG has to do relatively little for such a new release so the ROI should be pretty good even if the game didn't sell like gangbusters. Some money is better than no money.

Conclusion: I guess GOG doesn't like money. =P

Quality reception of course is subjective, at least to some degree. That's why you do not let a single person decide about it. For games which generally get more than 90% positive ratings and reviews the quality should be out of question though.

It's not about if I like a game or not, it's about how a game is rated in general. And yes, when they reject a game which is rated overly positive everywhere else, they are extreme.

So the features I proposed are missing. People are right to complain, and there's an opportunity here (although I doubt the masses care enough to look at another store).

The thing is, though, anyone with half a brain can figure out Opus Magnum is not shovelware. It's not a borderline case; it's not even close to a borderline case. The game friggin' oozes quality. Furthermore, shovelware doesn't get "Overwhelmingly Positive" on Steam with nearly 1000 reviews. 24 of those are Steam curator reviews and none of them are negative.

It is firmly my opinion that anyone who would fail Opus Magnum should not be curating games (or at least not that category of game).

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No, not really. Wishlist voters are in the tens of thousands at least, which means that 400 is a tiny, tiny fraction of the wishlist voter group. So even controlling for the smaller base group of wishlist voters doesn't make 400 enough votes to expect a return on the game.

That's not even getting into the people who vote for a game and then wind up not buying.

GOG should be more honest in their rejection letters and just say that they don't expect the game to make a profit for them, sure. But they have good reason to expect the game not to break even.
GOG does significantly more than Steam, because of the DRM-free installers that need packaging and the greater employee involvement with writing up release blurbs and doing testing for multiple operating systems.

GOG's release process has to include these steps:
-Package up DRM-free, Galaxy-free installer, either themselves or bugging the dev into doing it
-Test on 7, 8, 10, Linux, Mac operating systems
-Get any bugs fixed by the dev so the game works, or develop workarounds
-Train support staff on common issues with the game
-Write up release blurbs and get everything packaged for the release
-Release the game

These happen for all games, otherwise they couldn't guarantee anything and they would be just like Steam.

Also, GOG has limited release slots, instead of just releasing whenever the dev wants like Steam. There are good and bad points to both strategies, but it does mean that GOG isn't going to take every game. They want to make sure they are releasing games that are worth their while and that there isn't another game they could release that would make them more money.

Steam's release process has none of that. Steam doesn't guarantee support of games on multiple operating systems or test the games themselves, Steam doesn't package individual installers, etc. GOG releases take much more work than Steam releases. So it makes perfect sense for GOG to reject games they don't think will have an audience on GOG.

The other thing that people are overlooking is the competition. If a game genre on GOG has lots of games in it already, or had a recent release, I suspect they are much less likely to approve new releases in that genre. That's again a function of GOG's different process.

We love the DRM-free and guaranteed support! But it has costs to GOG, and it's perfectly sensible for GOG to say that some games aren't going to earn back the money spent on releasing them.

Came here to post this. I rely on GOG and pay them for discovery (the flipside of promotion). That's why I show up here almost daily and buy a ton of new releases and even in-dev games based only on a couple of screenshots. If their curation results in them rejecting obvious masterpieces, I'm going to stop relying on them, stop making those "impulse" purchases, and if it happens often enough, they will lose money, market share and rep.

(I don't meant it in a "aw, you rejected my favorite game? I'll show you, I'll show you all, muahahaha" way but "oh, a new release? looks shiny, instabuy" naturally changing to "oh, a new release? never heard of it, I'll wait for reviews... which I'm too lazy to google... whatever")

Votes for old AAA games and new indie games aren't on the same scale, and notbuyers voting on name recognition are more of a "problem" for old games (barring an organized raid). Hell, even some extraordinarily popular AAA games look like failures:

Nier Automata has 1600 votes.
Dragon Age 2 has 1600 votes and some wish duplication, for an estimated total of about 2000.

Indie games are generally not doing great:

They Are Billions, 102 votes
Northgard, 287 votes
( ^ Steam keeps shilling for these two.)

Pyre, the alleged omgwtfbbq masterpiece, 593 votes
our man jefequeso's Dusk, 245 votes (go vote)

"500 votes is too few" is basically an argument against releasing any new indie games, and we know it's wrong because GOG does release new indie games.

edit: I also suspect the super high vote count for indies, where it happens, wouldn't imply a runaway success for GOG either -- by the time such a game shows up, it'll have been bundled and rebundled and largely forgotten.

This reminds me of 4e, when the dickhanded devs cut out the "unpopular" options from the initial release, and then it turned out (what a shock) gaming groups contain more than 1 person, and if one player's character is emphatically not supported, the group as a whole has no reason to downgrade to a new edition.

This is also what keeps killing large automated brick-and-mortar bookstores.

GOG isn't supposed to be in the black on each release, they're supposed to be in the black overall and have that black get larger in absolute figures. That thing where I check GOG each day for a new release to maybe buy is completely different from a dynamic when I learn about a popular release elsewhere and look for a store to buy it at. The former, more good games has a multiplicative effect on bestsellers, too. The latter is a death spiral, and it's going to look supersparklypositive if the metric is "what share of the releases is selling well" - it'll turn GOG into yet another box to maybe check on isthereanydeal.

Well GoG started a New Year's Resolution Sale so I think the bestest resolution would be reverse your decision about this game?

Thank you Starmaker. Agree with you 100% on every sentence.

We all know the hard work behind classic games, but is there any place where someone from GOG has explained what needs to be done for a new game? Maybe that would help us understand the necessity and logic (or lack of) behind the curation process.

They've stated in the past that every game has to go through testing, and for indie or new games sometimes they find bugs the dev needs to fix.

GOG guarantees support because they do their own inhouse testing. That's for every game, not just old ones. They wouldn't provide the support guarantee without the testing. The process for new games is a bit shorter than for old games but not by much, because they follow the same procedure for every game.

Does anyone has friends, colleagues, people you know who work(ed) or have experience with curating games in a distributional context? It would be nice to know which reasons could be possible which lead to such a rejection.

One argument surely is:
- The game is just buggy, not fun, has terrible graphics and thus not meets our standards. But of course, this can't be a reason with Opus Magnum.
- This game is a mobile game can't be a reason aswell, as many have pointed out games, which are clearly mobile-like, but *are* on GOG.

But did anyone has experience which other kinds of possible reasons there are in everyday business? GOG hints that they are (can be) subjective ones. But of what kind?

I am aware that these are things which are kept secret, just like GOG does. But maybe whoever can tell something about it, can do it in a general way so just to enlighten everyone, how curation works in the game business?

Considering how buggy some releases have been over the years I'm not very confident in the testing department then.