Indie Devs maybe, but I seriously doubt any Publishers are spending their time reading the community forums of a digital distribution site.

It might be more effective to send an email

1. it's not old
2. GOG will probably never tell anyone.

I guess this isn't too niche.

So I'm not the only one who immediately thought "Newspapers, Please" upon seeing this and reading the description. I concur that the GOG announcement thread really doesn't portray the game very well - I thought it was going to be a "end of the newspaper era" management sim, but it does sound terribly like "The Republia Times" instead. Don't know if I need another copy of that, and I think I'd rather play the game I initially assumed it was instead.

I always blame Zoidberg for everything. It's good to know I'm right so many times...

Nordic for example is reading the release threads of their games.

But let's not derail the release thread any more. ;)

Well, it looks like a rip-off of a fairly successful indie game. I guess gog just likes to walk on well-trodden paths as far as their indie releases are concerned. Take "The Legend Of Heroes" for instance: Japanese (looking) stuff was pretty much a big no no on this site for the longest time. Then they decided to take a gamble with "The Legend Of Heroes" and it turned out to be a huge success on this site. And now we're suddenly flooded with games with animu visuals.

Please GOG, don't shocked me again :)
I almost thought that you forbid another of your base pillars.

You really haven't paid any attention to what has been going on here for the past several years, have you? It's been years since GOG stood for Good Old Games. They officially rebranded themselves as simply GOG.com long ago. They still release the occasional good old game, but the ones they are missing are so hard to get a hold of now that they cannot focus primarily on that, or they wouldn't be able to get enough releases.

GOG isn't about "good old games" only anymore for a very long time.

http://www.pcgamer.com/good-old-games-maybe-not-so-old-anymore/

http://www.digitalspy.com/gaming/news/a373527/good-old-games-now-offering-newer-games/

At first i thought it was something like a tycoon game (Theme... Newspaper). After i saw what is all about, i steered clear; Don't know if it's a good game or not, I just cannot assume the role of a newspaper editor / journalist. :P

You're not alone. To be honest, I'm getting kind of a sketchy vibe from this game. The art style is so similar that it seems less "homage" and more like an attempt to trick customers into thinking the game shares a pedigree with Papers, Please. Even if that wasn't the intent, it was a reasonably foreseeable outcome and they should have done more to clarify their (lack of) relationship - it looks like at least one news site even initially mistook it as coming from the same creators and then had to publish a correction. On top of that, you've got the release announcement presumably written by the publishers, that mischaracterizies their own game in a pretty significant way. So what the hell is going on with this game?

If anyone's aware of an innocuous explanation for this stuff, please feel free to set me straight - I don't want to cast aspersions on a publisher without justification. But from the two minutes or so of googling that I was willing to put into this, I didn't see any helpful clarifications.

I didn't want to leave the word "innocuous" because I'm not sure this fits the bill from your (or my) perspective. From an article on Vice's Motherboard:

"If this kind of political game as a series of bureaucratic choices sounds familiar, it's because The Westport Independent is heavily influenced by Lucas Pope's Papers, Please, a celebrated indie game that puts you in the shoes of an immigration officer in a fictional Eastern Bloc communist country. Fans of Pope's work might even remember that he made The Republic Times, a game about running a newspaper at one of those countries before the release of Papers, Please.

Strangely, Lundén said they haven't even heard about The Republic Times until they started working on The Westport Independent.

'You can see in Papers, Please how Lucas Pope has taken a lot of what he's learned from Republica Times, so I guess in a way we sort of reverse engineered what he did,' Lundén said. 'They have very similar themes but the gameplay itself and the actual point of the game are a bit different. The core point of Republica is not so much about editing and trying to twist news as it is about saying them and not saying them. Westport is more about taking an article and then turning it to your advantage.'"

Thanks for posting that, but you're right, it doesn't quite fit the bill - it only tells us what we already knew, that the game takes inspiration from Papers, Please. It doesn't account for the strikingly similar art style or the weird press release.