Not for games that absolutely no one are buying or interested in on Steam...
Of course certain genres probably sell better here than average. Guess who knows that and by about how much? Answer: GoG. That still doesn't mean you take the most poorly advertised, most poorly selling games of that genre. And even though Steam doesn't release exact figures, there are ways to tell how popular a game is. How many actual reviews? How many peak concurrent players? Whether the game cracks out of the bottom tier on Steamspy for estimated number of games sold. And one needs to take into account whether the game was given away free in the past and has appeared in bundles (many games to a $1) to artificially inflate those figures.

The problem is that some of you people make a completely unsupported claim that these games are going to be great sellers here, despite being available elsewhere for years and failing...

You're argument can be summed up in one word, "niche". GoG is a niche storefront. They cater to people who prefer to buy games DRM free. The fact that it is a niche market means that the pool of potential buyers is automatically smaller. Arguing that a game will sell better at a niche storefront over the industry leading storefront just doesn't make sense.

Apply the same logic to any other product and see how far it goes. You're selling left handed scissors, that's a niche product. You sell them at walmart and you sell them at a store for left handed accessories. Walmart will still sell more because of the size of their customer base. While it's true that people going to the left handed stuff store are looking for left handed stuff and therefor may be likely to buy the left handed scissors, there just aren't enough people that care about buying left handed stuff to make it better to pursue the niche market over the mass market... so if walmart can't sell it, the niche store likely won't be able to sell it at a profit either.

So GOG has a fundamental curation concept that basically makes it such that they are really relying on 'big hits' to sustain their system. Their 'curation' takes way too long, and they insist on mega parsing out every game and patch a dev puts out. This is a huge time and resource sink for GOG . And every title they add, this cost goes up exponentially. This means that a title HAS to project to sell a lot of copies otherwise its not worth GOG's time and costs them too much money to support. When they say a game is 'too niche' they mean 'youre not going to sell enough copies to justify all the back end costs it will take to support your game'.

Steam takes a totally hands off approach. pay $100, you get a store page, sell your game. That's it. The cost to steam for adding a new game is literally zero. The cost of distributing the game is near zero. They have all this giant infrastructure already so adding a game doesn't add much to that. This means that even if a game on steam sells only 1000 copies, that's ok that's still money. If it only sells 100 copies that's still money. Larger giant AAA games are functionally funding all the 'heavy lifting' of the infrastructure, and everything else is just extra.

This means there is no 'game that is 'too niche' for steam. If it sells 50 copies, steam still makes money. If you happen to get a runaway hit like Unturned, great, you've now made a zillion bucks off a title no one else would have approved via curation. If it doesn't, it doesn't matter, steam still makes money.

Well, there's a news article about a major update to Bard's Tale Trilogy. Even though the game was only released within the past year, I would say it counts as an old-school RPG because it is a remake of 3 well known old-school RPGs that far predate Ultima 8. (If Ultima 8 counts as old-school, then so does Bard's Tale Trilogy.)

Except the games being DRM-free here versus there makes a difference in people buying it whether you want to believe it or not. There are literally people like me who will not get it from Steam, even "free", but will buy it here. I suppose the best comparison, albeit still imperfect, would be to look at how well Grimoire is selling on itch now that it is available on that store DRM-free. And you are acting as if this is some unknown game. Maybe on the Steam ecosystem it is. Here, this very thread shows the interest, controversy, and relevance of this game! I am on Page 24 and without the max settings it is many, many more pages than that. No, not every poster is a potential buyer, but the legend of this game grows.

I have always made it clear that I think GOG's best long-term future is in catering to a niche market. Contrary to your beliefs, niche markets can obviously be profitable and this has been borne out in multiple industries including with gaming companies. Alternatively, your suggestion to the left-handed scissor co. in your analogy is to focus less on the left-handed scissors in order to start selling food, clothing, tires, et al. This is patently absurd to me.

Why is it that EVERY time people start saying GOG can't be niche, they have no answer for the financial colossus that is Steam (or Epic, even)? In other words, Steam, just like Walmart does with mom and pop stores, can afford to undercut GOG on price. Thus, GOG cannot compete with Steam head-to-head and a mom and pop store cannot compete with Walmart head-to-head.

Not quite. To add a game, they still need to add it to some database somewhere, and doing so increases the size by a small but non-zero amount. Storage isn't free, so there is some cost to adding a new game.

(It would be more accurate to say that the cost is "near zero", just like the cost of distribution.)

Again, not technically true. I would argue that, as long as new features don't need to be added to the store, the cost of adding a title only increases linearly. It may be a higher constant for GOG than steam, but it's still only a linear increase.

(If it grew exponentially, that would mean that adding X games would double the cost; unless X is *really* large, this would quickly cause the cost to increase to absurd levels.)

(Yes, I do feel like nitpicking at the moment. There aren't any major problems with your argument that I see, but there are plenty of minor ones, like this one.)

And how well is that working out for GoG right now as they seem to be making no money?

Of course a game coming here will sell a certain minimum number of copies just based on curation. There are people who count on that to make their buying decisions. But that minimum isn't enough. You keep talking about the "legend" this game is, but then why are there only 11 players in game at the same time at its peak yesterday? Someone mentioned Monster Prom as a crap game that doesn't belong here. Well let's look: Peak concurrent players yesterday: 546 or almost 50 times that of the 11 playing Grimoire...or 273 times the 2 playing Aeon of Sands.

So these games might be a better fit here, but are they 50x or 273x a better fit?

The answer is really simple actually. It's the same thing other startups have done. Which is to add value to the product or service being offered. GoG needs to stop trying to be Steam and start trying something new. I almost exclusively buy games from GoG because I don't want to buy games that have DRM, but people who care about that enough to only buy games here are a small group of buyers.

GoG used to have other things that differentiated them from Steam, but they've ditched all those things in favour of getting newer releases and expanding their list of partners. They need to find ways to set themselves apart again. The one world price rule they had was a good thing for that. Ditching that may have got more developers onboard but it made them a smaller version of Steam with less features and less DRM.

dtgreene, so you're aware, satoru is a Steam moderator. Evidence was posted of this in another thread. It is something you may wish to know. While I believe it is generally best to address the points rather than the person, my impression is that he is not here for honest conversation due to this "conflict of interest".

I am talking about the legend of the game growing here, on this site. Again, the Steam stats are not necessarily indicative of GOG users' interest because the audiences are different. What is popular among one audience may not be popular among another (and yes, I am aware there is some overlap of users who buy on both sites, albeit many of these folks would likely buy on GOG if given the choice). Beyond that, you still have not accounted for the fact that Steam can grossly undercut GOG on price. How is GOG supposed to make any more money when Steam can sell the same game for pennies on the dollar, if they so choose?

Well said, totally agree!

Grrr nitpicky but...... accurate so cant really say much :P

I think GOG needs to abandon their 'high touch' approach to approving and supporting games. It costs way too much to do so, makes it impossible to compete with other players (Steam/Epic) and makes revenue growth very difficult as you're highly relying now on 'mega hits' to stay afloat and can't take advantage of 'long tail' type of games

To me it feels like a situation my friend was in sales. the company wouldnt pay commission for deals less than $50k. But this seemed dumb. It might be way easier for a sales person to close out lots of small deals, rather than banking on a few giant ones to meet their quota. Like I could probably get a PO for a $20k sale without much issue. But if I need one for $100k I have to get a lot more approvals and annoyances. That company would lose out on an 'easy' $20k but would rather bank on the more difficult $100k deal since they dont get commission on it.

Basically GOG needs to

1) Move to 'minimal' curation policy. Basically just "is this game not total garbage"
2) get rid of in-house support of games. Do what everyone else does, and refer them to the developers for support
3) reduce refund window - the 30 day window is entirely based on their tech support, costs too much money, get rid of it. Note this doesnt mean 'get rid of all support'. You still need support for payment issues and account stuff. But get rid of the '3rd party game tech support' side of it. Do what everyone else does, 14 day 2 hour playtime window.

You've now dramatically reduced operating costs, and reduced the incremental cost of adding a particular game. Now you can have more 'niche' games on GOG.

You seem to be under some illusion that the half dozen people crying about the game right now are enough sales to make this worthwhile to sell here:

A number of factors work against this game:
1) It is mocked in "Let's Play" reviews on Youtube.
2) The developer seems to inexplicably want to blame its poor sale on Never Trumpers while throwing around anti-LGBT rhetoric. I think most people know my stance about "agenda pushers" and the push for "political correctness" but that doesn't excuse people who are truly being outright abusive toward others based on their personal characteristics or life choices.
3) It would not be a new release, thus would lose the extra profit from "first day sales".
4) Overall poor reviews on Steam despite the developer actively brigading people for positive reviews.

The problem is your counter-argument is that YOU think it will sell here. As if somehow your one opinion and that of the half dozen others will make it happen despite all signs to the contrary.

How do you propose to enforce the 2 hour rule? (Remember, because GOG is DRM-free, there's no way for GOG to prevent you from playing the game more after getting a refund, and it's possible that the game might be played on an air-gapped computer, so there'd be no way for GOG to know how long that game has been played.)

They can't do this. Legally they are required to offer a refund. However, they will not refund a game that works. They can't reliably track play time on games due to DRM-Free. So this fails right out of the blocks. Unless you want to go all-in and suggest they drop DRM-free gaming. Doubling down on bad arguments won't do you much good here though.

What a 24 page thread shows is that people love drama. There's no way this thread would have this many posts if Cleve wasn't such a drama queen.

You do realize

1) that's false I am not a steam moderator
2) I am a game hub moderator on steam which was also shown to yoou but you seem to have conveniently ignored
3) whetehr I am one or not is IRRELEVANT to the points made but again hey I dont expect you to have the intellectual honestly for that since all you can do is make ad hominem attacks when you have no poitns left to make. There is literally zero data to support your supposition and moutains of counterdata

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/186940/Defenders_Quest_By_the_Numbers_Part_2.php

https://grumpygamer.com/twp_sales

https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DavidDAngelo/20160414/270282/Feat_Unlocked_One_Million_Copies_of_Shovel_Knight_Sold.php

There is literally no data to support your claim


https://www.gog.com/forum/general/so_grimoire/post1191

CDProjekts own games sell better on Steam than GOG

What is popular among one audience may not be popular among another (and yes, I am aware there is some overlap of users who buy on both sites, albeit many of these folks would likely buy on GOG if given the choice). Again you are literally talking out of your behind

Developers set prices on Steam. Steam cannot 'undercut' anyone because developers control

1) How much the game costs
2) When the game goes on sale
3) How much the game is discounted

How is Steam going to 'undercut' GOG when the developer has the overwhelming control over pricing, sales and sale prices. YOu seem to not even understand the utter basics of how pricing on the Steam store works, and are literally just making stuff up