I agree with Orkhepaj and Time4Tea here. It's useful to distinguish between private censorship and content moderation. Curation is akin to content moderation where a proprietary set of pre-established criteria is referred to when evaluating applicants in order to appear on the platform. This issue falls more under content moderation than it does private censorship because corporations are free to choose or reject whomever they do business with so long as it's legal. And a business not willing to do business with gamedevs isn't a violation of their rights to warrant it being called censorship.

(BTW, calling this censorship as a rallying cry only hurts the discourse on other legitimate and severely consequential censorship, but that's another topic for another day.)

Swordstalker16, you're more than welcome to find a different store like Steam, itch.io, DLsite, and the other sites TomNuke listed that better meets your standards of a decentralized game store while still being DRM-free. Part of the appeal of GOG is the curation process - for better or worse. It's a powerful selling point to blindly buy almost any game on here and still find some appeal with it even though it's a game, genre, or setting you may not like. Though I disagree with Orkhepaj that there's no reason why GOG can't be carrying more specialty games so long as they're high quality AND are economically feasible.

Appreciated, thank you.

I find this an interesting stance, seeing as you're the one who started the boycott GOG thread(which has the Devotion removal as one of it's issues).

So you don't want games removed from sale/barred from GOG due to "complaints of many gamers", yet are seemingly ok with games kept off of GOG if staff find them to not be "good"?

Imo, if one is going to hold a position/stance, they should at least try to be consistent across the board with said stance.

And where is there any inconsistancy here? No one ever even pretended quality had anything to do with not selling Devotion, so what does that incident have to do with quality control?

I agree that companies should be free to choose which games are sold on their platform. What I was saying was that in the case of stores where rejection is (supposedly)the exception and not the norm; ie like it is on steam, arguing for content restrictions of any kind will lead to less creative freedom for creators and will harm the industry. This is because:

1. Games are being made and presented for approval at a fast pace the pace will only increase as game development becomes easier. In such a scenario, no company would be able to give all submitted games a fair shake. This will result in games that effort went into being rejected and is bad for the industry.

2. Once restrictions are tightened, there is no reason to trust that the people enforcing those restrictions won't be personally / politically biased and enforce the rules however they like. This is not an attack on GOG as you seem to think but merely arguing that there is no reason for such rules / restrictions and people to enforce them to exist in the first place (and in current steam, such stuff mostly doesn't exist). I don't expect I can cater to everyone's tastes as a content moderator, and don't expect anyone appointed as one to do so either. To analogize, I'm saying that I want to choose which ice-cream flavor I order rather than have someone choose it for me. Not all stores have all flavors to choose from but the one in question (steam) does.

Fighting censorship is not about fighting only consequential censorship IMO, since when something is not allowed to exist, it simply doesn't exist, severely consequential or not.

I don't hate GOG, and I don't understand what I said that sounds like I do. I think GOG and steam are the most important players in carrying the right of game ownership to the future. But anyway, itch is the store with zero curation while steam does have a barrier to entry (I think it was $100 and other stuff), albeit one that lets most games in. If I'm OK with the level of curation on both GOG and on steam, why should I go anywhere else?

If you want to talk more, we can talk via PM since I'm not going to feed the trolls more.

That seems like a Trojan horse for concealed censorship. Making a good game is difficult, be it standard or perverted, but there is a clear bias by the powers-that-be against perversion. For no other reason than because it wins brownie points from people who can't stand the idea of people enjoying their sex lives.

In any case, perverted developers are no different from standard ones, in that they need to practice their craft in order to produce masterpieces. That means many failures, iteration, and just plain luck to catch a big break. Your "standards" exist to throttle fledgling developers in the crib.

I want to experience the highest quality games, and they won't ever existence if developers have to give up the trade.

This is unfortunate, but a part of life. But despite its inevitability, it can be mitigated besides hiring more curators. I'd be surprised if the curation team wasn't already evaluating a game's time-to-hook and its effectiveness / payoff. Games that take an significant amount of time to hook and/or has underwhelming payoff compared to their genre averages shouldn't be here because the working population with huge disposable incomes to buy multiple games also have no incentive to play games that aren't fun when there are other funner games to play instead. It's a valid refund reason under "not what I expected / didn't like the game". Its stats here should also be referenced to update the criteria if a significant amount of people are refunding it.

I'm having a difficult time understanding why being rejected here dissuades creativity and is bad for industry. Steam is already a significantly more popular platform willing to accept any content so long as it's not illegal or trolling (2018), which is already low barriers to entry. Because of GOG's small market share, gamedevs will not see a significant impact in its revenue if they get rejected here. For more info on GOG's market share, I did a quick calculation here.

And for inspiring gamedevs looking to practice their skills and craft, there's nothing stopping them from either joining a more reputable hentai gamedev group and learning the ropes before leaving and making their own game that they know has potential and will pass curation. You trust curators because they're the experts who are professionally paid and/or qualified to determine worth. And having a team of curators is another balance check to offset the opinion of one individual. This is the same with professionals for daily services people use. Experts aren't right all the time, but they're statistically more reliable most of the time both as individuals or as a community compared to the average layperson. Curation and decentralization are not perfect solutions to shovelware, but come with their own pros and cons depending on the business model and market they cater to. GOG needed a curation team to filter out old shovelware and this aspect got carried over for modern games. If they drop curation that distinguishes it from the market, I'd switch over to Epic for tighter curated DRM-free games or go back to Steam DRM-free for the bigger library, user curation, and for already housing all my games instead. Never mind this being a slippery slope for other distasteful activities, there are pros to censorship or curation already brought up by other users. In a case about curating games for a private platform when there are so many other platforms willing to accept the material is not a censorship issue that is worth caring about because there are no illegal, moral, or ethical injustices being committed here. The game has already been made and exists, so it presumably has passed their respective government censorship laws. The reasonable view by masses is that it's a game being rejected because it is deemed low quality and/or isn't profitable enough for the market of that platform. Some points:
1. I don't think you're attacking GOG nor should they be free from criticism. Rather that it's the viable solution in response to corporations whose ideas you fundamentally disagree with with through wallet-voting when they're not open to communications through solicited user input or boycotts as the case is here. Yeah, not the ideal solution, but it's the best and most powerful action you have as an individual consumer.
2. Itch.io has more curation than Steam by willing to ban everything that is "malicious, derogatory, discriminatory, bullying, harassing, [or] demeaning" than aforementioned
3. $100 USD is extremely nominal expense when we consider the opportunity cost of producing games from hundreds of hours to tens of thousands for indie gamedevs and is later returned if enough copies are sold; it's more of a symbolic buy-in to filter out someone's half-finished computer science assignment clone of Pong, Snake, Chess, etc.
4. I don't understand how Steam is helpful for game ownership.
5. Disagreeing with others doesn't necessarily mean trolling. Maybe others are trolling, but I certainly am not.

Because Devotion has unique features that makes it different from a low quality hentai game being rejected here:
1. Devotion was legitimately well-received by critics before the Steam fiasco between Feb 19-25, 2019 and the GOG fiasco in Dec 16, 2020.
2. Chinese patriots on Weibo review bombed a game simply because they found a political easter egg offensive, which shouldn't have been a significant deciding factor in any game.
3. Those same patriots somehow exerted enough pressure to an extent that the rest of the global population couldn't play the game legitimately until it was released on the gamedev's store despite China owning 25% of the global video game market.
4. Because of the lack of transparency surrounding the CCP's involvement on this fiasco, the ambiguity of this case ranges from private censorship issue that is largely non-actionable to a government-sanctioned censorship issue that had consequentail international effects on freedom of expression.
5. Red Candle Games is the underdog most people want to root for.

In contrast:
1. Low quality hentai games often have unfavourable spread of reviews. Good examples are user reviews of Sakura [*] games on vndb.org with averages of 5-6/10 in their genre-specific community.
2. Review bombing hentai games isn't a prevalent issue on prominent review websites.
3. Poor reviews don't stop these games from being publicly distributed in an accessible manner on Steam or the other sites TomNuke listed.
4. While there's a possibility that governments could be censoring this material, it's not to an extent that affects global access to this material and therefore not as severe.
5. There's no clear underdog status here with hentai gamedevs because some people can't dissociate pedophilia with these games (there's not much research on whether these games or hentai do cause people to become pedophiles either).

Therefore, it's entirely reasonable to curate high quality games and still criticize GOG for not publishing Devotion.

"Smut" is such a loaded term, and honestly, I don't see what's wrong with adult games, provided they're well made. Poorly made shit of the sort that floods Steam should be dissuaded regardless of the nature of the content. The PS1 and PS2 eras saw the E rating as something of a dumping ground of some of the worst trash imaginable, as publishers saw a game was irreparably bad, took out the violence and swearing, turned up the primary colors and hoped for the best.

Of course, we don't need to talk about the absolute monsoon of trash, both smutty and non, in mobile phone gaming.

Give me a pornographic game that's made with love and care over some hastily thrown-together shitshow any day.

Ah mobile gaming. The garbade bin experience of gaming. You will be lucky if you find 1% of games worthy of your time. They are not even asset flips as most of them are exactly the same just with a little different skin.
It clearly shows that numbers won't bring game diversity or creativity.
And that's what some of these trolls want here too, open the gates to everything, probably they want to ruin the site.

GoG already has porn games, so they are not forbidden if they have quality.

every time someone out there in the internets claims to be insulted by some anime smut, God kills a catgirl.
think of catgirls!
stop the slaughter!

I partially agree, though. there's so much crap in Steam's catalog it's hard to find a good VN these days.

You're the troll dude. Adult games has nothing to do with quality. At least you get more out of adult games than regular clickers, yes more. Because you can get more of a kick out of it.

But you're right here, 1% are worth your time. I wouldn't even say that. Yet you fail to connect the dots and get the point. That being that the masses are throwing money at mobile junk. That's the "free market" they talk about..
It has nothing to do with sexual content, and only to do with quality.

Why would I be the troll? I bet you can't bring even one reason for it.

yep. that's why I used the totally neutral "crap" and said that I partially agree.

Totally off topic here, whilst I agree with you on mobile gaming and funnily enough it’s spread to pc too (think tempest, didn’t even bother changing the UI for PC). I do however have a list of games on ipad I would not be without (paid and free), such as stranger things the game and goblin sword which are not on pc, and ascension which is probably the one card game I have put more time into than any other. So it’s not all bad, just the vast majority of it, which you can generally filter out by “in app purchases”, “king,com” and such like.

Yeah, some games are nice, but they are very rare and most of those are not the micro fest free games but prepaid ones.
And some good ones are just ported from PC.
Try out Through the Ages, it is very good game for mobile. Dunno if it is available for apple products.