i would love to hear on what basis gog decided to allow bombshell here , its a downward bomb fall for sure. There are tons of indie games that could have been allowed instead of this

The original is, but the remake - the version that isn't owned thrice by everyone because of bundles - isn't. It's just a Steam key.

Well, GoG doesn't issue many public statement (or at least isn't known for spontaneous communication ;°), so it would be an easier route for a dev to say 'they rejected it' rather than 'I don't care about drm free' or 'I don't have time to maintain two builds' or 'I didn't have time to check with them' or 'they only sell old games' or 'is it thursday already ?'.

I know I am being the devil's advocate here, but there could be reasons.

This is definitely not the case with the Degica rejections, given that Mushihimesama has almost exclusively recieved high scores and praise on Steam. GOG are just not willing to take risks on genres they are ignorant of and/or don't give a shit about, unless of course a dev holds enough sway here to force them to release a game, or else risk losing others. Which is most likely how we ended up with Hatoful boyfriend.

GOG are completely ignoring the whole, "if you don't create a market, why would anyone come" thing. Because they are both genre snobs and too nutless to take the risks to expand their content.

GOG also just doesn't give a fuck about supporting anything they don't think will make large bank on day one, ignorantly rejecting the long tail concept of sales... as well as, you know, general decency to offer a variety of quality games for everyone.

I think they prioritize on rewarding the originality. Many times I hear about rejections of newer titles, it's usually because they don't want to release samey games on a close interval, which I salute. But I may be wrong.

Then I don't dispute that it seems quite complicated for someone to release his first game here. Once you got your feet in the door it seems easier. I think it's just up to the devs to prove that they will update their work n a timely manner : I mean, a lot of arguments may be advanced by one developer to prove they really want to get in the gog club (like promising not to talk about it ofc)

This doesn't fly given in the last six months the vast majority of games have either been strategy or sims.

That, and they've rejected very high quality games in genres that are utterly bereft of choice on here.

But ... TWA and OFDP are amazing games though.

Since the thread is still going on as a pretty much free-for-all:
I agree with skeletonbow on everything except Hatoful Boyfriend.

Hatoful Boyfriend is a very clever and subversive game which uses the mechanics of an otome game (a girly dating sim) to tell a way better story. Did you ever have to watch a romantic comedy with a significant other, thinking to yourself, "This movie would be vastly improved by a robot zombie apocalypse"? Did you wish that e.g. Bella Swan would just get eaten first order of business and then Twilight would follow more interesting characters?

Hatoful Boyfriend made my wish come true. This is why it's been published by Devolver Digital, and why it's on GOG despite the general policy against visual novels.

Basically there seems to be a whole lot of people on these forums who think armchair quarterbacking GoGs business model is a good idea. Quite frankly, most of the people talking know Jack Shit about business. Overbundled games like Thomas Was Alone is a losing concept. 5 year old games that can be had for $.25 in any of a dozen bundles does not make good business sense. Picking up games from no-name developers which don't sell on Steam, same thing. Most of the people on these forums promoting them haven't even played them.

I'll agree with you somewhat on titles like Mushihimesama and other Degica products. In this instance, the sales on Steam look pretty good, 16,000 in 2.5 months. At least in the States, I know that Anime and Manga are very popular and I think a side focus on Japanese games could be an untapped market for GoG. But maybe they are just focusing on what they know. Did you ever consider the reason Mushihimesama isn't here might be because Crimzon Clover's sales didn't meet expectations? It's possible, but the people in the know are GoG. Of course if they chose to focus more on Japanese titles, maybe they could create their untapped market.

But seriously, more than half what these armchair forumites are pushing are money losers. $3-$5 games are not GoG's thing. Most of them will be bundled in a matter of months and available for pennies. And the fact so many talk out of their ass like they know something in decrying Hatoful Boyfriend...a game with over 200,000 copies sold on Steam, shows how little many here know.

Not sure if I like that really. Sometimes it's good to have a large collection of samey games coming out at samey time and the advantage would be that for the consumer it's much simpler to compare them and pick the best ones. Not doing that means you restrict the choice of the consumer - and this can result in lower sales as well.

It's not as if I:
- want to play a shooter but don't mind which one
- want only to play games from GOG
- take the first shooter from GOG and buy it

There is some natural advantage in choice, even among games of the same genre, although of course from a dev point of view, programming the zillionth adventure may not turn out to be a very profitable business.

Anyway, do you maybe still remember where you heard that?

True, though it is highly frustrating when DRM-free versions of epics like Bioshock or Torchlight 2 (both wish-listed in the several thousands) are / have been on Humble Store yet are still nowhere to be seen on GOG. The Witness is selling very well and getting generally positive reviews, is available DRM-free on Humble yet still not on GOG. Same goes with popular games on Steam that don't use Steam's DRM (ARMA games, Ori and the Blind Forest, etc) as well as popular games that have DRM-free retail disc versions (eg, Age of Empires 1-2 Collector's Edition DVD version apparently has had the earlier CD version's Safedisc copy protection removed according to PC Gaming Wiki). Those two AoE games have sold 5m copies between them.

It's easy to measure sales but what about lack of sales? I bought Bioshock along with Nihilumbra, Parcel, The Witness and Prominence all DRM-free from Humble this past week simply because I've given up waiting for ever seeing half of them on GOG. That's 5 lost sales by 1 person in 1 week, and whilst some of the "lesser titles" have debatable profitability, I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person here who likes Bioshock looking at the 6,000 strong Wishlist for it and is left wondering why a predominately Steam key reseller (Humble) can manage to sell a DRM-free version of it when a store dedicated to DRM-free titles (GOG) cannot...

Looking at this discussion and, other than the fact that it started from quite a list and ended up mostly focusing on choice of games that get accepted here (on which note, yes, I'd also like to see a list of rejected games, but see all of this as a quite small problem overall), it's clear that it's once again between GOG as primarily or even solely a business and those ok with that fact, and GOG as an entity standing for something and trying to steer the industry in a better direction and those who came here for that promise. Needless to say, I'm firmly in the latter camp. Didn't and won't support anything that is and acts primarily as a business in this field, and GOG did a pretty good job of acting as an entity that didn't let the bottom line get in the way of its, shall we say, activism and consumer care for quite some years, then over the last two things changed.

And on that note and back to skeletonbow's arguments, it's perhaps less of a problem that things changed here and more one of the lack of options. That parallel with the room and temperature preference is as good as any, but it's actually just another reason why the market shouldn't be dominated by a small number of players. You can't have everyone feel comfortable with the temperature if they all need to be in the same room, but you can have different rooms at different temperatures and use streaming or what have you so people will still be able to communicate with each other.
When, on the other hand, a few players kick the others off the market and/or make it too difficult for new alternatives to pop up, they end up with the responsibility to cater for all the different people and their desires. You can do what makes business sense to you if you cater to more or less a niche and people are free to easily choose from many other options if they don't like it, but not when your "niche" becomes a significant part of the market, not to mention most of it.

I Know

They Don't even Have an [YouTube][/YouTube] or [Media][/Media] Feature in here or even an [Img][/Img]

Hmm...

I'm wondering if you think anyone of importance is actually going to read this? And or care?