That could be the case perhaps, such things are also a part of business negotiations for a store like GOG. You make decisions that you believe are the best for you, and later on you're always free to renegotiate those decisions with yourself based on new information, new opportunities etc. All decisions aren't necessarily final, although I do have to admit that I was a little surprised that Braid wasn't offered here before because it did seem to be incredibly popular. Not that I personally cared much either way, but it was one of the very few indie games that people chastised GOG about for not selling that I thought people might have a leg to stand on. :)

Yeah, I totally think you are correct on that for multiple reasons. Matters like that ultimately are business matters, and they should be private business matters that are kept that way, not aired on the Internet like a game forum is the game developers personal Facebook status feed to gripe drama about private business negotiations that didn't work out for whatever reasons. The professional thing to do if they're going to communicate publicly about "Why isn't your game on GOG" would IMHO in a situation like that be something like "We would love to sell our game on GOG if we have the opportunity." or "We're investigating the possibility of being able to do that." or some other statement that lets people know they have a desire to do it, but not necessarily the gory details of the status of it or what their emotional feelings about the hows or whys of it all are.

Indie developers in particular are more likely to do this because they put a lot of time and effort into the development of their games often living on a shoestring and struggling financially pouring a huge amount of their lives into their game, so they are deeply emotionally attached to their game and the hopeful success of it, sometimes even to the point of mental instability. Watch "Indie Game the Movie" for a sample of some of that for example. While their game may be an extension of themselves in their own mind and deeply personal - they really need to detach from that when doing business and communicating with customers and potential business partners and treat the business side of their business like a business.

(Read that last sentence picturing Mike Brady saying it out loud to you for a bit of a chuckle.) :)

Oversharing with the public might feel like "being more honest" or "being more open" but that can be an excuse for being a drama queen and unprofessional IMHO. That kind of communication can not only burn bridges, but it can burn future opportunities not only with the same potential partner but also with other people who are watching and seeing the unprofessional behaviour as a sign to "stay away".

Even as a gamer though, when I see devs communicate like that, I see them as emotionally unstable and unprofessional and I'm less likely to trust that they'd treat their customers much differently as well. Usually there is a co-relation. Look at the dev of Fez for example and his public communication track record and behaviour. Too emotionally tied to the game he was developing, too emotionally invested in online comments about it and taking everything people said too personally then having negative public emotional reactions in a big dramafest. Made me want to buy the poor guy a big box of kleenex. :)

Your post made me consider filing a request for enhancement on the wishlist to get GOG to add a "+100" button to the forums. :) I kind of liked Gothic Forsaken Gods though after playing it for about 6 hours one night I was getting into it. Never finished it yet though so I can't make a final judgment about it. :) So.... maybe +99 instead. :)

Not necessarily disagreeing there's a difference there now on GOG, obviously there is since GOG still has to pick and choose the titles they sell. But that's really not much different from what Steam used to do (though they didn't nickname it 'curation'). The basics of it is that Steam until recently simply wasn't capable of releasing more games. And given how GOG has picked up on selling titles I doubt they're capable of releasing many more titles as they already are. So picking and choosing is a necessity.

That said, if GOG would ever grow to Steam's size I wouldn't be surprised if they started opening the floodgates as well if they're capable of doing so.

I think people need to step back and not overly attribute GOG with something that is very likely to become yet another thing that's going to be lost as GOG grows.

ps. I'm not saying they might not stick to better quality control than Steam, but 'shovelware' etc is just a matter of opinion on what games are worth having and not a matter of whether the game runs well on your computer or recent OS. The latter I can see GOG doing their best to stick to. But as it grows I think the definition of what constitutes a 'Good Game' will become thinner and thinner as at some point of growth more games simply becomes more profit.

No Man's Sky is very much an indie game. From what I've read they refused to come on board fully with Sony because it would have meant giving up creative control of their game and they wanted to keep that as it was important to them. Or should I say "creativeless control" as it amounted to... They probably would have been better off to let Sony sink their tendrils fully into the game's development in hindsight. But they didn't, and despite the Sony affiliation they're a small indie game studio that developed a small indie game that was overhyped to appear to be a big huge massive indie game but was in fact a small indie game. They probably made a pile of money off of it in the hype process with the opening price, but that hasn't much to do with their status as an indie outfit.

Sure, Obsidian and Larian are bigger companies with more experience all around and so they will naturally get more respect for that. "indie" means "independent", but an independent company can be one person in their parent's basement making the next Tetris clone, or they can be Larian putting out Divinity OS 2, they're still independent. Naturally Larian's game is going to be much higher quality likely because of their experience and likely higher budget from former successes.

If Steam releases 50 new games a week, I'd say that maybe 1 of them might be good or interesting personally, most of it is indie shovelware crap. I have lately been going over Steam's "coming soon" page looking for up coming AAA and other big titles (from big or indie devs) and you have to wear out your mouse button on the pagination controls to even find a game you've ever heard of before that don't look like kindergarten drawings. It's getting crazy ridiculous. Sometimes I wonder why some of the indie developers can't just go get a job at a call centre or McDonalds instead and do themselves and the world a favour.

But then I go.. oh... that's right... http://store.steampowered.com/app/291090/ and I remember why... :) (Haven't played it through yet, but I have it for a laugh, thought it was funny. ) ;)

As for pixel-art games, I'm openly not a fan of modern retro-pixel-art used in games in general but that's not right or wrong, just subjective opinion for myself, but occasionally a game is still interesting that uses pixel art and I can sometimes overlook that to a degree. If they actually make a proper and good game with good gameplay then the game can potentially overcome the eye-bleed. IMHO, most of them don't though, they're just mostly unoriginal games made that way because it's easier to program and far less effort and they know they can capitalize off of the retro-pixel-art phenomenon out there as there is a big enough market of people ready to gobble it up. In that sense though, perhaps they're smart in doing so too, who knows. You hit the nail on the head with the unity crap with reused assets and RPGmaker crap et al also though, that's some of the most unoriginal crap possible to even exist IMHO.

I've thought about this over time as well more or less concluding that for the time being at least GOG has finite resources in manpower, cash on hand etc. and with their policy on supporting games directly, that naturally limits the number of titles they can bring to the store to the head count they can afford to have working in support. Can they simply continue to grow that support head count far into the future as the number of games scale? That remains to be seen but it could in theory, especially if they get better at doing it, automating as much as possible etc.

If they ever decide they need to increase the game count faster than they can increase the head count of support personnel though then either per-game support will drop in quality, or increase in response lag, or start being dropped entirely.

I hope they maintain the balance indefinitely with a sustainable business model over time, however that may or may not prove to be feasible depending on various factors so I fear the possibility of your caution. It could become an eventuality, but hopefully that doesn't turn out to be the case.

I hope that is not the case. I like P&C adventures a lot but also still have to play quite a few of them (many bought on GOG). I hope GOG is not systematically showing any unfair bias against them.

I like giving the customer the freedom to choose for themselves what is a good game and what is not but I would also welcome lots of filters that show me the more popular games first which are regarded as high quality by many other users. I would be willing to trust the judgement of other users there.

For example, I wouldn't like to see 10 new releases on the front page out of which 9 do not interest me usually, even if occasionally I might miss a good one.

This seems to me like a sensible approach, if GOG ever decides it has a large enough customer base to open the floodgates. I guess Steam is doing it that way already and kind of prioritizing their front page space for the big releases.

What I like about opening the floodgates is that no estimation of quality is more fair than the buying decision of the customer. That's the groundtruth. My impression is that lately GOG is going into that direction already.

The wishlist isn't futile and if it's unused it's because people like you just don't want to put in the effort to help raise awareness about the games you supposedly want to play. You wallow in defeatism rather than take the initiative to make meaningful changes.

Two problems, one is that GOG would not have the manpower to prepare all of the installers manually, manual patches, support staff for game problem troubleshooting and assistance, etc. to open the floodgates.

Second problem is that the buying decisions of the customer (via demand, anticipation, hype) got us No Man's Sky. The customer is not always right. :)

Having said that, to be balanced No Man's Sky with the price tag it has and the volume it probably did sell was most likely quite lucrative for GOG assuming refund chargebacks didn't F that up.

Despite GOG having rejected a couple of games I would be interested in I still defend their curation. I'll take quality over quantity anytime.

I´m somehow glad they are not accepting everything... I just check Steam and saw like 10 titles coming up today...

I would rather prefer for this devs to use desura or some other really starting indie platform instead of these ones.

Another thing that just occurred to me as a relevant answer here, is that if you really think about it, by default it could not really be any other way. What do I mean by that? Well, GOG must receive hundreds of indie submissions every month I imagine, probably more games than they even have manpower to really look at and test out. Even if they queued indie games up as they came in and then accepted them all and released them as fast as they possibly could, there would be probably 30 times more games being submitted every month than they have manpower to actually release. As such, they'd have to reject the ones they couldn't even process and the list of those games that wouldn't make it simply due to manpower resources would be huge, certainly enough to qualify as being "refuse so many indie games".

In short, they can't NOT refuse so many indie games, just by default, and that's probably without even looking at quality, stability, bugs, fit for the GOG store and other factors. So instead of releasing first-come-first-serve until they run out of manpower it makes sense to have filters to try to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Ever buy a bag of dried beans or lentils? Even though they're sorted and whatnot, you still find a rock or some other item in there that doesn't belong there but manages to slip through, but there's a lot of beans or lentils that didn't make it into the bag also. :)

(No Man's Sky could be one of those rocks in my metaphor) :)

A good deal of discussion has come along in this thread, as for my take on it.

While gog can be a bit slow and frustrating at times when they don't have as many releases in certain weeks ultimately I really like the fact that they have a degree of cu-ration especially in regards to their IN DEV. games which I think are brilliantly curated.

We live in an age in that 'indie devs' are a dine a dozen and there is so much shovel-ware out there. Sure there are still quite a few 'downer' games on gog but at least they try to balance a bit of quality control. I've seen some great games that have been held off on being published on gog until they fix certain bugs or come along far more in their development/ patching and that is a good thing.

As for the Meridian 22 Dev. and his claim it is just that no one on gog officially made a statement to it not that I am saying anyone is lying but people can claim all sorts of things, I don't work for gog or know their internal goings on and nor do I wish to so that is up to gog. I do wish they would continually add great games to their catalogue here though.

Blaming the big bad publisher was often an excuse the game creators would make and now it seems that there is less of a gap between game makers and game producers it has moved onto blame the sales store.

In summery
-I love that there is a degree of cu-ration and quality control
-I love gog's quality In Dev. program
-I love the fact that the gog stream team often plays new releases so you can check the games out in action yourself.
-Sometimes it is a bit frustrating waiting for games to come to gog or lack of games on gog.

+1 to all of this

I'll take a slower pace of releases over having to sort through Steam's flood of every game under the sun. Life is full of tradeoffs.

This made me think of that guy in the movie "Office Space" that come up with his brilliant game invention called the "Jump to conclusions mat". A case of someone having a creative idea that they themselves think is the most brilliant thing ever, a big money maker, when it turns out it is the dumbest idea ever. Now imagine that person being an indie game developer going to a publisher or distributor trying to peddle their video game equivalent of the "Jump to conclusions mat".

What's sad is that it's entirely possible that some gamer on GOG who is a developer with an interest in video games might look that up if they're not familiar with it, and start developing a video game equivalent of the jump to conclusions mat and try to get it on Steam and GOG, and it probably would actually get accepted on Steam too. :)

Soo... this week made this thread its bitch... does it got Romerod? :D