I think your comparison does not work. First of all, brick and mortar game stores did (and still do?) have to select what they sell. After all, they have only a limited shelf space. They definifely can't sell everything under the sun, they have to decide which games to carry, which older games to try to get rid of by selling them dirt cheap or even throw to trashbin altogether, etc.

The other thing is that at least in the case of GOG, having more relatively new titles on the store means more maintenance work for the GOG staff, as it is apparently the GOG staff itself who maintains at least the offline installer versions of games. That probably causes the need to restrict the number of new releases to GOG store. Maybe GOG is hoping that the older games they have here stabilize themselves over time, not receiving new updates anymore, so they don't need much of maintenance anymore. But it is the relatively new titles that are still updated that are the problem, I'd believe. (E.g. I've noticed Chaos Reborn seems to be updated quite often for some reason, it just got yet another update today? Whenever I run gogrepo to get updated GOG games, Chaos Reborn seems to be quite often one of the changed games.)

I just keep thinking back when GOG was changing its game installers from v1.x to v2.x, what a massive work they must have had in front of them. They had to do it in parts over a long time, even though back then they had much less games than now. They are probably wishing very hard they won't have to change the offline installers for all their older titles ever again. If it comes to that, I wouldn't be surprised the new "installer" wouldn't be any real installer at all, but some zip file that you uncompress yourself, and then maybe run some script to make sure all dependencies are ok. And it would be the same format that the "Galaxy versions" of GOG games use, not separate versions.

Pretty much this. Up to now, gog has made an excellent job in choosing and curating, i believe. The only thing going wrong is regional locks, though...

GOG refuses a lot of indie games? Recently I've seen a few questionable indie titles arriving here that I feel like: well... if you say so. Or maybe I'm just picky. The truth is more like: why do so many indie games refuse gog or have gog as low priority.

There's a difference between "bad" and "offensive".
There was some thread not too long ago (I think by tfishell?) linking to a Reddit post about that. I forget the details of it, maybe somebody else can direct you to the thread.


And to re-iterate a point about a lot of you complaining over the curation:
First of all, recognize that, for most of you, the problem is not so much "Why did GOG let this in here?" as it is "Why didn't GOG let in the game I want in here?"
Second of all, remember that GOG is a business, and therefore is catering to the larger market. The forum is not the larger market. The forum is the opposite of the larger market.

Indeed, and probably a good 1/4 of the catalogue have outdated installers that STILL have not been updated to be GOG Galaxy aware even though Galaxy has been out now for 2 years. But they plan to do it "soon(TM)", which means sometime within the next 10 years apparently.

Indie games are naturally from small development teams, sometimes just a single person. They may not have the resources to maintain separate builds of their game for Steam and GOG, update each individually, quality-test them, etc. Even some bigger companies wont do all of that work. This is especially true if a game is actively taking deep advantage of the Steam APIs to handle all of its networking and other aspects, as they would have to adapt their game to use Galaxy APIs and/or independently code their own solutions. Some developers have the resources to do that and some don't, or they don't perceive the uptake in sales will offset the costs of the custom build. Others may simply drink the pro-DRM koolaid or other factors as well.

When it comes to any creative medium, I go by Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is mediocre. The remaining 10% ranges from decent to masterwork in quality. However, there are two things that must be accounted for:

1 - What we desire will subjectively color the quality that we perceive. I enjoy games like La-Mulana and Fruit of Grisaia, while I would find Dark Souls and Ultima VII to be meh. None of these games are bad, but the glasses we wear will affect judgment. This means that for every 10 great games, an individual is likely to only enjoy half of them at best.

2 - The number of items in a given pool dictate how many good and bad products exist. 10 produce means one item that might be good or better in quality. 100 means 10, 1,000 results in 100, and so forth. The bigger the pool, the greater the odds that you will find something that is of good quality and appeals to your sensibilities.

Basically, restricting the pool of games via curation runs into #1 as a problem, since a low population of works will limit the number of items that can appeal to a given person. If a single product out of ten is excellent, the subjective desires of a person may render it into something unappealing. Steam uses #2 to its advantage, which alleviates #1 by increasing the sheer number of options available.

TL;DR: Sufficient quantity will produce quality.

Remember when Thea: The Awakening was rejected by GOG (developer's public statement), but then some time after some of us had a loud hissy fit, it came here?
Remember when Undertale was also apparently rejected or just not coming here, but then to forum had an even bigger bitch fit and it came here some time later?

Consider that you guys might not have been the only ones pitching a fit about it.
And after "some time", the games you mentioned had more time to get a bigger profit in the market and show GOG that hey, wait a second, maybe these games CAN make us money after all!

Undertale was already very highly praised and for a considerable time period.
Thea has been nowhere near as profitable as Undertale, but has ALWAYS been praised well.
The whole 'GOG does it for the market' doesn't make sense in the slightest in both situations.

Fair enough, wasn't aware of that.
My main point is still that GOG listens to outside sources far sooner than they listen to the forum, though. For both of those games, was the forum the only place making a fuss?

Oh right, they do have that kind of project of updating (all?) the installers already under way... Any idea how many such incompatible games there are still? Fortunately it doesn't seem like it affects all installers, at least I haven't noticed with gogrepo that all or most installers would have changed without some bug fixes or such. I've seen some where the changelog says the reason for the new installer is to fix some Galaxy issues.

Am I only imaging it or do I remember seeing some message months ago that GOG might be looking at overhauling the "offline installers" so that they would basically just be the installed Galaxy game in a compressed file, and maybe some script to install any dependencies/registery settings, if needed? So basically a package they could use also with Galaxy, without having to keep up two different sets of games (the Galaxy versions, and the offline installers)?

Hopefully I am not starting empty rumors here, if I just misunderstood some message.

No idea, honestly. I wouldn't see people getting grumpy anywhere else when they could just buy it DRM free anywhere else.
I double checked the time it took GOG to bring Undertale - it's release date was September 15 last year, and GOG released it March 1 this year. That right there is a huge gap.

Slightly less then 6 months. Maybe it was just enough time for GOG to see and understand Undertale's viability (and profitability)?

over 60 thousand total thumbs on Steam (and we know some can't be bothered thumbing). I find it hard to believe that most of those ratings weren't evident within the first month.
edit: if steamspy is anything to go by - https://steamspy.com/app/391540

and this reddit article which was created the September the game was released: https://www.reddit.com/r/Undertale/comments/3qei98/undertale_has_now_sold_more_than_200000_copies/

It was definitely a great marketing decision to pick up a game that probably sells more than the majority of titles on your own service... slightly less than 6 months after its release.