perhaps I had some jacked up version of steam, because I never saw a place for that prior to the store.

I too have bought a fair share of games as well. Here is my games shelf.

http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/5305/mygamesmyaccountgogcom1.jpg
Siiigh...

you could buy games for other people, have a contest with your website to draw traffic. :D

Something may already be in the works! :D

While there are one or two titles on GoG that may be considered a ripoff even at $5.99, I really don't think lowering the prices to $4.99 would yield a high enough boost in sales for it to pay back the $1.00 price drop in the long run.
Would you buy a new set of shoes for $45.99 if you flatly declined to buy them for $49.99? Usually the price slash has to be larger than that for a big enough part of the customers to take the bait.
I'm not buying Simon 3D for $5.99. I will not buy it for $4.99. I can't really think of any games that I have not yet bought that I would DEFINITELY pick up asap if the price suddenly dropped to $4.99 instead.

Also, you have to remember that much of the time the value of a game is in the eyes of the beholder. Seriously: sometimes someone may *hate* a game that another one loves. Besides this site has a sale every week (or almost every week.) Six to Ten dollars for games isn't bad: I find it funny when people complain about it. Especially with the quality and length of many of the games on here. I'd rather spen six to ten bucks for Fallout or Sacred then 50 to 60 for the latest movie tie in game no one will remember in a year.
I believe if you had games on here for 2 dollars, some people would still say they are paying to much.

Would $1 difference really make you buy?
You'd be surprised. If you price something at 4.99 as opposed to 5.99, you will find people buying it more. Not so much because it's a dollar cheaper, but because they can look at that price and easily double it. Justifying to themselves that they can get 2 items for under 10.00. Which they will usually end up doing.
Whereas if they see 5.99, they don't then look at that and say they can get 2 items for under 12.00. People like to break down purchases depending on the monetary divisions of their currency. Which is why they then end up buying more when a price can be divided according to currency denominations as opposed to when it can't.
It's pretty much all in the mind =) But some shops do use that reasoning to their advantage.

This applies mostly to impulse buys and not so much when people have a product in mind that they're specifically looking to purchase. In the case of impulse buys the sale is pretty much all about mind games, and naturally irrational perceptions surrounding price are part of those mind games. However, when someone specifically sets out looking for a product they already know what they want to get and have a general idea of what they'll be willing to pay for it. As long as the asking price is within the range that the person was willing to pay then it will probably be a sale. Now, I'm sure there are a fair number of people in both categories that buy games from GOG. I'd also be willing to bet that the folks in charge of pricing at GOG took this into account, along with the margins they'd have at various prices, and so it should go without saying that the prices are the way they are because folks with access to much more information than us sat down and came to the conclusion that the chosen prices would maximize their profits.
It's actually more complicated than that, as your calculation doesn't take into account marginal costs. In an extreme example, dropping the price of an item by $1 could mean the difference between selling at a profit and selling at a loss; in such a case it doesn't matter how many more items were sold, the price change would still end up causing a loss. In a less extreme example, if a $6 item had a $4 marginal cost associated with it then dropping the cost by $1 would drop the profitability of the item by 50%, meaning that the price change would need to result in at least a 100% increase in sales in order for the item to turn the same kind of profits it did before the price change.

I think this deserves to be quoted for truth. We don't know GOG's margins, but I think it's fair to assume they're pretty small.
First of all, finding and securing the games may take a lot of time and money. Secondly, making versions compatible with modern operating systems, testing them for problems and fixing those, can probably be quite expensive as well. And then there's all the costs of maintaining the site, adding new features, keeping the servers online, advertising and so on. And finally, the people who owns the rights needs a fair bit of the profits as well.
Add to this that we have no idea how many copies a game typically sells. We can be pretty sure that the Interplay classics have sold a decent amount, and that Duke Nukem 3D is pretty successful, but regular releases does not seem to be all that successful (based on the amount of user votes, how they do in the top ten charts, et.c.).

This could be an interesting measure as to how well games do on GoG. Obviously, not everybody who votes on a game actually buys it. On the other hand, not everybody that buys a game goes off and votes on it. If these two figures are comparable, then honestly GoG is doing worse than I imagined - "only" at about 4000 copies sold of Fallout, blockbuster title #1. The "customer votes" figure scales down quickly from there.
The typical number of user votes for older, semi-obscure titles lie in the 30-60 range, I'm thinking of games like Waxworks, Kingdom, Simon 3D etc.
The vast majority of games seem to lie at about 150-300 user votes. This includes titles like Gothic 2 Gold, Painkiller, Simon 1+2, Broken Sword, and so on.
Then there are a few high-profile titles, like Duke3D, the Descent Series, Fallout Tactics, that lie in the 500-1000 range.
Fallout 1+2 leads the pack with over 3000 votes each.
So what do you think? Can any meaning be extracted from these numbers? Is GoG doing worse or better than expected (relating to total sales volume)? Or are people just lazy and not voting on the games, meaning that the number of games sold is usually much larger than the number of customers who took the time to vote on the game?

I think those numbers do give a certain indication of how well games sell on GOG, though it's very difficult to extract realistic sales numbers based on them. But at least I think they give a general idea of how different games sell compared to each other, and it's pretty obvious that most typical releases aren't selling anywhere near the amount that the few big hits like FO and DN3D are selling.
Another indication of this is the weekly charts. Typically there's a handful of Interplay-games there (Fallout and Freespace), plus the weekend offers. New releases typically come and go pretty quickly, and normally don't place very high on the charts, which indicates that they're not selling all that well. Brand new releases often fail to get higher sales (in the release week) than the Fallouts, which have been on GOG since the beginning.
I honestly don't know what to make of all this. I get the feeling that sales in general aren't super-great, but at the same time I don't know how much GOG needs to break even, and how much a typical publisher expects to make off GOG to feel that releasing their old games here is viable.

It doesn't seem unreasonable to assume that prospective publishers would want to see sales figures for the business as a whole and its general level of profitability. That would let them estimate if letting GOG distribute their software is likely to bring the publisher profit or not.
If this assumption is correct, the semi-regular addition of new publishers would imply a pretty good sales situation. Furthermore, the lack of DRM would probably mean that each negotiation would start with GOG at a disadvantage and that profitability of the business model would likely need to be that much more impressive before anyone signs on.

I haven't rated like half my games.