Thanks for the answer .

Going from memory from last time I tried to calculate the cost, a game on GOG would have to sell a couple of thousand units for them to break even. Lawyer fees to negotiate the contract, QA time needed to make sure the game does run and support tickets the title may generate being the biggest costs.
Yes, if it's an already signed publisher with a new bug free game, the costs do go down, but if it's a new publisher with an older game that will require testing, and which may require special handling, the cost may very well be in the tens of thousands of dollars.

No, GOG exists because it managed to balance the things, and yea, let's not forget that thing called The Witcher. Probably brought some pennies too. With the money they got from that game they managed to make GOG happen.

And yes, you would be able to sell a game much cheaper. Let's say you have the IP rights for a game. All you have to do would be to make a cheap blog, place the game on an FTP, link that blog with your account, write few words about the game, place some screenshots, and you don't have too pay too much for all of that. But the difference is that you are not GOG. You are not forced to respect a specific quality of all these things, they are. You don't need to have a designed graphic designer, they do. They need to keep that quality up where they kept with other releases for every single title.

That's a misconception as i always saw. Thinking that digital goods do not require money to be produced or sold. That's absurd. Every single game from the catalog started from a negative balance. In best case scenario, that game would cover that balance, and start providing profits. But this does not happen in every case, they surely have a lot of games that did not generate profits in the store, but those are balanced by those that did. There is a trial and error in what they are doing, but they do this for a while, and i'm sure that they know better than anyone what they should accept in their store and they shouldn't.

I'm glad to see so many others rejecting this idea. (No offense, OP.)

People also never seem to remember that -- unlike, say, Steam -- GOG staff have to create the installers for every single game, DLC and patch/hotfix in their catalog, as well as periodically updating them, and they also have to deal with all the "bonus goodies" for (mostly) the older games -- either tracking them down on the Internet, or creating them from publisher-provided materials. Add to that the fact that they already seem to be spread too thin for the staff they currently employ, and note their apparent trouble enticing qualified applicants to move to Warsaw, and it starts to seem amazing that they release as many games as they do now.

Please god, no.... no, no, no, no.

Does that include also users taking care of creating the GOG installers for the games/updates/DLCs, support for the games etc.?

I could be mistaken of course, but I think that one major difference between Steam and GOG at this point is that Steam has a hands-off and laissez-faire approach to the games. Valve does practically nothing to individual games, they just offer the infrastructure and tools to developers/publishers, and the devs/pubs are supposed to take care of almost everything from then on, making sure their games work with Steam and have Steam features and whatnot. This works because Steam is the dominant force (most users) and the publishers want to be there, no matter what.

To my understanding, GOG is nowhere near there. GOG actually has to do some work to create the offline installer (also for updates), take care of version numbering etc. Maybe they could offer tools for pubs to do that themselves, but I gather many would object and say GOG should just take the same generic installer that the pub already released on Humble Widgets or selling through their own homepage, or otherwise GOG gets no game whatsoever.

Remember the complaints how the GOG version gets updates and DLCs so slowly, and some publisher's even saying outright that they feel supporting their game on several platforms is too much work and they hope they'd need to support only the Steam version? They would feel even more strongly like that if GOG told them to take care of everything, according to GOG's rules.

tl;dr: Every new release is more work to GOG than it is to Steam (Valve). Hence, GOG has to be more careful which games they feel are worth the extra effort.

Disclaimer: I might be fully wrong with my assumptions of course how GOG works at the moment, but I believe my understanding is probably close to home.

One more thing: when some publisher says GOG rejected them, we don't always know the exact reasons. Maybe sometimes a publisher wanted GOG to include third-party DRM or a third-party account for single-player, or there was disagreement about pricing etc. Since GOG never comments on the rejections (like I wouldn't expect them to, that's extra work too serving no real purpose), all we know is that the dev said "GOG didn't want our game".

What's wrong? Not a braindead zealot of Five Nights at Freddy's?

In French, one says "ne pas jeter le bébé avec l'eau du bain". Applied to this suggestion, I wouldn't throw the issue away with the proposed solution. anything looking like / functionning like greenlight is, as you say, a disaster.

But the game selection issue is real. GOG has been actiovelly rejecting very good games, as being too "niche", But voting is too imperfect to be a solution. Also, I don't see why the vote of a person with a large library should be more important than the one of a person with a small library. What counts is potential sales.

Maybe a form of pre-sales ? Like the P500 introduced by one known wargames / boardgames manufacturer : once they secure 500 pre-order, they commit to produce and release it. If the treshold is notreached, those having pre-ordered it do not pay anything.

No, no, no. If you want steam go use steam.

Early access is, essentially, a guaranteed source of income for developers and publishers, but a very unsafe way for consumers to invest their money. (In my opinion it's a scam.) Therefore, I think that GOG, having established itself as an ethical business practice, (DRM-free games, expanded compatibility, world-wide pricing) should not adopt early access. In my opinion it conflicts with GOG's ethical business conduct.

I recognize that lots of people think there are positive sides to early access, and I'm not opposed to people spending their money on early access games if they really want to. However, even if you do not agree with me that early access is a scam I hope we can agree that it's at least morally dubious. Since GOG has established itself as an ethical business who want's to be fair to its customers, my argument that early access, being morally dubious, has not place with an ethically run business.

In my opinion, if you want to pay for early access you should do so on Steam, which has never taken up the mantle of ethical business practices and is happy to screw its customers over.

Yeah, like we need Grass Simulator here.

Depends on what you mean by "grass".

"Don't throw the baby out with the bath water" is used in English as well.
And "simulator", and "need", and "we", and "here", and... uh, every word could be defined completely different to how they're currently defined. Maybe I had too much grass.

That green stuff, the one you can watch grow in realtime.

A greenlight equivalent on GOG = Less quality game and more shovelware