Darvond: Well, have you actually made entries in the wishlist and publicized them? How is GOG to know that you want obscure games about…robots if you don't tell them?
I've voted for obscure games,
and made requests for obscure as all get out games. mechmouse: The company approached GoG, their project has had international press coverage, its not some hidden gem but a notable event in computer history.
Yes I get that some unknown might not get noticed or accepted, but I'm seeing established teams with notable IP being turned down. How can anything based on Steve Jackson's work not get a "Okay lets look".
I'm not asking for the gates to be flung open, but I think GoG as a platform could handle 10-20 releases a week rather than the 2-5 we currently get.
One of their less-publicized tenets is that they try to give some good front-page promotion to most everything they release. Regardless of whether GOG could handle pumping out 20 per week from logistical or technical standpoints, releasing an average of nearly three games per day, every day -- or 4 each and every weekday, considering that they don't generally release stuff on weekends -- would mean that no one of those games would get very much exposure. I would guess that the vast majority of users of stores like this don't visit every day; that would effectively mean that, if you visited just once a week (probably pretty common), you'd have 20 new releases to sift through; if there were very many DLC or alternate editions for those 20 collectively, that would push some of those 20 base titles right off the bottom of the first "page" of the 25-slot "New" tab, never mind the 11-slot first "page" of the "Headlines" section (which also has a lot of
non-release posts mixed in), or the even-more-limited "Featured" and "Special Offers" carousels and the five highlight slots beneath them. (For example: at the moment, 10 of the top 25 items in the "New" tab are DLC or deluxe editions.) I would not consider that great promotion. If I were such a customer -- only checking in on the weekends, let's say -- I probably wouldn't feel inclined to go clicking on each and every game that had been released since the last time I visited -- which is pretty much what I do now (ignoring things like DLC for games I don't own, and certain genres or sub-genres), since there are few enough releases that that's feasible, even if I only have 30-60 minutes to spare.
I'd also not be pleased with this as a partner, with my game being shoved quickly out of view in favor of the next days' products. I suspect that many, if not most, game companies are here at least as much for the guaranteed window of front-page promotion as for any ideological love they might have for the concept of DRM-free software. "Guaranteed eyeballs on my game" is always going to be a worthwhile draw, even if that guarantee necessarily comes at the expense of many other games.
Personally, I'd say an average of 10 titles per week (not counting DLC and alternate editions) would be a good
maximum. Though it would probably be a bad idea to have any hard quota to fill.
I'll join others who've said that I think their curation is mostly OK the way it is now, perhaps even starting to dip into "too permissive" territory. Ultimately, though, curation is, by definition, always going to be subjective. People who say, "Well, their curation is
mostly good, but they should've let in this game, this game, this game, and this game, and turned down all of these games," are missing the point. The curator's tastes are what matters; if you were one of the curators, you would have boatloads of people disagreeing with you, too. Your own personal tastes not being fulfilled is not a reason to further relax curation, because everyone has their own wildly differing tastes. itch exists, humble exists, Fireflower exists. As far as DRM-free goes, as long as one of those accepts a given game, there's not necessarily a powerful reason it needs to be on the other, apart from that much-prized exposure.
Reiterating something else already said:
If you know of a game that was rejected, and you would like to buy it here, vote for it on the Community Wishlist. That is what it is for. And,
speaking of the Wishlist... ; )
