Let's be honest. With this game even I can say that it's too niche and there is nothing to gain for GOG. In more than a year since release it only got 14 reviews on Steam (which are mediocre at best). That says a lot about the sales numbers.
Not let's keep in mind that it costs GOG money to release a game here. There's legal paperwork, bandwith costs, support, costs for testing, creating offline installers and keeping the games up-to-date on recent OSes.
Let's keep things cheap and assume that all these things only cost $2000 minimum (which probably isn't enough over the years).
The game only costs $2.99 full price. Most people will wait for a promo with at least 50% off. GOG gets 30% of that money. That means they will get about $0.44 per sold copy. Which means they will have to sell at least 4500 copies to even reach point even (but only if there will be no regional pricing otherwise it would be even more).

GOG has a market share of about 10%. So be honest to yourself: Do you really think a game like that could sell 50 000 copies?

Don't want to say that their curation is perfect. But in this case I can see why it would make sense to say the game is too niche even without playing it.

When Degica got the rights to publish Cave's games on PC, they said they pitched them to GOG and got hit with the "too niche" response.

I havn't looked at all the rejected games listed but I can certainly see why some of them have been rejected without looking too far into them. I'm all for more games on gog but some of these games are just not fitting for a store front.

Yes, good points. However, it's not this particular rejection that rubs me the wrong way, it's the overall attitude towards curation.

What grates me is the thought that gog staff don't really play the games that get submitted and instead make their choices entirely on screenshots and youtube videos. And considering some of their more bewildering rejections (or acceptances), I'm inclined to believe that games do get rejected without anyone at gog ever having played them.

However, I'd love to be proven wrong on this one and you may have more of an insider knowledge about this than I do.

Alright, you're put in charge of curation at GOG for the day and are given these three games to evaluate.

1. Blossom Tales: The Sleeping King
>>Trailer
>>Review

2. Flinthook
>>Trailer
>>Review

3. Rex Rocket
>>Trailer
>>Review

Which would you approve?

If the process of creating offline installers is not completely automated by now then it is certain that there is not a single competent person working at GOG. That is something that can easily be scripted and save huge amounts of time (and automation would also prevent lots of errors as well).

This is not a list of games that gog has turned down. Why are you presenting it as such ?

For instance, the Hidden Folks guy has probably never proposed his game to GOG, he seemed very against the idea, on tweeter (tweets that someone had posted on gog).

I simply made a list of every game mentioned here so far. I can make a separate list for games, like Hidden Folks, whose developers/publishers aren't interested in releasing on GOG (or at least don't seem to be). I suppose we may never know exactly why the Hidden Folks dev only replied with a dismissive "nope!".

Steam reviews and sales are low because we published it ourselves and have no money for a proper promotion then. Console releases have a publisher and sell well.

I'm not saying that our game is perfect (everyone can Google scores and reviews for each version), but I was really disappointed by GOG's work with developers - they neither play the game (even Steam staff checks the build) nor give a solid answer.

Judging a game only by screenshots and other promotional materials is not okay for a "curated" video game store. And I can name a lot of indie projects here which are also "too niche" or even bad (in my opinion). But they are here while something like Alpha Polaris is not.

As you can see in this thread, the thing is not only with my game.

Isn't Bolt Riley incomplete and only something like 4 screens long game? I understood the devs took a gamble with it and hoped to get enough sales to do more with it, but as it's now, it's likely never to be completed.

Ah right. I really hadn't realised that so many games had been mentionned on the previous page.

Anyway, yeah, I always take with a grain of salt the claims of rejections. When it's explicit, I often suspect some possible "they rejected our terms". When it's not, some possible lack of interest (to be true, the Hidden Folks answer had been a surprise).

But yeah, fair enough. This sudden long list had seemed more random to me than it is.

This makes me really upset with GOG's 'curation' and approval process. How then did West of Loathing get approved?

It's not actually called that anymore. It used to be, but now it's just GOG, one word and not an acronym for anything. GOG didn't want their name to imply that they only stuck old games, as they've switched more and more focus on new titles.
Probably "curated" by a different intern.

To be fair, actually playing every submitted game for a reason amount of time to judge it would probably be just as expensive as releasing them..

Let's say you need at least 30 minutes with a game to say whether it's good or not.
Steam released 7672 games last year, that's roughly 150 a week. Even if we assume only a third of those get submitted to GOG that's still 50 games a week, or 25 hours of testing potential games.
I don't know what wages are like at GOG (or in Poland) but even if it is an intern playing those games your probably talking £125 a week (£6500 a year), and really it's far more likely to be trained GOG game people in which case you might be looking at £500 a week or £26000 a year.

Now look at GOG's release schedule, we get maybe 10 games on a good week, so even if you ddouble that because they are playing the games the vast majority of those games are still getting rejected and that is time and money wasted...

huge existing fan-base - The Kingdom of Loathing - started in 2003 (so 15 years old now...)

https://www.kingdomofloathing.com/create.php

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Loathing