Yes. Yes, it is. Considerably so. Dial back on the snark a little bit and you might have some valuable feedback.

At the very least the letter you wrote makes an effort to give off the impression that "Hey, these people actually had a look at my game and put some thought into it" instead of "Hey, these people copypasted random buzzwords from the Steam store page and then decided to not sell it because whatever".

Now take into consideration the fact that you never ever played the game and everything you wrote about is based on watching a couple of minutes of a youtube video. Now you might see why I think their correspondence with devs is of a shockingly poor standard.



So what? If gog gives valid reasons for rejecting a game, there's not much to rally against. It'll make them less open for attack than their bullshit 2neech.

She never said anything about complex, stop twisting other people's words. As for great, that's probably in the eye of the beholder. Just because you don't like the genre doesn't mean there aren't great games within that genre. I don't like RTS and rogue-like - should I insist they don't belong on GOG?

That wasn't well worded... from the description of the process they get alpha builds (70-80% finished, often not even with final graphics and mechanics) and try to assess the potential. Pretty natural this goes wrong regularly - and in both ways. A vocal developer might sell their alpha with promises of how great it's gonna be once finished - and then not deliver up on that. Someone with less talent to sell their game might understate the planned quality (or they don't believe them) and get a rejection although the game turns out really good.

For bad games ending up here - well once the contracts are signed, that's something we have to live with. For good games being rejected, it's our - and the devs - responsibility to put a little pressure on GOG. It has sometimes worked.

That's PR speak for they monitor the wishlist and the forums and try to assess what people would buy. Past sales are often not a good indicator because trends come and go. Have people enough after buying three pixel art rogue-likes or would they buy another one? Are people discussing, hyping a game which is not yet released?
I agree that GOG should communicate more with us. On the other hand, you can imagine how it would end if they asked "Do you want game X here?". A hundred people would scream yes, a hundred people would scream no, because it's a pixel art rogue-like visual novel and the dev is a leftist alt-right Putinist vegetarian... And then only twenty people buy it anyway, the rest is waiting for a sale with 80% off...

I watched more than a "couple minutes" of a Youtube video...
But yeah, accuse me of not doing any research.
I sat through a whole 2 hour video, watched the agony, watched the stupidity of that game and watched as they started over trying to optimize a new party. Color me rather unimpressed.

Seriously you can go piss off!

if your talking about grimoire isnt that the game where the developer is a complete dickhead.

There are objectively bad games, and those are the buggy ones. Maybe not the little glitches, but clearly any game-breaking bug, anything that will only be noticeable to the player after the fact so it won't even be a matter of knowing to immediately reload, and anything making it impossible to do something you should be able to, like being presented with a choice and an option not doing what it says, or anything at all, or a spell or skill or item or whatever not working. Those shouldn't be here until and unless the issues are fixed.
Then come the games that are missing relevant updates, this being connected to the previous point when it comes to fixes, and those lacking in game content or features available elsewhere. That doesn't apply to all the list being maintained, since some are there for, say, being unable to purchase the soundtrack or having modding tied to Steam (which is annoying, but may be seen as a "cost" of DRM-freedom), but if any (official) content or features actually affecting playing the game isn't in the version available here, the game shouldn't be either.
Past that, it's in the eye of the beholder, as they say. May go for a "GOG unfiltered" category, for games GOG wouldn't normally be keen on, as long as they don't fall foul of the two issues above (and with strict contracts ensuring they won't in the future either, with stiff penalties if they ever do), without release announcements (not that release announcements are much to speak of since the redesign, but still), assuming that sorting by addition date will work properly so anyone will be able to check releases as they come in.

Pretty much. And on top of that the game has Mixed 67% positive reviews. 67% positives puts the game in the bottom 1/3 of all Steam games by User Review score.

Out of 26531 Steam games, Grimoire's 67% beats out 8442 games...

Even if he was, what does it matter in regards to the objective assessment of a game and whether or not it's sold through GoG?
If that's a criteria for the "right to exist" on GoG then why wasn't Fez immediately pulled from GoG the very moment Phil Fish had his great melt-down and officially outed himself as the complete jerk he is?

- Me: "Rwarehall hasn't played Grimoire and bases all his opinions on the game on some youtube video."

- Rwarehall: "Piss off! Stop accusing me of not having played Grimoire and basing all my opinions on the game on some youtube video! Here's what really happened: I haven't played Grimoire and based all my opinions on the game on some youtube video that I watched FOR TWO HOURS!!!!11!!1!!"

Hilarious!
xD



My point still stands, though: whatever research you did, it was enough to write way more in-depth feedback than the sorry collection of bullshit platitudes the gog "curators" came up with.

It's not as if Grimoire is an arcade game. It's a turn-based RPG. Frankly, watching a Youtube video is a perfect representation of it's gameplay unlike a lot of games.

You are the one who is hilarious. Clearly you have no taste as you are blindly supporting a bottom third Steam game. A game that Steam reviewers are resoundingly unimpressed with.

Ironically, that didn't stop Phil Fish from pulling a Phil Fish and pulling his game from the store last year...
Should GoG repeat the same mistake with another unstable dev whose game is poorly reviewed? Who also calls out reviewers who give him a negative rating on Steam? At least FEZ was genuinely lauded.

If a dev has gone that far off the deep end, I don't think GoG can totally ignore it either...

Hey R!

We disagreed over the value of the rejection letter that gog sent to the Grimoire dev, so I thought I'll share with you some more valuable "feedback" gog sent to another dev:

https://www.gog.com/upload/forum/2019/05/a8a8b6635de40683c7505ed527d94e197610dd10.png

Sounds kinda familiar, doesn't it? But I'm sure the dev will take this constructive criticism to heart and go "Fuck it, I'll just go to Steam exclusively."

Gog does away with itself.

Or in short...they don't believe it will sell enough copies to be worth it to GoG...
They aren't confident in its release potential (i.e. they believe it will lose them money)
Sorry, but at the end of the day, that is what matters...
Not people backseat driving thinking there is boatloads of cash to be made from marginal games.

You can keep flooding the forums with your amateurish business proclamations, but the truth is that businesses understand far more about their financial reality than you!

What makes you so certain that the decision to reject Grimoire was a purely rational economic decision, as opposed to being based on other possible reasons? In other words, has a business ever made irrational decisions?

fronzel's opinions on games being rejected here are important, as are everyone else's. "Put up and shut up" rarely results in good outcomes with product lines in stores, and the reliance on one curator's opinion of whether a game is good may not resonate with the rest of the gaming community. I for one like to hear that someone is happy/disappointed of GOG's decisions for feedback purposes, though I do feel that if want action on a decision we need to confront GOG properly not just post on this largely ignored and overly negative forum.

I for one would like a backseat driver to say something when the car is headed over a cliff. Drivers make mistakes too you know.

Well, I think posting in half a dozen threads all the time. Supporting dozens of games which are not selling elsewhere and generally making a nuisance of himself are NOT admirable qualities...

It's one thing to have opinions, it's another to go around finding every tangential topic to spout off his ridiculousness in. How about you explain to me how that really relates to GoG in the Media and Interviews?

Grimoire is a turd. It's a game widely ridiculed on Youtube that was overpriced didn't even have a manual and is a poorly conceived slog of a game. And at the time they submitted it to GoG, they wanted to sell it for $40.

Similarly Hatred, a game that when it was finally released proved exactly why it was rejected. At least 80% of the curated game rejections are painfully obvious as to why, the rest are at least debatable, yet the forum is overwhelmed with people spamming the forums over it. It's just plain silliness and stupidity...

Opening the doors to every crap game is frankly a horrible business decision, but certain people with no clue about the cost of doing business act as if everything is free...
Because the game sales on Steam were abysmal at the point that developer decided to finally approach GoG. Just from sales alone, it was obvious this game would never be accepted. Bad sales for a game that was released on Steam a year before = failure. And this is before you take into account all the Youtube reviews which utterly panned it...