This is to the GoG team, but the GoG community is welcome to join in this discussion.

My Full disclosure: Ihave no affiliation with Cave, Degica or any game company, publisher, developer, PR firm or any other potential conflict of interest. (Thanks to Lord Kane for asking and point it out)

This is the game in question:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bf0xkLOlQqw (Thanks to JMich for pointing it out)

Dear Team GoG,

Once upon a time, this site and company began as Good Old Games, a place for good and great games of the past to be made available to the public again without DRM and good to go on new operating systems. This was good. Very Good.

Then you changed from Good Old Games to GoG and started offering new games along with older games all without DRM . This was, and is, Great.

You have a curator process to prevent GoG being a mess like IOS, Droid and Steam. This also is very good, but also has a downside.

All of which brings me to Mushihimesama and GoG "Getting Back to Our Roots."

Mushihimesama is shoot-em up (also known as a Shmup to fans of the genre - and for those unfamiliar with the genre).

Mushihimesama is the embodiment of a Good Old Game - except better. It is a Great Old Game (Originally released in 2004), from an excellent developer in Cave and was ported to the PS2, Xbox 360, IOS and now has been ported to the PC by Degica with no region restrictions.

GoG's stance on DRM free has often been a deal breaker for many games, but Degica have approached your business to put this game on GoG DRM free.

http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=55529&start=180

And this the outcome:

"We've contacted GOG a few times about getting our titles on their platform
Below is an email from GOG from a week or two ago in regards to Mushihimesama. We'll be sending them some info on Monday and hopefully they'll choose to take the title. If they don't, we'll work on releasing a DRM free version via the Humble Store.

"Hi Name,

We’ve discussed Mushihime Sama internally and because we’re so close to launch we’re not sure if we’ll be able to make it for launch, especially because this will be launching around the same time as our Fall promo. We’re also not totally convinced that the game can perform so well for as as it appears to be relatively unknown outside of Japan.

Because of this what we’d like to do is to wait and see how the launch on Steam goes and then see if it makes sense for us to add the game at a later stage.

Best of luck with the Steam launch!

All the best,
Name" "

To say the least, I find this rather stunning. Yes, GoG is a business, yes it must make a profit to survive, but according to Steam Spy this game has sold approximately 31,000 units.

http://steamspy.com/app/377860

No doubt, that is not a huge seller and not by the standards of the Witcher III, but is that really necessary?

The Economics argument (all figures in US dollars):

GoG's market share has continued to climb, and though exact data is unavailable, developers have shared sales percentage figures for their games by platform holder, and so as near as I can tell GoG is now around 15 percent of market share and steam sales.

Fifteen percent of steam would be about 4,500 copies on GoG, the game has a $20 price tag but the average selling price is around $17 on steam (again according to Steam Spy referenced earlier).

The math then equals $76,500 of total revenue, with a standard 30 percent cut to GoG that equates to $22,950.

But take the 25 cent credit card transaction fee for every sale that is $1,125 and add to that a 2.5 percent overall sale fee to the credit card company that is $1,912.50 for a total transaction cost of $3,037.50. Assuming the entire fee is taken fro GoG's share that leaves GoG with $19,912.50. Now, for CDProject Red (parent company of GoG being valued at $1 billion) roughly $20,000 in sales seems not worth the time and effort.

But here is why it is worth the time and effort. The effort is minimal - at best. The game already is ported and works. All GoG has to do is literally put a copy on your servers. That's all. And it is a free $20,000 in the bank (less taxes).

The economics actually make sense. It is actually as close to free money as a business gets. A proven product, no extra workload and new sales and revenue.

The Good Old Game argument:

As mentioned earlier, this is a game from 2004. So it fits the "old" criteria - old, of course, being relative.

But what about good?

Well, as much as Metacritic is worth or not worth, the game holds a 86 rating among critics for the PC version.It's Steam ranking is a whopping 96 percent. Among fans of the genre, the game is highly rated. So the game meets the "Good" criteria.

So if the game is both Good and Old, and makes economic sense, why the rejection?

Goodwill and new fans argument.

If Mushihimesama is a 4,000 to 5,000 seller, the economics make sense. It will also bring a lot of goodwill with a community of passionate gamers. Those of us who would buy Mushihimesama are among the group that do the most to evangelize the genre, developers and stores to others we know. GoG is a gamer's store. Mushihimesama is the best example of what can, and should, be on GoG, I can buy Halo, CoD, Gran Turismo anywhere. From Walmart, Target, Gamestop, KMart, Sears, Kohl's, Best Buy, Amazon, etc. But how many places can offer a game like Mushihimesama? Very few. This is why the digital store dedicated to games is so crucial to these types of games and to gamers who have no other alternative to these games.

GoG's argument that it is not known outside Japan:

True for many people. which is another reason why GoG should offer the game.

Digital Distribution made it possible for indie games to reach an audience and it makes it possible for smaller titles to succeed, too. But these games will never become known to more people if they are always denied an audience.

How can GoG expect people to know about Mushihimesama, when those of us who do, had to import the game from Japan?

Simple, they can't. A circular argument on a false premise by GoG. This game as a western release would easily allow more people to learn of this great game and this great developer.

GoG bias against Shmups, 2D and non-trendy games?

Are trendy games really a requirement?

When GoG released Legend of Grimrock, it was not a trendy genre. It still is not, how many games still use the FPP one-step at a time dungeon crawl? But it was and still is worth releasing.

Conclusion:

From all the information I have available, it seems GoG just has a general bias and disdain for the Shmup genre.

As economically, the game makes sense.
On a quality basis, the game makes sense.
On working with the publisher, the game makes sense Degica approached GoG.
DRM-free negotiations are not a problem, Again, it was Degica who approached GoG.

From all I can tell, it would be in GoG's interest and the community's interest to add Mushihimesama to the GoG library.

I STRONGLY urge GoG to seriously reconsider your prior decision to reject Mushihimesama and add this great game to the GoG community.

Thank you for the time and keep up the good (though could be a bit better) work you all do.

P.S. For those who read the whole piece and would also like to see Mushihimesama added here is the wishlist link and maybe up vote this post to help Mushihimesama chances.

https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/mushihimesama

https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games#search=Mushihimesama

(edited to add details missing)

OP,

In the interests of disclosure, do you have any connection with the developers of the game?
When was the original submission request? in 2015? was it this year or was it earlier?
Have they tried to resubmit recently?

These are questions I would like truthful answers to.

I have absolutely none at all. I have no connection to any developer.

I am just a fan of shmups and have Ikaruga, Deathsmiles, Mushihimesama, DoDonpachi Gradius V, and Jamestown (among others) across many different platforms (PS1, PS2, PS3, GameCube, Xbox 360) and would just like to be able to play them in one place and know that I can always have them for the PC in the future.

My GoG collection has Raiden III, Raidern IV, Raiden Legacy, Astebreed, Crimson Clover, Symphony and Dyad,

Fair question.

As for the last time they submitted, I have no idea. I have no connection to the company.

Edit for typos.

You make a few assumptions, which do increase the figure you end up with.
Assumption 1: The game will sell 4500 copies at full price.
From my understanding of the forum threads, most people wait for a sale before buying a game (any game), so a 50% cut should be applied to that. The $17 average is the average price across regions, not the price people paid for it (I think, haven't really looked at SteamSpy). So the first figure should be halved, which means $38.250. The standard GOG cut then translates to $11.475
The transaction fee remains the same ($1.125), and the 2.5 is halved, so $956.25, which leaves GOG's profit a bit lower than $9.000

Assumption 2: All the contracts are already in place.
Yes, GOG most likely does have lawyers in retainer to create and negotiate the contracts, but their time is the limitation here, not the money. Assuming the least amount of time to finalize a contract is 5 hours (which I seriously doubt if it's enough), the game may not make economical sense to pursue.

Assumption 3: Support will be provided by the publisher.
For older games, the support is provided by GOG themselves. I a game is expected to require a lot of support manhours, it may not make sense to release it, even if it would sell half a million copies. Newer games may not have the support cost, assuming the publisher will provide the support themselves. But the support cost then moves to the publisher, who may not like it.

All in all, I'd say this game may provide GOG with a few thousand dollars, which is most likely not worth their time. But increasing the visibility and knowledge of the game can change things, so this thread is a good step in that direction.
On the other hand, I know nothing of the game, and this thread doesn't tell me anything either. It's just a "You must play this game. It's awesome", without any explanation as to what makes it awesome.

Here is the game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bf0xkLOlQqw

As for the price, I took the Steam spy average. I agree most would wait for a sale, but Steam has massive sales and the $17 is the average at this point from the $20 base. That is my reasoning/assumption. I fully acknowledge that it will never be a million seller, but most games are not and most of these games on GoG are not million-sellers among the indies.

As for GoG having to update the game in the future. That is true, but most likely it may well not be entirely on to them. Just as using DOSBox for some games now a "WindowsBox" may very well be part of the future to always play these games on newer PCs.

I know the game is a bullet hell one. My question still is why the game is considered awesome, and how is it different from any other bullet hell game. I said support, not update. Things like "Game crashes on startup" or "Music doesn't loop" or "When using a controller, I can't move to the left". Common inquiries that people encounter all the time with games, and that someone will have to answer (or at least attempt to).

The game is by Cave, and their games have excellent controls, very precise, which is needed, very easy to see the bullets ( a lot of bullet hell games actually make this difficult with bad backgrounds and poor color combinations). The colors used to differentiate what is good and bad is easily recognizable and the bullet patterns they develop are excellent.

Degica is actually doing the support, this is from 2014:

"We're working on troubleshooting the issues that have come up and we'll have a patch/update available very soon.

Wanted to quickly address this as well:"

I have not heard of any more issues, recently. But I can't comment say for sure, but as it has been on Steam for more than a year I think most of the problems are solved. Also, the majority of the problems seem to have come from the Steam DRM, not really the game from what I have read from those who have had problems.

Hmm GOG audience is often more critical and since gog started with games being only 6 or 10 dollars, anything priced above that still makes people reluctant to buy I think. Often resulting in forum comments like: "XX amount of dollars for a (insert insult here) game??" On steam they'll swallow everything and throw their wallet at their screen. I would love to see that game here as well. Just because I have a soft spot for the genre. Not that I'm any good at it.

Yet another "curation is great and all, but I'm displeased because GOG rejected a game that I personally wish was available on GOG" thread. We never see these very often at all! :)

It's not a surprise mind you, and in fact I expect the trend to continue to grow simply due to mathematics. Unlike Steam which more or less will sell virtually every game imaginable on their platform, GOG will only consider a small fraction of potential games through their curation process by design. Since GOG only wishes to sell a select subset of all available games within their business model and there are many many times more games available to potentially sell than what they plan to sell - by default they will end up rejecting many many times more games than they accept.

If we assume that every single game made has fans and potential customers who want to buy them, and some portion of those people are GOG customers/fans also, it stands to reason that they'll want the games that interest them to show up on GOG also. Since everyone is an individual with different tastes in games and preferences, naturally people's selections will vary quite widely on what they would like to see available in the GOG store. As GOG presumably rejects more games than they accept due to their curated business model, naturally there are going to be people who want some of the rejected games to be here for just about every rejected game.

This really leaves at least two solid possibilities:

1) GOG continues their curated business model as it seems to be a very successful one for them so far, producing growth year over year with no public signs of faltering at least from the viewpoing of CDP's public financial statements.

2) GOG caves in to minority viewpoint pressures and starts giving in and allowing various games that any person has complained here in the forums got rejected for some reason or another. The store ends up accepting dozens of these games and effectively turns into Steam Greenlight and we're blasted with a gardenhose of games of various quality. As the number of games rises, GOG's available manpower resources are divided among them all even more thinly and the amount of attention any specific game gets from GOG's engineering, support and other teams goes down.

With option #2, the further caveat is that people out there will still not be happy. Because if they accept 20 more games per week they'll still be rejecting games and someone out there will want those rejected games. Not only that but the unhappy person will now be able to say "but they accepted <list of 20 additional games accepted this week> BUT NOT THIS ONE! WHY????" just in the same way that people do right now. No matter how many games they accept, if they reject even a single game - a voice out there will be unhappy and want to know why and not care what the answer is.

So what option do they ultimately have really? To open the floodgates like Steam did and let all games in and let the customer make that decision just to make everyone happy? Well as we can see - that way of doing things doesn't work either because many Steam customers aren't happy that there are 10 million shovelware shit games of mediocre quality released every day on Steam, making the store a cluttered mess of shit.

At the end of the day, no matter what business strategy that Steam, GOG or any other store takes with regards to these decisions there will be customers that like the given business model personally and those that hate it or are upset about the decision to reject some game or the decision to accept some other game. Any company that doesn't realize that will soon realize it when they read their own forums to see what people think - because no matter what they do they will have people who agree with it and those who disagree with it. Constantly changing business strategy just to try to get every single voice to give you praise is a losing proposition, you try to please everyone and end up unable to do so because there are people with diametrically opposing viewpoints that can not both me mutually satisfied by one single strategy.

So, Steam has their strategy and it works for them as a successful business model, and GOG has their own very different strategy and it works for them as a completely different successful business model. Both have people who praise each store's strategies and those who criticize each, and it will be no different from now until the end of time. It will be that way if each store continues their existing strategies indefinitely, or if they try a different strategy every month until the end of time. You just can't run a business like this and make every single customer 100% happy, any more than a politician can please 100% of the population via passing new laws and new government programs etc.

Me, I'm mostly pleased with GOG's curation and wish they'd be even more strict personally and reject half the games that they currently accept. I even wish they'd take it a step further and go out and set some of the developers of some of the games on fire just as a great symbolic gesture in a sort of Postal dude sort of way. :)

And yet another "GOG should curate even more so I don't have to look at those awful screenshots" answer. We all have our thing. The key difference being that for some people like me, a game being here is the only way to buy it, because for many games there would be no other drm-free version. For someone like you, a game you don't want to buy being here means... I don't know. Nothing? Having to read a little bit more? Having to know what games to buy instead of buying everything the store might offer? Honestly, I'll always favour the choise to buy over the slight annoyance of reading a little bit more.

I wonder how many of the "I want this really curated" people really don't care because they'd buy drm games in Steam anyway?

And also, I seem to remember you wanted Goat Simulator in here... What was that about GOG curating even more and weird great symbolic gesture fetish? :P

The one aspect I find more difficult is to let Steam have a game gog could have sold here. Of course I have no knowledge of internal affairs, but why give another reason for customers to go to Steam first? Seems counter productive to send customers and their loyalties to a main competitor.

And this will only grow in number as GOG turns down games that potentially would be good fits for their catalog and customers. There's a tremendous amount of subjectivity likely at play here, and it seemingly all comes down to whether or not the individuals directly responsible for the curation "like" the game or not. That's all well and good if your tastes happen to coincide with that of GOG's own staff, but people can neither expect everyone to have the exact same tastes in games as they do, nor can they expect a game store to stock only the games that "they" like. With all due respect, I think this is a repeated strawman arguement that implicitly posits that the games GOG doesn't accept are all Greenlight fodder (regardless of their actual quality), or that the only alternative to GOG narrowly accepting games for seemingly (at times) subjective and arbitrary reasons is for them to accept all games. No one, no one is arguing that GOG open the flood gates and accept every single game that people complain about here. What I do see are people who are trying to make impassioned arguements for their pet games, with some of them having merit, and some of them not.

As I've said before, GOG has the potential to miss out on some great games both now and in the future; everyone wants GOG to grow and have a good quality catalog, and I would say that while this process still involves curation, it's worth taking a step back and remembering that just because it's GOG doing the curation, doesn't mean it's perfect.

As for solutions, the only suggestions I can think of are to encourage other people with like-minded interests to take to the Wishlist, or, voting with your wallet and buying the game on Steam, Humble, or direct from the developer. If GOG won't take your money, give it to another store who will.

Hm, while I would love to see Mushihiemasama here, I would prefer Starward Rogue or Cryptark but what do I know. There are so many shmup games or mixup genre out there. Still I don't get it why they denied or don't release them. It just makes no sense especially for Mushihiemasama. Well at least Crimzon Clover is here.

If it were only a matter of skipping over more games I'm not interested, or the website being updated with Steam like filter controls to cull the garden hose of games to some degree then it would be less of a problem in terms of what one sees on the homepage day to day, etc.

But, unlike Steam which just more or less shovels games over the fence and washes their hands, redirecting customer support inquiries to the appropriate publisher/developer and wishing you to have a nice day KTHXBYE more or less - GOG personally has to build all of the installers, patches, gather the bonus extras together in their standard format, and maintain all of that on an ongoing basis, as well as creating their own support knowledgebase for each game, and staff training to a degree for each game to handle issues that arise with them all because that is a value added feature that GOG provides where they actually provide direct support for the games that they sell in the catalogue. So it is not a resource free situation to just add any number of random games to the GOG catalogue, it costs them per-game resources to support new games here and continue to have the same level of support for each game they sell.

Sure, I would love to have Goat Simulator here. The difference between my affinity to see it here and all of these "GOG curated yet another game!!!?!!?!!!" threads, is that my desire is just that, a passive desire. It isn't a crusade to get the game to be here, nor is it a criticism towards GOG for the game not being here. To the best of my knowledge the reason that game is not available here has little to do with GOG, and I believe more to do with the developer/publisher of the game not having any interest in selling the game here.

However, if someone were to contact Coffee Stain studios and ask them about bringing their game here and actually receive a response from them stating "We wanted to bring it to GOG but they have refused Goat Simulator." whether they included a rationale for the decision or not - it wouldn't phase me at all. I can desire something to be here without feeling entitled towards GOG nor the publisher/developer of the game that it should be here. I don't think there is any problem at all with people desiring any game at all to be here. Desire is just that, desire.

And if GOG were offered Goat Simulator and even came right out and said right here in the forums "um... no, we don't want to sell a crap game like that here, we hate it and think it should burn in the fire of 1000 suns", even though I'd disagree with them on their assessment of the game compared to my own assessment, I wouldn't criticize them for making that choice as a business decision because they know how to run their business to be profitable and grow far more than I ever could. I'd cast my vote on the wishlist for the game and hope for the best and then pretty much leave it at that.

You wouldn't see me post a ranting tirade about it here, nor have bad feelings towards GOG about it. I'd like to see Spellforce 2 Faith in Destiny here also, and allegedly that is one that GOG actually refused according to some people. I don't know if that is true or not, but I cast a vote for it on the wishlist and have made some neutral (as in devoid of emotion) comments in a few threads lately about it stating that it'd be cool if it came here.

Whether or not either of those two games come to GOG.com, it has no effect on my opinion of the quality of their store, nor do I have any negative feelings about their curation. Likewise if there is a game I'd like to see come here in the future and they outright reject it and that is known, while I might still like to see it come here, I wont scoff their decision or set them on fire for it.

Ultimately it's rare that GOG would reject most games that I'd actually like to see come here though, as the type of games I'd like to see come here tend to be the ones that GOG would shit bricks of excitement to have the opportunity to bring here and sell to us in the first place, rather than ones that are middle-ground "up in the air, hard to say for sure what way they might go on that one" type of games.

I would however shit bricks of excitement if Goat Simulator were added here with all of its DLC, and with new special cross-franchise DLC somehow involving The Witcher 3 (like they did with Payday), and have new DLC for The Witcher 3 that lets you turn Roach into the goat from Goat Simulator or something. That would be some pretty funny ass shit. :)

So I'm no different than anyone else in the desire department, but I don't get overly-emotional or go on crusades or judge GOG about their decisions about this stuff even if it means they reject something I'd like to see here. I think they do a great job overall with curation and fully expect that that means something I might want here might not make the cut sometimes too, and that's a small price to pay to know GOG isn't going to become Greenlight over night.

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