Fine but could you change your title? I for one like it here, and don't need you hanging out telling everyone to take their business elsewhere.

I spend a lot of time in here defending you when people call you a troll, getting a lot of shit from a lot of people, and here you are being one.

Less half baked games, not that curation keeps away the games i want here anyway.

i did change my title. but my last straw from gog was that they blocked many games in germany months ago which were available for years on here and that they still didn't patch a gamebreaking bug in rage of mages 2 although that bug is fixed by a patch for everyone who owns the retail version or pirates that game (the non gog version of course). so i don't try to force myself into seeing something positive on gog, thats worth a notice, anymore. and i also doubt that i'm the only one. also and don't see why i shouldn't post negative facts about gog, as i have supported them and didn't do that so they can pull all the shit that they're doing since 2014.

...so then why are you still bothering with the forum? There's, like, a thousand or so other gaming forums out there.
Because if you do nothing but spend all your time doing it, you get people like me telling you that if you don't like it, there's plenty of other lovely places on the internet for you to hang out at.
And if you continue to beleaguer people who don't care about it with it while claiming to hate spending your time doing it, you become a troll.

It's not a shit store but some shit has been creeping in for a while. I understand the 'company gotta make money' bit, but yeah, No Man's Sky is the perfect example: 60 USD for a game by a dev that's being investigated for false advertising. And now you can buy games in development, which I consider another mistake. They say they're about quality, so they need to stick to that.

NMS had a HUGE hype train going for it. Everybody was raving about it. If GOG had refused to get it on launch day, people would have been up in arms, whining about GOG curation. It was the closest thing to a non-witcher AAA day-one release on GOG.
So they took it. Ans since the released game is underwhelming, people are up in arms, pestering about GOG curation.

They just can't win, can they? ^^

There's not much doubt out there that No Man's Sky was a terrible disaster or immense proportions (well, except by people who have not yet actually played it long enough, or they're so upset about how crappy it is after paying $60+ for it that they're embarrassed and go into a massive denial trip deluding themselves into thinking it is a good game or "not that bad"), however neither GOG nor anyone else could have reliably predicted that it would be such an epic disaster to make Daikatana look like Game of the Decade.

So I can't fault GOG for recognizing this game and it's money making potential and bringing it speculatively to the store like any sane store would have speculatively done given the chance to sell it. In fact, I'm glad they brought it here because regardless of where it showed up for sale it would have sold anyway and I'd rather see GOG have gotten some of that money in profit than it all going to Steam and Steam's various resellers. At least this way some of that vomit-money will go into reinvesting in GOG's future products and growth rather than buying Gabe a new pair of baby seal eye slippers or whatever. :)

But you're absolutely right, it is impossible for them to win with curation if they try to curate things in any way that pleases everyone out there as people have by very nature opposing views about things that can not be reconciled by a single decision that has to pick A or B mutually exclusive. Every decision they make about every single game will have people that are happy as hell, people who dislike or hate the given game and people in between that don't care either way. It's just the nature of things.

Good point, I fully agree.

For the demands that GOG should proactively stop selling the game... I personally think they should see and follow what other stores are doing. If Steam and such don't stop selling it, then I don't see the point why GOG should either. Why is it that GOG alone would feel the game is a fraud and can't be sold?

I think the current situation is quite ok: GOG is selling the game, but there is also open discussion and reviews of the potential and existing problems the game has, so people are informed whether the should buy the game, and at which price point.

As said, I am still on the fence, gathering information and waiting for a better price. I am not into the politics like what the pre-hype was like and how well it was fulfilled, or what is the game author's view on gay marriage and child prostitution. Who cares, except gays and child prostitutes of course?

"Stop liking things I don't like." Lol! That's from a video TotalBiscuit did on "Relativism in games critique." He really nailed it on the head - we need to stop trying to prove other people "wrong" about which games they do and do not like, because it is someone's opinion. And that's it! You also nailed it when you said there will always be the haters and the lovers of any game (or movie, T.V. series, or book, I might add).

And those who talked about No Man's Sky...Hello Games purposely withheld reviews and content descriptions until the day of release (that alone should've made people think twice about getting the game), so GOG was just as unaware of the impending disaster as everyone else. Therefore, they sold (and pre-sold...ugh, people need to stop pre-ordering) the game in good faith, which we now know was rewarded with a subpar experience. A 60-dollar subpar experience. But $60 is what it sold for everywhere, whoever was criticizing GOG because of that. It wasn't a "GOG price" only; it was $60 universally (barring a few discounts and/or sales that some places may have had).

Thing is, how can gog do both curation and pre-release ?

By only caring about $$$$$...which is what every store/company does. "Curation" is indeed a myth.

Well, they already do both, so some protocol must be in place.

Not sure this happens really often? My impression always was that if someone complains here that game X was rejected by GOG (for being too niche or whatever) and I looked at it, then it didn't look like I would want it to buy. But maybe that was just me.

On the other hand my impression is also that GOG lately has lowered the threshold and releases even more Indies of questionable reputation. That should also reduce the problem of games not being here.

No curation approach can be perfect, as long as humans decide. There will always be mistakes and some wrong decisions are to be expected.

I totally agree although even on GOG I find plenty of games that suit me. Steam is just bigger and probably can afford higher fixed costs by having a huge amount of games on their plattform that do not sell relatively well but still good enough in absolute numbers because the Steam customer base is so much bigger.

It's one of the disadvantages of being small. Everything scales worse.

Still, also Steam has gatekeeping. After all they have to make sure the apps offered on their plattform are no malware, do not contain child pornography, nazi symbols or islamic propaganda. So yes, they must have gatekeeping in place for sure, just much less than GOG.

The curation process is geared towards profit maximizing, not quality assurance. If a game is shit, faulty, or bugged to infinity, but should sell well, they list it under column A.

Just to be clear, consumers don't create "hype trains", the people involved with promotion do, and those who stand to profit. And they know that people are fairly easy to psychologically manipulate by eliciting emotional responses rather than rational responses. And the values of our society are such that most people consider psychological manipulation to be acceptable. I certainly don't -- it disgusts me -- but I realize that I'm in a fairly small minority.

When GOG first started promoting it, I saw a $20 game -- assuming it worked as advertised -- being sold for $60, and said no. But a lot of people saw that price and thought it meant that the game was above and beyond what should be expected from a small, independent developer with no track record, and all the promoters winked and nodded and hyped. And it worked like a charm, just like it had millions of times before.

That said, I'm not going to blame anyone because this is considered acceptable behavior by most of us. It's a dog-eat-dog world, and we all play a part in this by allowing it to go on. But I will say that the "winners" in this world look an awful lot like losers.