Weclock: I'm figurin' since they only deal with Good Old Games.. usually if it was a good game, it was picked up by someone and eventually became the ip of a large company...
Generally, I don't think thats true. Big mainstream game companies do not seem to be interested in games that they don't expect to sell million(s), games generally made for niche audience/market. It's just not commercially viable for them.
In recent years some have been picked by small time "guarrilla" publishers (matrix games, shrapnel games, Strategy First etc.) and game download services (world of goo for example available from steam). Some distribute their own games (Spiderweb Software)and some even have their own game download services (Paradox Interactive's GamersGate). They can make profit from 100 000 unit sales (or even less).
Weclock: but anyway, half the developers on here are people I've never heard of, or games I never heard of anyway, so who knows?
For me it's quite the opposite; I either own retail version of the game available, have played them somewhere, have read review about it or the very least seen it somewhere. Only exceptions are Kingdom: The Far Reaches and Waxworks (even its screenshots seem vaguely familier).