You've answered your own question with your second paragraph. Developers rarely seek to be a one-hit-wonder. They almost always have dreams of being the next big thing, and on Steam that's remarkably hard to do, because by the time your next game is finished, your name will already have long been forgotten. Hence my quote from Lao Tzu there (or from Blade Runner for the more literary challenged out there).

Boyd doesn't seem to be bashing GOG specifically so much as making a broader point that selling your game anywhere besides Steam is more trouble than it's worth. So yeah, Steam is just a rampaging juggernaut that tramples all in its path.

Love? I thought it was a fun game when I played it but I also beat it in a couple of hours. It's good but something you have to watch out for with indie games is whether they offer a substantial enough experience to charge a certain price for them because a lot of indie developers don't have the manpower to create deep or lengthy games.

I admit I don't get why GOG rejects certain games and there's probably a lot of inconsistency, but to me it's not a big deal. On the whole they have a pretty good batting average in terms of release quality.

Maybe not better than those games, but you know what Daikatana DOES have over those? Infamy and instant recognition. In the same way that people like going to Rocky Horror or Troll 2 showings/conventions, along with other terrible B movies, Daikatana is that same kind of experience and it doesn't matter if it's GOOD or not. Mainstream customers are going to be more likely to know about Daikatana versus the others.

Not to mention, we just don't KNOW what kind of contracts GOG gets locked into when they sign a new publisher here. In the case of Master of Orion, maybe they couldn't GET 1 and 2 unless they took 3 as well. This sort of thing happens with business contracts all the time. Sometimes you have to take the rotten fruit to get a crack at the ripe ones, especially when you're in GOG's position.

I am not saying, that seal of quality is not important. I’m just saying that, if I have to rank both, financial success comes first. Seal of quality alone won’t help you finance your next game. Money however will. That’s why I think: financial success first, seal of quality second. Having both, is preferable of course, and the decisions that you have to make as a developer do not always force you to chose between the two. Often, both go hand in hand.

To get back to the topic, what this means, I guess, is: exposure on GOG is no guarantee that you will be successful, and not being on GOG does not mean that you will fail.

Having a store that isn't curated just means, shovel-ware, crap-ware, crap that doesn't work properly and a huge amount of wasted time by the customers having to sift through the crap to find the gems.

I highly doubt that any of the stores you went to prior to getting onto the internet weren't curated. They do it specifically because sales plummet when you have 6 dozen different kinds of toothpaste to choose from. It's hard for the customer to find the one they want so they, buy one at random, buy the one they always buy, buy the one with the most advertisement or, more likely, they don't buy anything at all.

Same deal here, GOG has gotten my money more often than any other computer store because they have a currated list. It's a smaller selection, so I have fewer options and can focus a bit more rather than being overwhelmed with crap. Even if Steam went DRM free and reformed their practices, I probably still wouldn't buy much from them because most of the games on there are complete crap and shifting through it is too much work just to spend money.
Wouldn't work. 1 week is a ridiculously short period of time and do we really need that cluttered crap on this site? Also, 100 orders is a small amount of money compared with the investment that GOG has to make in bringing a game here. Granted new games should require less testing and fixing, but the cost would likely be greater than their take on 100 games and moving to 500 or 1000 would put us back in the position we're at.

Unfortunately, GOG can't bring all the games here without filling the librarly with 80% crap and until there are actual sales figures in to contradict their estimation of the marketability of the games there's not really any way around it.

Also, developers have screwed GOG in the past. I remember when that game came out here at the same time that it was bundled. Where's GOG's incentive to work with indie developers if they're going to do that?

That's as much on GoG as it is on the developer. GoG chooses to put itself on this island where they determine what does and does not get released. When a title does finally get here, odds are it's been already out in the mainstream for years. So you think the developer is going to do GoG a solid and not bundle it anymore (or not bundle it at the time it comes out on GoG) when the game has already sold a decent amount already plus there are pretty good chances that they will sell more copies in a Humble Bundle than on GoG?

GoG is seen as a niche storefront by most devs and irrelevant to others. Nobody comes running here to release games day one, at least not in large numbers. GoG has been in business now for quite some time, proclaiming that they were going to show the world the DRM-Free is the way to go. Do you think they have? Do you think the existance of GoG has made most devs and publishers pause and think about releasing their game here vs. Steam? Do you think the existence of the DRM-Free store has in any way shape or form impacted Steam's bottom line all these years? Fanboys will never ever comprehend that DRM-Free as a whole represents such a tiny, insignificant portion of the PC playerbase at large that it hardly even registers to most devs as an option to do it.

I kind of wonder if GOG should make a sub-brand that's "GOG, but not curated" for Indies like that, and the high performers can be added then to the main catalog.

The sub-brand would be fully GOG (same accounts, download system, etc), but really just a filtering of the catalog depending on which site you're viewing from.

Last I checked, GOG was one of the largest online retailers of games. If these developers are so spoiled that they view that as a niche shop then they deserve to have their games not show up here. I certainly don't want to be dealing with that sort of ego, it doesn't make for good games.

And yes, it has changed Steam's bottom line. Not much, but there are people buying games here that would have been forced to buy the title from Steam or a retail pack that used Steamworks.

Ultimately, if they want to be on Steam competing with a huge library of crap, that's really their choice, but titles that make it into the catalog here have much less competition. There's fewer than 1,000 games here and they're just competing with games in their genre. The Just the likelihood of being seen here and promoted is far and away better than what Steam can offer. That has value, and if the Indie devs are that spoiled, then I'm glad they aren't here.
Won't happen. I thought it was nuts that they opted not to do that when they brought new games here, but if they didn't do it for that, I can't imagine they would do that for this.

Do you have something to back up that they are one of the largest online retailers? How can you be one of the largest online retailers when you only sell a third of what everyone else is selling (and I'm not talking about shovelware either). Do you have hard numbers to back up how it's impacting Steam because everytime I turn around, Valve is putting out a press release that the number of concurrent users goes up. It's not just devs that are releasing on Steam vs. here. There are countless references to games that are available on both stores and Steam outsells GoG somewhere in the 80% range on a consistent basis.

If you think indie devs don't think Steam is the golden child when it comes to sales, check out the series of articles by this dev. Another thing that gets overlooked is the amount of tools that Valve provides vs. everyone else. That is a huge selling point, especially to indie devs who don't have those kind of monitoring sales tools of their own.

http://gamasutra.com/blogs/DavidGalindo/20100724/87650/How_much_do_indie_PC_devs_make_anyways.php

There was a posting about that a few years ago. Like I said last time I checked GOG was one of the bigboys, not sure if they still are, but they wouldn't be getting the games they're getting now if they were a small-fry.

I'd rather have curated games i.e. rejections than Greenlight.

Great points, but I think your satire radar needs tweaking.

Search function. And if there are games I don't like or don't want to buy, I have the choice of not buying them. But those that want to, can, because the choice is available. I don't think the solution is limiting the choices based on arbitrary and subjective reasons. I know what I want, I don't blind-buy, I do my research.

You can ignore crap and focus on what you want.

Because most people don't know what they are going to buy beforehand?

Look, I can respect curating from a logistics POV, but unfortunately that's not what happens in all cases. Seriously, what's the excuse for the lack of games like Limbo, Braid, etc...?

Personal opinion, if they are released now, they won't sell (because everyone has multiple copies, including DRM-Free ones). They may be released when the developers put up their new games for pre-order, in a "Pre-order developer's X new game, and get his older game at Y% off".
Haven't I already posted this?

As it was already discussed in the past, most people interested in those three games already had countless occasion to get those games at a big discount elsewhere (I know I have them while not being particularly interested in them to begin with). That means, if they were to be released here it would be mainly purchased by new gamers, people buying exclusively here and people not minding to buy duplicates because they love it here :-). It seems extremely more nice than profitable.

What games are they getting? They are such a big boy store that Paradox decided to release Cities in Motion (not even the sequel), a game that's 4+ years old and bundled before instead of Cities: Skylines? Warner Brothers is another big publisher here but no new games like Shadow of Mordor. Homeworld Remastered is on the top 10 at Steam, can I find that here? A lot of people are ranting and raving about this game called Rocket League that's #1 on Steam right now, where is that?
But yet there are plenty of other games that are released here that have been sold to hell and back elsewhere. See Cities in Motion and Tropico 4.