Alexrd: I must say I was never a fan of GOG's "curation" (read: babysitting). What's considered to be a good game or not is something only the consumer can decide. I can understand that resources are limited and that they can't let everything in, but I would like to understand the basis of their requirements and filtering methods.
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.
Trilarion: Instead of releasing games, they offer to order a game conditional of a certain minimum number of orders and only then they are releasing the game. So what I mean is that one week before release any publisher can tell GOG the game and the price and if GOG is not sure if it will be profitable they take pre-orders and only if a certain number is exceeded (say 100 orders) they actually process them and release the game here on GOG. This way could predict the success of a game much better than their personal selection.
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?