Yes, at 04:00 my arguments are usually that brilliant. Let me dissect your posts now.


Good. But GOG isn't the only DRM Free store. If a game is already sold DRM Free in other places, you are already covered.

See above. GOG isn't the only DRM Free store. Not to mention that one can sell DRM Free games on Steam

Yes, because if GOG sold Thomas Was Alone, it would double its user base [/sarcasm]. They way to increase the user base isn't with indies. It's with exclusives. I'm willing to bet that the Warhammer and Star Wars games had more of an impact on the user base than all of the indies combined. So to increase their user base, they have to work on exclusives, not indie games that are available everywhere.

Yes, because if an AAA company wants to know about a store, they won't ask that store for numbers, nor will they ask those already on the store. They will go with a random developer that didn't manage to get his game there.

This is one of the most laughable arguments you make. If an indie developer has that kind of influence with someone in such an important decision making place in an AAA company, then he wouldn't be an indie publisher, since he would have used said pull to have the AAA company publish his game. If the AAA company refused to publish it, then what does that say for his game?

They do. Usually to people in the same floor as them on E3. Do check out the floor plans, and notice where the indie developers are, and where the AAA ones are.

Depends. Are the large companies only thinking of the bottom line, in which case the ease of working with someone is not that relevant, or are they thinking of the interpersonal relations needed for work, in which case they wouldn't have an army of lawyers for the contracts? What do you find more likely?

Monetary losses. That is the most likely reason. Selling those indie games would cause GOG to lose money, unless they can be sure of the volume they will move. So what ills could befell us if GOG did sell those? Losing GOG due to monetary problems.

I wouldn't. AAA games are what will bring users to GOG, so their games are highly unlikely to be refused, though not impossible. I think that Carmageddon: TDR was refused, but then again, Stainless Steel does call the game a stinker themselves (and I'm not sure if Stainless Steel is AAA).

Like which ones? Or are you just speculating without evidence?

This is the thing. PC games - especially indie games - have a notoriously short long-tail these days. Once a game has had its day in the sun and has been bundled, any income from the game thereafter is likely to be nothing more than a trickle. There's very little point in trying to bleed a game dry when it's been on Steam for months and been bundled to boot. Of course, there are a few long burners like VVVVVV and Super Meat Boy that are considered 'classics', but for the most part, most indies are forgotten after just a month or so of life.

Zeboyd Games' attitude seemed a little childish to me, to be honest. It should have been clear to him that putting Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World on GOG would have been construed as a last-ditch attempt at flogging a dead horse, especially given the amount of time that they'd been on Steam, the number of times they'd been on sale and the number of times they'd been bundled.

I can obviously only speak for my tastes personally, but I can honestly say that outside of AAA titles, there has been almost nothing released on Steam in the past couple of years that I would really want that hasn't been released on GOG as well. Most of the Steam exclusives are either multiplayer-centric or shovelware.

Most likely reason is that getting them now would be a financial loss for GOG. They may get them once the developers are closer to releasing another game, so they can have a "Pre-order the new game of developer X now, and while you wait, you can grab his older game at -67%" scenario. Remind me, what are those developers working on now?
Edit: Cave Story+, isn't that the developer that said GOG wasn't using the 70/30 split, even though he was never in contact with GOG?

Sure, they are absolutely free to do whatever they like. But you approach it from the wrong angle, I think.

GOG is a business and should be interested in making money, not building their own personal styled games library. And for making money they need the goodwill of the customers, that's us. And if we don't like what we see, we can/should/will articulate our disagreement. That's what we are doing here.

So if GOG doesn't get the mentioned games above soon I will be unsatisfied with GOG and I will go to Steam and buy my games over there. Let's see how much good it does to GOG then.

They can do what they want and I can do what I want. Everyone is free.

Still nothing wrong? It really doesn't matter how they decide? It really is not a pity if good games cannot come here because GOG thinks they are clever (more than they actually are)?

All I ask for is that GOG acts not stupid but really smart and tries to maximize its revenue. My personal guess is that there are quite a number of good games they miss by a too high rejection threshold.

Instead they should take a much higher number of games on, but only give them attention (like featured articles, banners in sales, ...) if they sell well and otherwise throw them out again. This strategy would surely be more profitable than the current one.

Surely that's what GOG thinks, that releasing them here would not make them more money (at least I hope they go for the money and aren't just lazy), but are they right with it? Maybe they just miscalculated? Maybe the criteria they use to decide if a game will be profitable or not are faulty? After all looking into the future is one of the most difficult professions on earth. (I hope their marketing gurus have a decent crystal ball.)

The success of Steam (with a larger user base) even with Indie games that were rejected here could be a hint that the calculation that GOG makes might be wrong. They actually might be losing money when they were thinking they were saving it.

Also in a way the fixed costs aren't that big. Almost nothing I can think of is cheaper than adding some more items to a digital product web shop (if it is programmed well and many things are automatized). They could introduce a lower quality segment at almost no costs and then let the market decide what goes up into the premium segment. It might be the better approach.

In the end the customer decides what is good and what is not. GOG is only there to help. As a lazy customer who only wants to use GOG I have a personal interest that GOG makes actually the right decisions.

I do not think I approach in the wrong angle. Why? Because not all people here want Indie non curated, games. And this post is more about the "indie" community, so what if I tell you I am here more for the OLD GOOD GAMES, than for Indie games? Even if I also like Indie games...

To the second question, my previous answer also replies to it.

That is what I do, Hatred wasn't here and I bought it there, so?

Agree.

I also think GOG did several wrong things recently, but not related to games, but related to try to copy STEAM or eliminate some GOOD OLD FEATURES, but I am free to leave the place anytime, for me, the glass is still half full, not half empty.

If you mean the three examples someone posted some lines ago, I must disagree, no one of them looks specially good. IMHO, please note that I also I didn't played them, but frankly speaking I will only willing to play the third one.

No, business can grow fast and fail eaten by themselves or grow within their possibilities, we have NO INFO about how much GOG spend on servers, on salaries, how much get from the revenue of the games, and a LONG etc... so IMO GOG is trying to maintain their services in their own good capabilities, STEAM is MUCH BIGGER than GOG, and I will not like GOG start to publish Indie Crap all over, not dedicating time to make Old Games work fine in my system or even eliminating more features. You guys think companies have unlimited resources and personal, let me tell you something, I worked in some of the most bigger publishers in game industry, and you guys are totally wrong thinking the money and resources are infinite.

But you are free to think anything else, of course.

Really? The celebrities of the indie game pantheon? I'm not so sure.

Braid's Jonathan Blow is working on The Witness. Cave Story's Daisuke Amaya recently released Kero Blaster (currently only available on Playism). Limbo's Playdead is working on . Super Meat Boy's Team Meat recently released [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfnMpFG9wrk]The Binding Of Isaac: Rebirth and is working on Super Meat Boy: Forever and Mew-Genics

Nicalis never claimed to have been in contact with GOG and the tweet was made before GOG ever publicly declared what their rev share was on their indie dev portal: http://www.gog.com/indie. It's possible it was originally not 70/30 and they got wind from other devs or they were misinformed or they were lying.

I also wouldn't call Nicalis' Cave Story+ an indie classic. The original Cave Story by Studio Pixel is, and that one is free. Cave Story+ doesn't bring that much to the table, IMO.

You do recall their answer to the "Provide unsupported Linux builds, we'll do the support ourselves", right? Because the "lower quality segment" you are describing is exactly that, unsupported builds.

"Not so sure" wouldn't be a good business argument. ;) Maybe they are celebrities because everyone already bought and played them. The customer bases of various stores overlap, and the more well known and popular an older indie is, the less likely it is that a lot of GOG customers don't own it yet.

I totally agree that resources are not infinite. It is a trade off. It may just not be exactly clear where it is.

Basically GOG has to ask itself if its still doing the right thing.

I mean also you said you might want to buy one of these mentioned games. So this is a hint that GOG might lose money but not selling them.

Here is another idea what GOG could do to improve the situation.

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.

Yes. I don't go after indies, but I think I have ~3 copies of each of those already. I'm not going to get a fourth any time soon, and a few of those are DRM-Free already.

So three of the developers have games set to release soon-ish, and the fourth is the questionable one.

Their tweet was "We would if they used the standard 70/30 split". TET had answered "Nicalis was never in contact with us, so I don't know where he got the notion we weren't using that split". I may have to dig up the posts, but that does tell me that Nicalis wasn't considering GOG due to incorrect evidence.

I don't recall, but I can imagine it. Well, I guess that's what the money back guarantee comes in handy for. GOG should just increase the cut for games it didn't test itself and does not expect to sell lots of.

If GOG just rejects a good game - it's the fault of GOG.

If GOG asks for a higher cut because costs are higher and the devs refuse this reasonable request - it's the fault of the devs.

GOG could easily make the cut volume dependent (i.e. higher for the first 100s of units sold and lower afterwards) so that on average it's 70/30.

Wishlist. Use it.