Fair enough and btw thanks for all your responses. I guess my view is best summed up as all dev communication is not equal. While I appreciate civil conversation, if what I am hearing from the other person is nonsensical or hostile to my preferences, then it isn't really worth all that much to me.

I'll give a few examples, admittedly my memory may be fuzzy so take with a grain of salt:

When the dev of Supraland decided to delist his game, I reached out to him, did receive a response, but the response was simply to say if I wasn't a backer of the game originally on whatever platform (I don't remember but like a Kickstarter or Patreon) then I couldn't get a refund. Oh but GOG customers could get a Scheme key.
Result: unsatisfying communication.

I communicated with a dev/partner of a dev regarding The Quest games. They clarified the DLC situation of the game; another platform had a DLC I wanted but it wouldn't be coming to GOG. This included several messages back and forth and was a pleasant experience despite me not getting exactly what I wanted.
Result: satisfying communication.

The best contrast from GTTOD guy I can show is the following:
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/release_8bit_adventures_1_2_bundle_9cf92
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/release_8bit_adventures_2_with_ost_and_a_bundle_ea6a6/page1

The dev of these 8bit Adventures games is all over these forum topics actively engaging with the community here. He does not act like we're some burden to throw a breadcrumb at every once in a blue moon. The behavior of this dev makes me want to prioritize buying this game even if the game itself doesn't look that remarkable to me (not meant disrespectfully...it is on a store competing with some of the greatest RPG masterpieces of all time). In fact I have bought games here in the past on similar principle, when the dev/pub goes out of their way to engage with the audience here. That's the type of behavior that should be supported.

I don't think GOG is acting hostile towards pubs/devs. GOG does seem to (eventually) enforce update parity or delist stuff if a new DLC comes out that doesn't come here, but I wouldn't say that's hostile. If you mean GOG users acting hostile I have to disagree. It's a good thing for users to "name and shame" the pubs/devs who don't want to be here, lest more customers unwittingly get stuck with a Supraland or other such title that will never be finished here and ultimately just gets delisted. GOG customers who purchase an In Development title deserve better than pubs/devs complaining and then the title being pulled. As far as I'm concerned, the customers who buy the game have held up their end of the bargain.

Edit: clarity

About 70% of what I'd make in the private sector, plus I do 10-15 hours unpaid overtime on average because I take pride in going the extra mile to do my work well, even when it isn't strictly required, but yes, I'm otherwise paid for my work.

It seems likely to me that if he hadn't treated the GOG version like abandonware, it might have sold more. This may very well be a case of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Either way, at this point, GOG consumers had paid for the product and he failed in his obligation to deliver what was advertised to these customers, not because he couldn't reasonably do it, but because he considered it inconvenient. That's all there is to it.

Personally, I'm fine with them not opting to release there at all and bear no ill will towards devs who make that decision, but I take exception when my money is taken and then what is advertised is not delivered, especially when it is in bad faith.

At that point, it's not longer just between him and GOG (which is how he likes to frame this issue). It is also between him and all the customers who got short-changed.

He's probably right that GOG could provide a better dev experience and it would certainly have been his prerogative to never release here again in the future.

But he could at least borne it until he completed the game and then bailed out of the platform. Heaven knows that countless people "bear it" under less than ideal conditions to fulfill their obligations when it is feasible for them to do so. As it is, it's not good at all.

Agreed.

Who knows, it does have quite positive reviews on Steam, so possibly I would enjoy it too. (The trailer didn't impress me and there were some catchphrases that always make me suspicious like "roguelike", but then there is only so much a trailer can tell about a game.)

However, considering how much games, indie or not, are released all the time, even to GOG, I just can't care enough if not all of them are released also on GOG. I guess I will not be playing "Orange Door" then; that is fine, I guess I will play some other game from my vast library of games, including over 2400 games on GOG.

This is not the 80s when it was a big deal whether Pac Man, Zaxxon or Gauntlet was released on your preferred gaming platform. Now pretty much every platform, even single PC storefronts, get so many interesting games that no one has enough time to play them all.

It is very rare for me to think of a game as a must-have. Some games are much more important to me than others, e.g. I am very happy that eventually games like Fallout 3/New Vegas, the newer Tomb Raider games, and Skyrim, got released in GOG. For a "yet another indie shooter", much less so, even if it has very positive feedback on Steam. If I think of some pretty recent game that I would want to buy (ie. really hoping it would arrive to GOG at some point), Elden Ring is probably such a game. But, again, for now I guess I can live without it, and maybe later buy it for a nickel and a dime on Steam or elsewhere, if I still care. Heck, for all I know Epic Games Store will at some point offer it for free; that is how I got hold of GTA V.

It was a similar situation for me with Skyrim, I was many times very close to buying it on Steam, but kept postponing it, until it pretty unexpectedly appeared on GOG. (I don't believe Elden Ring will ever appear on GOG though, but one can always dream).

As a gamer whose primary store is GOG, I feel a bit like a Nintendo gamer. Yes I will be missing lots of (new) games that the cool kids at the school are playing on their XBox and Playstation... but I still have lots of good and interesting games to play myself. Since I am an old fart already, I couldn't care that much what the other gamers are playing, and I want to play the same games because otherwise I am not a cool kid too. Back when I was at school, it did matter to me, I felt very bad that I didn't have Commodore 64 with its cool games, but I was playing games on Spectravideo SVI-328 that no one had ever heard of, like Frantic Freddy. My cool friends were playing Forbidden Forest on Commodore 64, and all the time discussing about it, boo hoo.

I bought the game on GOG and I didn't feel short-changed.

I purchase games in Early Access with full knowledge of the inherent risks, and I strongly suggest everyone else do so too. What's advertised is an in-development version of a game, and that's exactly what you get when paying the Early Access price.

Quoting GOG's FAQ on Games on development: "[I]t's good to feel comfortable with their current state when making your purchase"

GOG customers are paying the same price for the games as their Steam counterparts. When a dev/publisher abandons GOG, the people who purchased the game are left with an outdated version (sometimes with serious bugs), while the favored platform gets showered with updates. It's not unreasonable to expect the same features and updates when they are spending the same amount of money. Rarely is there any warning about discrepancy between platforms on the store page, if they exist.

So was the game no longer labelled as Early Access after the delisting was in the works?

Because a few days ago, after the delisting was announced, but before the game was delisted for good, there was no Early Access label on the store page?

A search on the Wayback Machine suggests the game was never tagged as such.

See I'm confused now because the game seems to have never been tagged as "In Development" which seems to encompass "Early Access" here.

So how is your post relevant?

How did they treat it as abandonware? AIUI it was updated and had version parity with the Steam version. The dev also asked GOG for help with improving sales, but apparently GOG wasn't helpful.

It seems to me that despite their reluctance towards GOG, the developer did give GOG a fair chance and eventually pulled out because it wasn't worth it.

For me, the marketing difference between here and Steam is huge if it was not tagged properly as an In Dev game.

It would explain why the reviewers here were more critical than the ones on Steam.

To the dev who is obviously reading this thread:

Don't put yourself down. If you have problems, there is no need to exhibit it in questionable handle names on various platforms. Nor are jokey system requirements like a 1992 Gravis Ultrasound going to endear you to customers. I'd wager the majority of customers here remember that card, and seeing it on system requirements is not a joke, but a red flag.

As to the general debate about GOG:
Steam's guidance for sales is really good, if you come across their pages intended for publishers, they have lots of advice and clear rules, and GOG could well learn from it.

But it's no excuse not to even be able to follow the simplest listing guides on GOG.

It didn't have the standard message under the screenshots that said "This game is currently in development" but it did say "GTTOD is still in active development. Things change every day, so if you'd like to keep up with what is being added to the game, come on down to the Discord or Subreddit and chat with us!" above the Discord banner near supported languages.

That is not the same.

In Development has a clear meaning - buyer beware, the future is not certain. See post #126.

An off-the-cuff comment buried in the description is not a warning. It is not visible. It does not show up in wishlists or in listings. It is ambiguous.

When you buy a game in development, you accept that game development is a risky enterprise and that due to circumstances beyond the dev's control (ex: not making enough money overall, to the point where the dev can no longer financially afford to work on the game in a significant capacity or potentially other tragedies that may happen in life to people when the team is very small), the game might not be completed, but there is an inherent agreement that the dev will be of good faith and will make an honest effort to give you the completed product.

It's mind-bogging to me that the dev would not deliver the finished game TO YOU, because he doesn't want to deal with the overhead of updating the game on the platform you purchased the game on, which while probably annoying, is a very small overhead compared to the daunting task of completing the actual game.

I doubt he'll be able to sell us that releasing here is of remotely comparable complexity to completing his game.

To my sensibilities, that's just wrong.

The game was never in development here, only on Steam it seems.

Why it was not tagged here, is for us to guess and for only the developer to know and the publisher to be blamed.

As someone who just discovered this thread after it's delisting it's worth noting that when I searched for it on Qwant I came up with a YouTube video advertising it coming to XBox. I watched that video to the end and it advertised the platforms it was on...they were XBox and Steam, no GOG in sight.....wait for it, wait for it, wait for it, this was a trailer posted for it TWO years ago!!!!
It's nice the dev. wants to chat with us but that promo trailer proves the dev. never gave those of us who almost exclusively buy PC stuff because DRM-Free on GOG a second thought. Why do you even need to ask Steam about how to promo your game? Occasional sales would be kind of common sense to me, not even trying to be a smart ass here.

Honestly I had NO idea about this game till I found the delisting thread, which speaks to how poorly the dev. advertised it. If I may have come across it in the past, I definitely forgot all about it.

So consider this as me being a bystander walking up to the scene and note how terribly clueless I was.