I'd settle for the platform merely ensuring that the product works as designed and advertized. Letting anyone put any code up and charging for it is wilful dereliction, IMHO.

You don't need to care. For customers service, convenience and game price are probably decisive and nothing else.

On a higher level though all this talk about revenue splits might hint at increased competition which might mean that GOG will face difficulties in the future. For the industry as a whole this can be good, indicating that digital distribution is really the most efficient way of distributing digital content, but in the process GOG could become a collateral damage and vanish from the market. That might be what drives some people here to discuss the matter.
The platform cannot really guarantee that unless they would conduct extensive play tests. They can more easily guarantee a money back guarantee in case the product does not work as designed and advertized and eventually even pull the product from the shop in case of too many complaints.

I would be OK with a non-curated approach, as long as I additional get tips from somewhere which 100 of the 7000+ new releases every are actually any good and interesting to me.

Sorry for massive OT, but just to clarify:

The Sputnik article refers to a paper published in Nature. Have you read it or at least the abstract?
It's not nearly as one-dimensional as the lurid sensationalism of the Sputnik headline implies. Yes, the impact of an efficient land use on the carbon footprint has probably been underestimated by former studies. The proposed carbon benefits index quantifies this more precise and shows that the drawbacks of organic farming are bigger than assumed before.

However, the new study "does not evaluate biodiversity or other ecosystem values". A pesticide related decrease of pollinators, which is unargueably observed and can lead to a massive decline in agricultural yields, is not taken into account, for instance.

so steam and gog take the same fee per sale?

btw, if some devs give their games out for free, does that mean, that they have to pay 30% of the base price to steam or gog for every game that someone got for free?

If they had some kind-- ANY KIND-- of curation, they wouldn't be the horrendous swamp they are. I used to love Steam, now it's just a Steaming pile. too many garbage game cash grabs from scam artists trying to make $10 for now instead of games that have actual working mechanics or even a valid .exe file (for windows versions!). No, I'm mostly done with Steam. Maybe EGS will become a viable solution.

Yes and no? If anything on the second one it's more likely that Steam or GOG would have to pay 70% to the devs, though I imagine in most cases they're probably coordinated promo's between the two of them (often before a sequel comes out or a new game from the same dev)

Maybe this will be an unpopular opinion, but I prefer for a game store to stay out of the way as much as is possible. By all means, provide a rating system, provide a review system, highlight games you think are worth the money if that tickles your fancy. Ultimately though, let me spend my money on whatever game I want to buy. One man's trash is another man's treasure.

In the case of developers who bring a game here and then abandon the gOg customer base with no (or greatly lagging) updates... too much.

A difficultly comes when the prospective customer wants Do you hold out and not buy the game at all because the developer is being crappy to one group of customers over another, or do you instead buy from the other store that gets the support?

Sometimes trash is just trash... in fact I'd go so far as to say that trash is usually just trash.

There are pretty simple baselines for what trash is so far as games are concerned that I think everyone could agree on.

For example, there are several "games" on Steam that just don't work in any way, completely broken. That's trash. There are games that will run but are so broken they are virtually unplayable, that's trash. There are games that deliberately try to trick people into buying them by pretending to be something else and then being an asset flip with no gameplay, that's trash.

Your argument assumes that there is no one trying to scam you, there are plenty of people trying to scam you on steam.

There are plenty of people trying to scam you everywhere, to be honest. Nothing is stopping you from requesting a refund for any of those games, nor reporting them to Valve to be removed if they are literally nonfunctional. Why does a small percentage of games being scams mean people shouldn't be allowed to buy what they want?

I'm fairly confident that all games Valve sells undergo a very basic testing to confirm they do launch before being listed for sale, but I haven't been on Steam for a hot minute, so maybe things have changed.

given that GOG is the biggest company i know that cares about DRM free and steam, the only one that seems to care about Linux i can see the potential threat if these new companies convince enough customers that they are the good guys and we should all abandon the old so we can better support the devs who are also angels and we can only do so on the epic store etc. hopefully enough people also question the ethics of paying influencers for promoting games on the epic store for example. seems to me you can only review enough games badly before that money stops coming in.

Well, the solution to that is to push the testing back on the developer, with a checkpoint to ensure minimum standards. So, when I want to publish my shiny new game, I have to produce output that demonstrates the game boots into whatever is the minimum configuration for say, a Windows box, and then include benchmark CPU & graphical metrics (FPS minimum & average, verified 3DMark score, etc., on that minimum system).

A checklist for each type of game, as determined by the publisher; no need for Zork to pass graphical tests.
(Because of the dearth of trust, this is a commercial opportunity for a third party to become a trusted certifier. This is your third party that provides "tips".)

As long as the process is transparent, and complaints are escalated via the retailer to the publisher, it would be minimally intrusive.*

This is the ideal; a minimum requirement would be, as you suggest, the ability to claw back purchase price (and a bonus?, say, an aggravated penalty for egregious or deliberate fraud), but there still needs to be a gatekeeper, lest anyone publish anything and pretend they have a different sense of what a "game" is. (E.g. Developer: What, I'm enjoying watching all the mooks trying to play it and giving me money — isn't my entertainment sufficient for it to be called a game?)

Otherwise, as I can personally attest, situations will occur like when Apple Australia refused to refund a purchase, simply because they regarded the account as vexatious. (Again? You have had eight refunds this year! No more for you! — It took an appeal to the US headquarters to overrule them. Because, y'know, I like spending money on crap that doesn't work, just to irritate Apple customer support apparatchiks, and have them ban the product and grant a refund.)

Of course, there are complications. Apple's policy of continual update is itself potentially vexatious, because it requires a continuous certification process: what hardware with which OS, etc. Again, from persoanl experience, something that works fine, now, with the current standard configuration often will not to work after an update because it assumes that both the hardware and software have been updated, as is expected (h/w) & mandated (OS) in the licence agreement. (Too bad if the device fulfills its purpose without the update.)

* What is interesting is that eBay, which used to have a brilliant dispute resolution process, now allows the offending supplier to effectively buy their (verified) negative review and neutralize it. This has the unintended consequence of granting a serial offender the ability to minimize bad publicity, and keep selling defective or fraudulent Scheiße, by buying off those who bother to complain (which is fewer than one might expect).

Very interesting experiences. Thanks for sharing them. I didn't know sellers can "buy" negative reviews on eBay. That just seems like it refutes the very purpose of reviews. It seems that many big marketplaces do rather cater to the sellers and less to the buyers which is a big mistake IMHO.

Customers should honor consumer friendliness and quality standards, but at the very least friendly return policies, as much as possible.