I see. Good to know, thanks!

Some support for donationware is something I've actually hoped would appear on GOG ever since it first opened. I searched the site wishlist and found this wish

This looks like it'd tickle all my old coin-op arcade nostalgia. +1 vote from me! Now, off to go play some good ole G&G on MAME.

Bump.

Bump.

Looks like a fairly decent game. I'm downloading it for now and will give it a go later but it seems worth the vote.

Voted, thanks for finding the wishlist entry. We need way more votes for GOG to even pay attention ;)

Very good game, it should be here. Voted!

Thanks for reminding me about Maldita Castilla. I totally forgot about this game.

Just downloaded v1.1, time to finally play it. :D

I don't get why people want GOG to be some sort of repository for freeware games. The game is already free, you don't need to register if you get it from the developer's site and the developer gets more out of direct donations than he would if GOG were to take a cut.

Because it is a really cool idea that gog.com curates also the many excellent freeware games that are available in the world? Because we come here to look for good games? Because it's nice and convenient?

It is extra effort on gog.com's part, but in the end it's probably worthwhile for everyone, people who come here to get excellent free games might end up buying excellent not-so-free games.

It's really not so crazy.

Also: voted, good game!

Developers of freeware and donationware games want their work available to the widest possible audience. Making their games available here gives them so much more exposure than they'd ever get on their own websites and, in turn, GOG gets more content to lure new customers to their site and reward existing users.

GOG doesn't need to take a cut. The traffic and goodwill the games garner is payment enough. If they were to host donationware games, they would only need to provide links at the top of the gamecards to the developers' PayPal accounts.

And we have seen how that tends to work out with Steam where to store is flooded with all sorts of crap. Curation is a good idea, but what do you use as your metric when the game is free? With paid games it's easy: if people are willing to buy it, then it deserves to exist.

Now assume I were to make a site that focuses on quality freeware games. The first question is, how do I decide what is worth putting up? The second question is, how do I make money? If I don't take a cut, then what's in it for me?

Yes curation is a good idea, and gog.com does it well. There is a bunch of commercial games that simply are denied on gog.com and will never see release here. How do they decide what's worth putting up?

We already have curation and we already have some freeware games here, such as Beneath a Steel Sky. This is not Steam, gog.com is already heavily curated.

Except this is a very good game. So the problem you mentioned doesn't apply here. We don't propose adding all kind of garbage to GOG. We propose adding good freeware game. Good as G in GOG.

Same question applies to all games on GOG. Their decision method is pretty subjective and often puzzling (for example they rejected a great game - Dex). Therefore this is not relevant to freeware vs paid games. So why shouldn't GOG add good freeware games (according to their criteria of good)?

Making money was already mentioned. Giving "pay what you want" option will give some money to GOG for such games.