I have a feeling... that sth. big is coming... soon.

Soon™.

Sexual connotation FTW

Which is why I was never talking about this game in particular -I'm not into 4x-, but about the practice of rejecting games when several of the same genre are released close to each other, because some might be subjectively worse in comparison even though in a bigger scope would be worthwhile in the service.

I will also complain about the practice of listing steam sales as a metric for good games. It's not. And I care more about good games than succesful games. And that also ignores the part that GOG might have in promoting the games. We all know that Steam doesn't at all nowadays with their game mass releases. And some games with no PR department and little to no marketing would benefit a lot from a GOG release. Which is why they want a GOG release to begin with.

Comparing GOG to Steam is a mistake. The problem with Steam isn't that they allow a lot of games but that they allow a lot of non-games, jokes, scams, never-to-be-finished early access games, school practice games, whatever. But there's a lot of middle ground between GOG 5 new released games on the best of weeks to Steams 50+ games a week average. More that 4,000 games were released on Steam. More that 40% of all the games in the service. That's because of two different things. One is that they accept everything. And that's not what we want here. But the other one is that there are more releases nowadays than in previous years. And with GOG releases number, we are missing on many valid games each week.

No. Every good games deserves to be here. As usual, people dismiss GOG as an actual service that do their own promotion and might help games success. Many small games don't have a PR firm nor any marketing whatsoever. And would benefit a lot from GOG exposure. Do I care about the number of user reviews on Steam? Not at all. Steam doesn't work anymore as a promotion platform, precisely because of the excesive amount of released games.

It's fanny to note that those 4 games you talk about, were crowdfunded (albeit bulb-boy didn't make it). The four of them. And back when kickstarter (indiegogo in the case of tormentum) was more successful, and game websites, even prominent ones, talked about crowdfunded games.

There have being many rejected games from companies featured in the store.
Also the concept of losing money is less clear with digital sales. Support is the only real ongoing problem, and should be less prominent with new indie games. For a long while, at least. Eveyone else working on the releases are on a payroll. Most Indie adventures are usually small. And narrative games have longer tales that mecanically focused games (this is more an impression I always had that factually based. But mecanics evolve and change, so they grow old and get out of fashion quicker than stories).

Everyone can have their own opinion about it, and I obviously don't agree with yours :-).

There is a lot of middle ground between Steam's uncurated approach releasing 50+ games a week and GOG's curation that ends with 5 new games on their best weeks (I'm not taking into account old game releases).
We are missing on a lot of games each week. Real, actual games. And that's from a store that still have a lot of games missing both in old games and more recent drm'd ones.

Bottom line; with their current release ratio the gap only getting wider. That is worrying to someone like me, who appreciates games as a medium and an art form of sorts, and have very strong feelings about the need for games preservation.

And yes, you're right. We should probably take this to a new thread about the merits and disappointments of GOG's curation, if it's even needed. As in none of us will really change their minds or anything. And we'll keep going in circles again again about the same things.

But this thread is one of the most useful here, and I always check it whenever is white to see if there's any new game incoming. It was kind of annoying when it was derailed to discuss Bethesda's games and what not, and it is annoying now for anyone not engaged in the conversation.

If a game gets rejected for being too small etc., perhaps the idea is for the devs to continue working on the game and resubmit as RWarehall posts. Look at the example of Dex. First game for the devs Dreadlocks Ltd., and they were only accepted on their third try.

In the case of Predestination, being a backer of their second campaign, I am not too upset that they've gone waaaaay past their release date because they still update with their progress. While I understand that game development is a business, I also think of it as a creative process, rather than just crunching numbers and code. As I understand it, Brain and Nerd are a rather small group, so I don't expect them to be able to output as much work as say, Naughty Dog. Perhaps when they've actually reached near full release status, then they can reapply... I mean, at the rate they're going, it'll be at least another year (or two), and the "glut" of 4X games might have subsided by then! :D

Yes, I'd also like to see more games I helped along via Kickstarter to appear on GOG. Selfishly because that means I get a DRM-free release on the platform of my choice, and because I. Am. The. Arbiter. Of. Good. Taste, all the games I help crowdfund should be good enough to pass the curators!

So, having Empires of the Undergrowth, Niche, Rite of Life, A House of Many Doors, Paradigm, Koe, Project Rainworld among others appear in the catalogue would be extremely nice. ;)

People don't deny that, but what one person sees as a good game is not always what another person does. So no matter how exceptional I may find game A to be (or appear to be), if GOG doesn't see it as a good game, they will deny it. It's up to their customers to show that they consider it a good game (even if the game is not one), thus why we point people towards the wishlist.

Yes, GOG staff are on a payroll. They have X manhours per month to spend on getting new releases ready, and each release requires some of those X manhours. More releases mean more manhours are needed, which can result in overtimes and/or additional hiring.
So the question becomes which of the releases will result in a higher income, thus be a better use of the limited manhours. It is quite possible that a game will not cover its costs, even if one says that their costs would be minimal.


Full release stats for the year will be posted at the end of the year, but so far it seems like we had about a Day 1 release every 3 days, and a game up to 3 years old about every 2 days.

Look, this all started with people making a false claim that Predestination was rejected because GoG already has too many 4x games when one can read the rejection and GoG pretty much made it clear the game didn't have the content/complexity to measure up with similar games on this platform. And all the usual suspects came in complaining about GoG's curation. This has nothing to do with Stars in Shadows since the devs themselves said they would try to submit it to GoG when it gets closer to release. When GoG reviews it, we'll see whether they feel it measures up.

We can debate games like A Valley Without Wind or the shmups but it's not like these games were smash successes either that GoG missed on. With Arcen's financial troubles, they pretty much said they only made money on AI War and Last Federation. Starward Rogue was a flop on release and the only reason it has Steam users now is it was given away in a Humble Monthly Mystery Box.

GoG has been releasing more games lately, and frankly more duds too. But generally speaking, I think GoG is doing a fine enough job of curation and I measure that by the fact they aren't missing many smash successes and that many of the games people complain most about being rejected, have flopped on release on Steam. I think they should have released Mushihimesama but its not like it was this great success either (but it does have very solid Steam sales numbers for a game which isn't bundled).

Unlike many of you, I can accept the fact that a curation process means that some marginally popular games that I want to see here get rejected and some marginally popular games I don't see that much value in get accepted as long as GoG does a good job bringing the must haves.

I gotta say that I agree with you. I'd just like to voice my opinion, since I see myself as the "average customer" that GOG wants to appeal to.

Why do I say this? Because I've been playing videogames for more than 30 years and I have a clear view of what sort of games interest me and those which do not.

Basically I want GOG to sell as many good old games & as many good new games as possible. Still I know that's a tough nut to crack.
GOG, unlike Steam, just hasn't got the power to sell every kind of trash or gold which is lauched every day. And I'm thankful for it.

I enjoy playing AAA games as much as the most exotic new indie. There's only a few criteria of selection for me. The game's gotta:

A) be a classic of videogaming (in case of it being an old game)

or

B) it's gotta bring something new or be of really good quality (if it's a new game)

What do I mean by that? Basically that I have no interest in playing some mediocre new indie 4X space game, when GOG still hasn't games like Imperium Galactica or Alien Legacy.
Or when they already have better games on their catalogue - doing similar things, just better.

I'll exemplify this with Xenonauts. By the time this game was launched on GOG, we still didn't had the original XCom games here (and the UFO series has a different spirit). Xenonauts is almost a complete rip-off of the original XCom games. Yet it's brought some new things to the genre. Namely the 70's cold-war technology and the HD graphics.

Now... if Xenonauts had only a VGA palette and used the same comic-book weaponry as the original, then I think the game would hardly be worth GOG's time. In fact it's a bit inferior to the original in some aspects.

Just recently it seems that GOG rejected some Legend of Grimrock-clones. I don't know if these games were much better that LoG or if they were "more of the same". If they were just more Unity-based dungeon-crawlers with nothing new to bring to the genre, then I say that the time and money needed to sell those games should be invested in bringing better new games or classics like Dungeon Master or Captive here.

It's a fact that we can't please everyone. But I assume that, in the long run, it's better for GOG to play it safe and bring the games that will bring more $$$, rather than try to please a minority and risk losing money.
Sponsoring Art and new devs is a good thing. But in the end one has bills to pay.

Sorry for the long text. Just wanted to give an "average Joe" opinion.



So... when is Oblivion coming? :P

yeah! god damn oblivion yo! OBLIVIONM

You forgot a few exclamation marks, ones and elevens. :)

It's going to be one of those all or nothing things, I guess... when we do get Oblivion, I suspect we're going to get a lot more (like stuff from id Software as well).

If we don't get it soon... well, we'll just have to keep on being crybabies about it, eventually someone is going to give us what we want :P.

Bringing the topic back to focus on future "unofficially" confirmed games (and not GOG's curation process pros/cons),... Thanks to SCPM for the original posts about the leaks using the ingenious api process, and to Andrey82 for keeping the lists up to date, as its is very useful to track.

One question: I notice that some of the games on Andrey82's "Still waiting for" list were not part of SCPM's original leaks (e.g. Fallout 3 listed, even though Oblivion and FO:NV were the only games on SCPM's original posts). Were the additional names derived from other reliable leaks, or just assumptions that the if FO:NV was released, the older FO3 would be as well?

In any case, thanks again for everybody's efforts on keeping the list updated.

According to RPS, Memoranda is coming to GOG on January 25th, 2017 for $14.99.