Does gog go to a dev, and say "hey, we want your game on our site"

or

does a dev go to gog and say "hey, we want our game on your site"

or is it some combination thereof?

and how does the money work? do the devs get money from their games on GOG, or does GOG, like, buy full 100% rights and keep everything from a sale, or what?



Im particularly trying to determine how some games get here, and others dont.... and there are some games of particular interest to me, which are available freely on places like abandonware.... which also have a large numbers of votes on gog's wishlist.... yet they arent here, and im trying to determine the limiting factor.

This topic again....
Must be a day that ends in "y"...

First of all it's not about the gamedeveloper but the rightsholder of the game, which sometimes is the dev but more often a gamepublisher.

Sometimes Gog goes to the rightsholder if they think they can sell their games, which was mostly the case in the past when Gog was GoG and was mostly doing old games, nowadays it's mostly the latter (I think) but since these kind of negotiations are never made public we'll never know for sure.

The money goes to Gog and the rightsholders.

Dev/Publisher says: "Hey we want our game on your site"
GOG says: "No, we don't want it. Best of luck elsewhere"
Game make millions on Steam.
GOG says: "Hey, we might be able to fit you into our catalog after all."

At least that's how it works with indies.

GOG takes about 30% cut of game sales, I believe. Exact number is secret.

Citation needed.

https://www.pcgamer.com/why-exquisite-puzzler-opus-magnum-was-barred-from-gog/

More like a puff piece from PC 'hipster' gamer.

which only sold 70000 times on steam ^^. Which is about 1,4 million in steam gross ^^ and about 400K for Steam itself if assuming everybody bought at full costs and no promotion keys and geo pricing and such (realistic steam gross will be closer to 800000-900.000).
So even with a day one release on GOG a very optimistic 5000 sold units could be assumed for gog. Which amounts to about 30000$ for GOG. So taking into account the costs for negociations, legal fees, hosting fees and such maybe 20000$ leftover for gog. With the delayed release they may have only sold 2500 units which leaves them maybe about 5000$ (numbers are fictive and i don't have any deeper insight into gogs cost structure). But ya with this exemplary numbers it's quite clear that it's not like gog was losing huge amounts of money for not straight forward releasing that game ^^

Just for reference, there's a "Submit your Game" link at the bottom of every page here at GoG that takes you here:

https://www.gog.com/indie

I'm sure that's how many games wind up here.

There's also an interesting articles here about how GoG reached out and purchased the rights to the old AD&D gold box games:

https://www.pcgamer.com/how-gog-rescued-13-forgotten-realms-games-from-licensing-hell/

I;m rather surprised no one has made the joke about "tens and twenties" usually help to get a game here at GoG. :)

Lots of ways for a game to show up here.

Hope this helps

edit: It seems like many times a game doesn;t show up here because of either a rights issue (ie who owns a game? No one really knows...) or the publisher and/ or developer is anti no-DRM and doesn;t trust their game to be here at GoG. WE just had a discussion about Japanese publishers who aren't here. Maybe someone else can link to it.

Some fairly good points here, and good enough answers..... so, i believe my internal blame can be placed on dev/publisher/rightsholder, rather than be upset with gog (at least for this particular reason)

Some games i've found for free as abandonware, which gog (at the least, i do not know about other companies) sells.... and im very willing to pay for those titles, simply for ease of use and centrally locating them (with all my games) in my gog library.

It almost seems like free money for the parties involved. especially "good old games" not likely sold elsewhere.

Some titles offhand, which i've seen as abandonware / for free: 4x4 evo (and evo 2), black and white (+ xpack and second game), age of empires (original + xpac and 2 + xpac), heretic, hexen, NFS games up to number 5 (porsche unleashed. one of my favorites for its evolution mode)

NFS underground, although also freely available, seems too new and too good.... i cannnot blame a publisher for continuing to milk it.

Huh? This doesn't seem like a common question on the forums.

Well, you see...

[Secrets!]

And that's how a game comes to GOG.

Almost everything is "freely available" on the net, if you search for it and don't care about the legalities. As soon as something is sold on GOG, it stops being "abandonware", if it ever was that before, because "abandonware" means that the rights holders are unknown or not interested in selling the game anymore, which is clearly not the case if GOG managed to strike a deal with them to officially re-release the game. Abandonware sites that continue to distribute such games after that are just offering warez.

Many of the Abandonware sites are pretty good about that. They'll pull a download if a game reappears for sale.

The original Underdog for example.

I think it's rather "some" than "many". Abandonia does it, too, but many others don't. I guess this helps to distinguish between those who really care about game preservation and those who just want to share games for free.