Often I ask indie developers why their games are not on GOG.com. The answers are the same in most cases: "GOG do not want our game" (for example: The Adventures of Bertram Fiddle) or "We send GOG a copy to review but have not heard any answer" (for example: Bear With Me)

What is the problem? And why Steam has no problem to release these games?

Two wrong extremes. Steam AFAIK has a fully automated, dependent on riggable player voting, system which allows the worst of the worst which only redeeming value is the trashtalk they get from reviewers like Jim Sterling.

Gog on the other hand has a complete hand on approach in which one guy gets flooded with a million games and just has completely lost the grasp on it refuses most of it in an automated process and occasionally waves one trough (at least thats what it appears to me mere peasant).

Steam has no problem with these games, because everyone can publish games there depending on it getting enough votes. Gog on the other hand "curates" the games they offer here. Meaning that it is most of the time not really clear why some games appear here and some not. There are supposedly some criteria but it could also just be one staff member liking a game and hating the other. Who knows how it exactly works since gog is not telling us.

Steam has gotten to a point where they can add as many games as they are now, something they simply weren't capable of doing till a recent system change a few years ago. (mentioned in one of the Steam Dev Days video's)

GOG is simply not capable of adding every game that comes to them which forces them to 'curate' their titles. And since it's a business that's going to come down to which games they deem would be the most profitable to them.

This doesn't seem quite right. A number of games are not going to sell well. I can only think of TIS-100, where it's programming, it's text heavy/DOS feel, no music, etc; It's a wonderful game but a lot of people won't have the patience or understanding to play it. Compare that to Dust, you're going to have much better sales with. Then there's Ultima0 which was released for free with no margin for profit.

Some of it may be that if they are totally unknown, there's the question of safety since it wouldn't be hard to insert malware along with a game.

Or it's possible there are just too many games. There's hundreds of games, and testing them on multiple computer configurations (say 5 expected common ones, including different graphics cards, OSes etc) may just take too much time to test properly.

Agreed, I was thinking of but hesitant to add a line saying there'd probably be some exceptions if they feel 'classic/GOG-y' enough, because I did not want to water down the argument itself :)

too niche

i'm actually glad that they refuse that much ^^. I rather have them release 1 decent game a week which is "curated" than adding 10 games a week of which 8 are "meh another semi-artistic, well we can't properly code so let's do some great unity game which nobody has done before -.-" . Yes there will be people which would have liked and enjoyed some of that 8 games but ya there will be a lot of people which wont and it would get the catalogue flooded.

Even while nowadays sometimes the (in my subjective opinion) too "niche" releases happens here the curated approach is still working quite well for me - i would say about 50% of the games offered i could at least add a "might consider buying tag" (not a have to buy or need to buy but at least game is that interesting that you take more than 5 seconds considering if you would like the game) and for another 30% of the games offered here while they are nothing for me and i wont buy them i can at least appreciate why people might like them/could call them semi decent games which are not my cup of tea. So ya that leaves only 20% of the games here which are subjectively garbage for me - this makes browsing the catalogue here quite enjoyable for me.

If i change the numbers for Steam i guess they rather change to 2%, 8% and 90% (90% being the garbage ^^) and i dont want to have that here ^^. On steam i rarely/never browse the catalogue because of that.

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Every week we get at least one "All GOG does is release indi games" thread. :P

I just woke up and so far I've seen a thread giving shit to Steam for not do the things GOG gets ridiculed for doing with regard to reviews, and now this. :P

Any minutes now: Why does GOG keep adding games to Connect!?

No doubt follows shortly by a question about Witcher 3 that ACTUALLY POINTS OUT it is a question ABOUT Witcher 3. XD

GOG probably thinks these games aren't very good and don't want to waste money and their customers attention setting up a place for them. Steam probably decided to take on a many games as possible in the hope that on average they make a profit.

Well, with Steam having more customers than with GOG both probably makes kind of sense.

The games you mention probably would not sell many copies on GOG anyway, so not much is lost. On the other hand I'm all for a bit more freedom and letting the customer decide. Actually I wouldn't even mind if GOG would list games for a time and delist them again if not enough people are buying them. After all support of less popular games is probably very costly.

I was going to make a snarky comment about GOGs curation, but since we'll be getting a lot of new Daedalic games, I'll cut them some slack this time :)

Because GoG only releases AAA games :P

Let's to a little bit math here:

According to steam 6 Euros

Normal share for GOG or whoever 30%.

Means 1, 8 Euro per sold piece

Let's assume just getting the contract done 1800 Euros, means you already have to sell 1000 copies.

Some other work (web-page, advertising, testing for which platforms it works, creating a GOGpackage......) same cost around 1800

So all complete, already 2000.

How long you think for a no-name game till ROI is reached? (I am by no way saying, it is or might be a bad game).

Now compare this too the good old classics like Monkey Island and similar, with an established fan base and a well known name. Where you might be able to sell like 2000 pieces a day, like when on sale or similar.

And don't forget the price of the game will rather quickly drop as well. Making the calculations even worse. (Also because WE do expect the price do drop)

Just some thoughts

> Why GOG refuses so many independent games???

Because so many independent games suck.

> And why Steam has no problem to release these games?

Because Steam isn't overly concerned with quality of games but rather the quantity of games and revenue generation. Steam has no desire to be a curator, offloading that responsibility to 3rd party "Curators" or to the individual consumer to decide. GOG has taken a different approach to be a self-curated store as an intentional core component of their different business model.


* My answers to these questions are just my blunt and honest opinion, and on certain reasonably well known publicized information about Steam and GOG's business models. Feel free to disagree with either Steam or GOG's choice of business models and decisions, or with my assessment of question #1 if desired, but opinions to questions like this vary, and well... you asked so there are my answers. :) Yeah, not to mention that every single game in the GOG store is supported by GOG in a manner much more than the level of support one receives from Steam. Steam adding games is probably a mostly automated process with as little human involvement as possible and they're willing to ship just about anything if there is even a chance it will make money. Steam doesn't offer detailed personal 1 on 1 support to install, configure every game and fix problems one might encounter with the game, offloading that responsibility on to the customer and the publisher or developer of the game instead and washing their hands. They just sell the games like Walmart does, they don't tell you how to reconfigure your video card control panel to disable some setting to get a game they sold you to work - where GOG does do that.

GOG would have to hire about 10 times as many employees as Steam to sell all of the same games Steam sells simply because they would have to staff a shit tonne more support people than Steam does due to the level of support they provide.

Can you imagine that for 90% of the bottom barrel indie shovelware crap on Steam? They'd go out of business losing money doing that in a heartbeat.