Not really. As I understand it, the bulk of a game's sales typically happens within the first two weeks, with the rest being part of the "long tail" for the rest of the game's lifetime. For a merchant, being late to the party often results in having whatever table scraps are left.

This goes double for digital distribution, since there are virtually no costs to produce, ship, and stock the wares. That eliminates the risks that physical products entail - thus, latecomers don't have the advantage of avoiding the risk of a flop. In this respect, being first to market is an "I win" button, with minimal danger for pressing it.

And I find it quite believable. Because:
1. Votes can be rigged (thats exactly why there was all that fuss with thumbing system a month ago).
2. Number of buyers and voters can be non linear progression. In other words there could be much less than 5k votes during first months of Undertale sales.
3. A man in charge for GOG game accepting could be just busy.
4. He also could be somewhat asamed of his mistake and be uncomfortable in telling Undertale devs like "sorry, I dissmissed your game because it looked like some piece of garbage, but now seeing Steam statictics I know that I was wrong". So he would wait for some time not to rush matters.
5. Undertale indeed looks like a piece of garbage. And not all people (and reviewers) consider it some unconventional masterpiece. There are a lot of popular yet crappy games out there, so it's not hard to believe that mentioned man in charge was sceptical for quite a while even seeing stats.
Then maybe GOG just didn't rush call to Undertale devs because they understood that they lost their opportunity.

mentioned man in charge needs a slap across the head with the attitude of #3,4,5.
Some games that come here upon a universal release date are just garbage consistently (not because of visuals) that make you think what the 'man in charge' was smoking at the time.

I've ran into probably 40-50 games with outdated installers that do not integrate with Galaxy so far and I haven't went through my entire catalogue of 523 titles yet. Most of these can be imported manually, however there are some number of games that have both; not been updated with Galaxy metadata support, and also will not import into Galaxy for whatever the reason may be. I've encountered at least 3 such games if not more, however I reported two of them to GOG after manually determining that the games worked fine and they've subsequently fixed Galaxy to support them on the server side but not updated the game's installers so they still require a manual import. I imagine there are a number of other games in a similar state.

Dunno if you're imagining it or not but I haven't seen any mention of changing the offline installers to the Galaxy bits. Keep in mind that the game files installed by the current standalone installers *are* the same files supplied by Galaxy so I'm not sure it makes sense to just repackage the files available in Galaxy separately as they're the same modulo unintentional glitches (such as Xenonauts a week or two ago). They could perhaps streamline the way the installers are put together and automate part of the process perhaps, or switch to some other in-house or 3rd party installer but for all the work it would require to do any of that there would have to be a massive enough payoff to make it worthwhile I suspect, and I doubt that.

Updating the installers is clearly a very low priority for GOG right now without any judgment as to why that is the case.

Yeah, it was second or third-hand information, like someone saying "GOG said in one of their messages that...". Better to consider it as a mere rumor at this point.

If it ever happened, tt might not be that GOG would change all installers, but only for new games, or old games which get changes. Or at least that kind of approach would make sense.

I would not say that quantity can produce quality. Either it's there (the quality) or it's not.

What Steam does right is using its larger customer base to also profitably offer more rather niche games (games that are only liked and bought only by a minority of gamers even smaller than for the average game). GOG cannot and/or do not want to do that.

At the worst GOG loses a rather small amount of business because they mostly miss out the really bad ones. And let's face it. On Steam there are thousands of really crappy games. Steam could go down in history as the largest garbage dump of video games, even larger than GamersGate and they took everything and nothing good it did to them.

The million dollar question still is and probably remains for the foreseeable future: how to find the really good games, the games you like, not the games others like (not even GOG) or the games that publishers advertise. How to find them all but none more and waste time with bad games? That's a big task and so far not really easy to solve.

umm.... did you not just describe a normal installer? What's the diffrence?

For instance that it doesn't offer you to install the game files to a set location (you uncompress the files yourself to some location), doesn't offer to check integrity, doesn't add shortcuts to the Start Menu or desktop, doesn't necessarily add an option to uninstall the game etc.

A bit like if you take an installed Steam game and compress it into a zip file yourself, then copy and uncompress it to another PC (in order to run it there by merely running the game executable). In Steam's case though, the dependencies are maybe checked when running the game for the first time.

That's been my question all the time. What magic ingrediant GOG installer's have to make them special? Why is it so difficult to automate creating the installers?

The answer to this question is obvious - decent search engine. With a lot of options (like price range and sorting by positive reviews) and good algorithm (so it would find games by name even if you don't know it exactly).
However, you are write - it would cost much more than million dollar and not easy to build.

You guys bring up Undertale as an example. Let's look at a different example: Stardew Valley. A massive success launched Day 1 on both GOG and Steam. So it is very possible to get your game day 1 on gog. Stardew Valley is developed by 1 person and if only ONE person can get a simultanous release why can't more? Not taking the obvious steam benefits into account.

As far as I'm aware, if you have a game made on pc and it works. You just send the builds to gog and steam. Both services will deal with the distribution of it. (making gog installer of it, etc). I mean we are talking about distributors after all.

How was the hype train on it running before release, though?
No Man's Sky had a day 1 release too, and look what a fiasco THAT was.

That sounds reasonably simple to me too. So without knowing the details I would assume that a simultaneous release should not fail due to technical difficulties.

Why do you assume Undertale wasn't released 0-day because of financial reasons? It could easliy be legal reasons, like the rightsholder or their lawyer not liking a phrase in the GOG contract gold fringe style. In contract work, I had people freak out over banal crap all the time. Recently, a guy quit his job and threatened to raise hell if the reason for his quitting was stated as the default "voluntary resignation". He wanted "bilateral agreement" instead. He got that and left happy.

The question is why they didn't make it sooner? Nobody here knows why, right? If the problem is at GOG's end then they probably could make much more profit by solving these problems. But then this is a no-brainer, so GOG already knows that, very probably.

For us customers without knowing the reasons, it's just as it is. If we cannot wait, we should buy on Steam and go on.