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

It was on 4 of the GB guest GOTY lists. A 91 on PCGamer and 95 on IGN.

Definitely in my top 5 of 2017.

That is madness. It was one of my top three last year. No GB love either - and I thought Brad quite liked Infinifactory too.

Like, did it have some sort of weird social message, or broken gameplay system? Did it personally wrong someone at Gog? I know nothing about it, but it seems to have a lot of positive word of mouth. This is quite a weird exclusion looking from the outside in.

"We take into consideration many other factors than just the actual game itself." That is a perplexing sentence included in there.

Bizarre.

Where does it say Opus Magnum wasn't good enough? Good games slipping through the cracks will always be a fault with a curated platform but there are many reasons to reject a game not just based on quality, the biggest problem with GOG curation is the process isn't transparent which leaves developers powerless to react.

GOG must not consider it popular enough to belong on the service.

Doesn't it have something to do with Steam workshop integration? IIRC, they didn't want the GoG version to be inferior to the Steam version, and for "Get it on Steam; the GoG version sucks" to be a commonly used phrase. Yeah, this game would probably not have made it a thing, but you can see how they would still like to prevent their services being tied to inferior versions.

Definitely a bit strange, considering what other Zachtronic games they have on their service. I actually really like that GOG curates their storefront and doesn't have the near daily tidal wave of crap releases that Steam has, but I suppose there had to be a downside to it somewhere. Maybe they'll change their mind at some point.

People don't realize that GoG is uh, weird.

More then a few oldschool devs have come out and said they'd love to have their games on Steam/other services, but that GoG went to the lawyers/firm that owned the rights and paid them for exclusivity on whatever game it was. There was a whole piece awhile back by Beamdog about how GoG has a 10-20 year exclusivity deal they signed for the old DnD games with Atari they are only getting around through the Enhanced Editions. This is also why NWN2 got taken off Steam.

They've also put out deals where they went behind developers backs to talk to publishers/rights holders and pushed for exclusive DLC for the GoG version, or even stuff like exclusive versions of the game. Occasionally against the devs explicit wishes.

They also exist in a weird vacuum of title releases. Most of the stuff they launch worked flawlessly out of the box/wasn't touched up at all yet people constantly talk about how GoG fixes the titles they get. Many of the titles they have "fixed up" don't work anymore in Win10, or don't work for a complete playthrough. You also have stuff that slipped through the cracks like NWNOG, which cannot be beaten through the GoG version and has a mountain plus worth of bugs.

GoG is a weird service. They used to be all about bringing back the oldies, and now they are weirdly trying to constantly jab at Steam/others and blowing their cash on weird exclusivity deals.

Gog works in mysterious ways...

I understand the need of a curated platform to avoid the garbage dump situation at steam, app store, play store, etc... but if you are letting a game like Opus Magnum fall through the cracks, even after it has proven itself on other platforms... wtf is wrong with you?

Well it is a new game, they really haven't embraced selling new games like most stores. They seem to be really selective about the new releases they allow in, for whatever reason.

It almost seems like they only want new games that share ideas from older titles? That's why games like Divinity Original Sin and the Mummy Demastered get on, they're modern versions of older game styles. Opus is kind of a whole new thing? Witcher being the weird exception because they own that developer. (Or the developer owns them?)

Edit: As someone mentioned above, All the other Zachtronics games seem to be on there, soooooooo.... what the heck?