not looking for a fight, but I have noticed these Polls are for little more than to placate us. I would love to see some of the top voted games like Full Throttle and Star Wars: X-wing be reformatted but they have been up there on the list for over a year.

am I crazy and making no sense?

Today you learned all about GOG.

All of those votes are meaningless if the publisher of those game (in this case Lucasarts) doesn't distribute her games via GOG.

I think it could only be affective for games from companies which are already at GOG.

Fair point (and no you aren't crazy at all) but I don't know if you chose the best example. LucasArts (or Disney) seems to be a beast unwilling to hand over anything with their name on it unless they can stand to get 100% of the profit.

Number of votes is not the only thing that decides what games to bring. It does influence (but doesn't decide) what games to look for first.

Ease-of-acquisition is another factor - if a publisher refuses to use GOG as a distribution channel despite GOG telling them "we have 20.000 votes for this on our wishlist", then the votes are not a strong enough force to help convince the publisher. Other publishers may jump on GOG and scream "PLEASESELLOURGAMES!!", in which case a game may appear even without having a single vote.

Then, of course, there are those cases where the vote count does matter, even if ever so slightly.

LOL. You seem to have seriously misunderstood how this works.

The wishlist serves 2 purposes - it helps clean all the 'I want this game' threads out of the main forum, and it gives GOG a neat way to track popularity so they know which games to go out of their options.

The game actually coming to GOG depends on many factors, the most important of which are:
* Rights ownership, often a time-and-lawyer consuming mess
* Whether GOG can get the game to work well on modern computers, which may involved weeks(?) of testing and development
* Distribution rights, which are often separate from the game copyrights, and just as irritating to sort out

Whether the game will be profitable or not is only part of the calculation, and this is the only factor the wishlist can influence, because GOG is counting on some portion of the people who voted for the game buying it. Giveaways for votes completely subvert the point of the wishlist, which is supposed to measure how many people are interested in a game, not how many people like free games, and are actually harmful because it makes the wishlist less reliable for profit-calculating purposes.

The other thing the wishlist (sometimes) does is give GOG a bit of extra bargaining leverage when trying to convince a reluctant company to release their game here - "look how many people have requested it on the wishlist". I doubt that this is a determinative factor in most cases, but it can't hurt.

Wishlist still helped. At least folks at GOG can know what games we want. But as others already said, it's up to publishers/developers to decide if they want to sell their games in GOG or not.

Well, this isn't like the (non-US) presidential vote where the one getting the most votes gets elected. It is, as you say, just a mostly meaningless poll.

I agree, personally I have always considered that the wishlist to be nothing more than a "let's the community have it's fun" kind of thing rather than something actually useful to them. I mean GoG doesn't need any wishlist to know that peoples wanted System Shock 2, nor they needed it to know peoples would love the old classic Lucasarts games too.

For me the wishlist would be useful only if "well known" games were excluded from it and it was a way for peoples to propose lesser know games that most peoples, including GoG team, have forgotten and never heard about. Also it would need some sort of moderation, at least to prevent the same games from appearing on X different names/spelling.

Gog can only put a finite amount of effort to acquire certain games for distribution here. The wishlist is little more than for guidance, it cannot guarantee that heavily voted games will get a release, for obvious reasons (rights holders, incompatibility problems...).

I'm going to bitch about it some more. It's not just that a portion of the people who voted will buy it - I bet many people who are active on the forums enough to participate in the giveaways already got the game from other sources - and it's not just "I promise I won't complain if this game is released".

Rather, by comparing "I find the game appealing enough to look it up on the list and vote without any incentives" votes and sales figures for released games, GOG can assess probable sales figures for a game they're considering, which they may or may not supply to the dev. And by artificially raising the vote count, people are making the game (to GOG) and GOG (to the dev) look as if they underperform, sales-wise. By engaging in statistically abnormal behaviour, such as voting for a game because of a thread, people are promising extra sales they wouldn't actually supply, even if they plan to personally buy the game. As in:

GOG: "500 votes! That means 10k sales in the first two weeks!"
Dev: "Awesome! Where do I sign?"
Release! Yet Another Masterpiece!
GOG [thinking] "Only 2k? Looks like our users didn't like the game and/or the genre. We should feature fewer games of the sort."
Dev [thinking]: Meh, just another indie game store with an overinflated sense of self-importance. From now on I'll stick with steam.

This

Don't you think the fact that System Shock 2 was the most voted game on the wishilist helped to bring it here?

Not sure if you are asking me or the community but . . IMHO, nothing less than a signed contract with the IP owners will bring a game to a GOG release. I believe GOG staffers to be the best at securing IP rights, none better. I don't believe having 10k or 10 votes on a wishlist is going to move the IP owners to sign a contract as their motives are not influenced by the number of votes on a game thread.

This is only my opinion and not meant to diminish the value of the "Wish list" for those who think it is crucial to getting a game released on GOG.