I was tinkering with a business idea that GOG could possibly adopt -- though I'm sure it would have some problems.

Imagine, if you will, a GOG-staff-created wishlist. The list would have games and prices. You would make a payment to GOG and they would retain your funds and use them as a bartering chip for a game to come to the GOG marketplace.

I know I'd gladly put $20 down for TIE Fighter. Perhaps if they collected a few million from GOGers, Disney might give GOG more consideration.

I was thinking it could work similar to Kickstarter. But instead of funding a project, you're validating your desire to purchase an already-made game.

Perhaps after a year or so, GOG would release the money back into your account or give store credit or something with your funds (or let you to put it toward another project).

Do you think it something like that could sway publishers? Would you put money toward a classic game?

Could be interesting but if a rightsholder smells money it could undermine gog's bargaining efforts.

But is that a bad thing for gOg? I mean, if they take a straight percentage cut and the community prepay rate shows that they can charge $9.99 instead of $5.99, isn't that a win-win-win?

Yeah I guess it could work out positively too.

No, I don't think so; not unless it was here and ready for purchase.

Ever thought about the work for GOG doing that?
I mean this is not about pre-order a game that for certain comes to GOG.
If the deal is rejected GOG must refund the money, and that means double pay....once for the money they got and than again the fee for sending it back.
And what difference would a prepay make? The owner gets a percentage from the sales (if GOG works similar to other platforms).
Them saying look how many pre-ordered your game....well they could use the wishlist for this.

All in all the idea sounds like Kickstarter only that the game exist and the *backers* have a right for compensation.

Maybe... maybe no exchange of money. How about this.

Ok so the game you want is put on the wishlist and it's either 5.99 or 9.99, you than put money on your account because your probably going to buy something anyways, than you can put your money down on the game, but no money would be exchanged, just a holding on that amount, so you account would say, 20$ but you have a holding of 9.99 on it so you can't use that 9.99. Then when the game comes out you can complete the transaction or cancle it.

So as a recap, no money is transfered, just a simple holding is put on which can either be cancelled later or completed.

An interesting idea, but speaking from my personal perspective, I have so many games in my backlog that I have no need to put own money to pre-order a classic. If it's something I think I may want, I know that once it's released it will show up on sale and I'll just wait until then. With the amount of games I've bought and have yet to play, it would be foolish of me to jump on a classic unless it's on sale.

Not a chance. When it is available for sale I'll consider it.

This is a very interesting idea. I mean, the problem with pre-orders is that you can't know what you're getting, but by default GoG is rather transparent with what they give, and such games being older meaning there's been times to access them.


One must question though what the benefit is if that's the case though. Why not just release it instead of screwing around with pre-payment? Seems more like a pointless feature, even if people would take advantage of it.

Isn't there a specific term for this kind of thing? We did have this thread before, but the question that couldn't be answered was this "What happens to the money if the game cannot come here"? If someone reminds me of the term, I could go looking for the older thread.

Easy. GOG cash. Buy gogbux with real money. Positive account balance can be pledged toward one or more unreleased games and at any given moment spent on existing games. When a game gets released, everyone who has pledged enough toward it gets the amount subtracted from their balance and gets the game (perhaps at a discount if you set the goal of attracting pledges), everyone who didn't gets and loses nothing and can buy the game normally. The total amount will fluctuate, of course, but at any given moment GOG could look at the money and say something to the tune of, hey Disney, give us Monkey Island 2 to sell and we'll give you X dollars right now.

The real question is how effective at raising money such a system will be. And my guess is "not at all". System Shock 2 has done well, and I imagine the vote-to-sale conversion rate is quite high. However, if the plan is to attract a rightsholder with an existing pile of pledge money, we shouldn't look at the sales, we should look at the votes. I really don't think that the pledges total would be more impressive than what GOG can already promise by pointing at the wishlist and disclosing the expected conversion. Honestly, the regulars don't seem to have much use for wallets, except for people who get boned by crossborder fees (and those have since learned to use paypal), and casual buyers aren't going to buy cash/pledges on what to them is a niche site.

I understand the example, but out of all the games you picked one game that GOG didn't bring back.
I just found that to be funny.

Maybe, I don't know. It'd have to be a classic I don't already own, and that I can't buy for roughly the same price off eBay. I honestly can't think of any game I'd be willing to "pre-order" a digital copy of for $20.

I picked the one with the most number of votes, because that number best correlates with the money you're going to get from pledges. As of now, it has 35k votes. It sells for tenbux. Would all these people pledge tenbux? Probably not, but let's guesstimate this/e in pledges, namely $100k. Is it the kind of money that can make Disney crap their pants in excitement when "we have 35k votes for Grim Fandango, which experience shows translates to this much in actual sales" didn't (where "this much" is greater than the pledged total, because the potential pledgers are active in the community and will instabuy anyway)? It's a system that can work for particularly stubborn indies (hey there Supergiant), but as a means of bringing the most wanted here -- not bloody likely.