Correction: Most games on Desura end up getting completely ignored.

Correction: Most games on Steam have ended up in heavy sales very quickly. And are, for the most part, completely ignored.

The 'fad' corresponds to market trends of full releases, and some indies are doing very well thanks to alpha funding. Most aren't, but that's a general rule, not just that of alpha funding.

If they don't now that's definitely a new thing. It's a change I'm very happy to see after much complaining.

As I posted here already, based on GOG.com part of CD Projekt Group 3rd quarter fiscal report (Google translated), the next big thing for GOG.com may well be support for early access/alpha & beta funding and if it is, it should be coming sometimes next year. See the bolded part at the bottom of the quote.

Other importan info revealed about GOG is that there has been 1.1 million MAC game downloads (august report) since the lauch of MAC support (compare it to 6 million total for first three years when there was neither indies nor MAC support).

Also GOG is now the single most important part of the CD project Group as GOG alone made 64% of net profits and 41% of total revanue of entire CD Projekt group made in past 9 months! (Group total revanue 103.21 million zł and total profit: 12.14 million zł). Obviously this will change significantly once CD Project RED releases Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 (development cost for first three quarters 16.3 million zł).

read the whole report here (polish)

The info about MAC downloads can be found [url=https://www.cdprojekt.com/resources/20130827_-_CDP_prezentacja_polroczna.pdf ]here[/url] (slide 26) And I listed things GOG needs (at bare minimum) before they can make it reality. [url=http://www.gog.com/forum/general/is_it_time_for_gog_to_start_upping_its_game/post49]Here I also pointed out that GOG is looking to expand it's staff quite a lot (odd in current global economic and financial situation) that may well be, at least in part, preparation for the big thing they're planning for 2014.

Here's the list: GOG will need more file and webservers and more bandwidth to coup with increased traffic (currently GOG can't even haldle increased traffic and downloads from sales, especially large ones).

GOG may need to introduce autoupdater function to GOG downloader. However standalone updates and downloads MUST be maintained at the same time. The autoupdater must be better than Desura's download whole installer every time and maintain zillion versions in cache (1 gig game takes 5 gig after four updates, no function to clean cache of old versions as far as I can see).

GOG needs to give Devs access to GOG installer building tools AND direct upload access bypassing GOG QA process (we don't wan't mess that Humble Store currently has with it's zillion and one installers and packages or slow ass updates GOG and Desura currently have.)

GOG needs more staff to monitor the system and maintain communication with devs (we don't want the silent threatment of other store fronts).

Obviously GOG.com site needs to be modified to handle everything above.

I didn't buy many of them so for me the number of Indie games on GOG is sufficient, but I wouldn't mind them releasing many more Indies or publicly selecting them before as long as I can keep the influence on my browsing habits on GOG.com minimal, i.e. it should be a devoted, separate part of the website. They could upgrade the GOG.downloader to handle such cases automatic. Alpha testers or Beta accessers then will have to live with a constant automatic updates as they would have in all other cases.

Internally GOG would have to automatize the systems for deploying updates. It might need some effort and might clash with their we-test-everything-ourselves philosophy. But maybe they could apply their testing only to released or to be released games, not to alpha/beta.

The newly announced money-back guarantee wouldn't go stunningly well with volatile alphas/betas, I should imagine. They could except early access releases from it, but they'd have to make that very clear to avoid customer confusion...

Personally I'm against most of the alphafunding process, because all too often the games are being made by people with no experience in the field of managing a game development project. Thus you end up with games that are perpetual betas, or which disappear entirely, or which are "episode 1" of a series that is dead. As others have said, this bubble will eventually burst, bringing the gravy train to a halt and unfortunately taking some well-managed games with it.

If GOG wants to spin out their GOG Indie site to encompass this effort, that's fine. But I'd rather "GOG proper" remain a store for complete games.