Nice. Any hint on what this game has that would make it preferable to other roguelikes?

This looks like another variation on NetHack. Why do they feel the game is able to charge $9+ USD for it?
So far the value proposition is not present for me to care about it.

because development costs money?
because people might want to give them some money for the enjoyment they've gotten out of the game at this point?

lots of reasons. pick one.

All of that is irrelevant in today's competitive games market. If you want to try an emotional appeal to me then that isn't going to work. As a consumer, I ask why I should pay for something when a similar/better version is available both for free and open-source.

There are dozens of open-source projects related to the Rogue and NetHack style of games, with ascii art or 3D graphics or otherwise. I thought GoG curated their store instead of letting any low-effort copy-pasted trash get thrown up onto it. It takes up attention and space that should be reserved for other BETTER games. That's why I buy on GoG instead of Steam. If I wanted just piles and piles of trash games I'd go to Steam.

Right now the game is trash and seems like minimal effort was made to actually do some development. I'm questioning whether the devs bothered to even do any work themselves or if they just pieced together stuff that is open-source and public-domain and tried to make money off of it. Using 'Games in Development' as a shield against criticism doesn't work if the game is for sale.

Any game for sale that takes money is subject to criticism. If they wanna crowdfund it they can throw it up on KickStarter/IndieGaga/etc sites and get laughed all the way to the failure pile.

In fact, if I had the time to do so today I'd love to go through and grab some of the open-source projects I know of and do a direct comparison between them and this game. If GoG wants to do a code compare between the latest dev build of the game and open-source projects then there's ways to do that. Almost all of them are under GPL (though some are MIT/PD) so if there's any GPL violations then these 'developers' will be in a lot of trouble.

1. because, surprise surprise, it's not nethack.

2. because it has some spectacular writing.

'Nice to see more roguelikes on GOG! How does it compare to Infra Arcana?

Now this is a rogue-like.

How long will Caves of Qud be in development?

Well it has:
-Weird world that takes some inspiration from Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun.
-Character system that allows quite varied builds like gunslingers or espers that telepathically turn enemies into allies.
-It takes a lot of inspiration from ADOM (one of my all time favorites) without being guite as "unfair" as its precedessor.
-Comfy soundtrack.

It is a full blown RPG. Some people have compared it to Morrowind.
The world is wonderfully crafted, strange and weird, the writing is great.

It is not a game for everyone as it takes time to get used to the controls and how things work but if you read the tutorial (linked in the game menu) you're generally off to a good start.
For somebody new to the game I'd also recommend using a ranged weapon at the start of the game.

i think till sometime in 2019 or so. honestly when i bought it on itch.io i didn't realize it was in development. it's more like 'active development' in which is definitely feels like a full game but stuff is constantly being tweaked and added.

the game is complicated, but it has great writing and a cool art style.

Sounds interesting! Do you know if it's similar to Infra Arcana?

Not really.

IA is a linear dungeon crawl while CoQ is open world design.
Besides Caves of Qud doesn't have Infra Arcana's focus on horror elements (there's "scared" status effect on CoQ, but it doesn't define game like it does in IA where PC will slowly descent into horror induced madness.)

Thanks for the info!

i have unfortunately not played that :-(