GOG losing money, going back to basics

This thread title is indeed misleading.

There! Does that help?

Yes! Thank you!

Are they focusing on not selling broken games with missing patches yet?

oh yes, thank you for tweaking it

A well done Witcher 4 would probably solve all of CDP’s (and thereby GOG’s) financial issues. I wonder where they’re at on it? I’m not familiar with how they run their studio, so I don’t know if they had most of their people focused on CP 2077 and are only now moving on to Witcher 4 or if they’ve had it in development this whole time.

Yeah, something that definitely soured me on gog as a storefront for new games, as opposed to their generally great work bringing old games up to a working state on newer machines, was the rising frequency of slowly patched and even seemingly abandoned games relative to steam. It’s not gog’s fault, but developers will sometimes just stop patching games there that still get updates on steam, which really sucks.

I kind of still only think of them as Good Old Games, as the name implies. I’m sure there are plenty of older titles they can still add to the catalog.

Thank you for this. I posted there about Star Fleet II being apparently rejected, and am just so sad about it.

This is where I’m at. There are still a TON of older games begging to be put on GOG.

At this point I think generally if they don’t already have it either the rights holder doesn’t want to do it or the rights situation is too hard to untangle or GOG isn’t interested. They have been doing this for over a decade. I can’t imagine there’s much they’ve simply not got round to.

(Thinking specifically about stuff that predates widespread digital distribution here. If I can buy it and download it, I don’t personally care if it’s specifically on GOG. Their big selling point for me was getting stuff back circulating.)

There are definitely older games I’d love to see on GOG that aren’t there yet!

However, I can’t argue against three facts:

  1. No one’s making more “old games.” There’s a finite supply. Whatever’s not available now probably isn’t available because it’s hard to make available. (I can still want it to be available, of course, and I do.)

  2. With every passing second, there are fewer people alive who care about old games, and more people who care about newer games. Financially, you gotta get those new games.

  3. You have to sell old games for cheap. And when you do, people on forums will say, “$5.99?! I’ll wait for a sale.” (Then a year later, “Ugh, I missed the sale when this was $4.99, I’ll wait for the next sale.”)

Sure, and that’s why they renamed the store and now focus on DRM-free rather than just old stuff. That’s an evergreen niche, if admittedly one that most people don’t care about.

Word. (Although it seems fewer and fewer people care about DRM-free, which makes me sad)

I cared about it a lot, but Half-Life 2 got me to sign-in to Steam, and then their sales got me to start buying stuff, and I decided I cared more about saving money. If Steam ever goes out of business and screws everybody I can trivially pirate any game I want. I buy games to support the developers and honestly, because it’s marginally less effort.

Don’t tell me there’s no more place for old games on GOG. This shit just hit Steam.

But not GOG. INTERESTING THAT.

One of the few things I remember from going to Pax nearly a decade ago was the grandmas at the booth handing out freshly baked chocolate chip cookies (despite not eating one).

Didn’t say there isn’t room. Said there are probably reasons GOG doesn’t have them already, and those aren’t likely to change very often.

Also the Kohan games aren’t on gog.

This is a fucking war crime.