Sure, I agree. That would be amazing. From my perspective as a game player.
Now think about it from GOG’s perspective. So they have to provide tech support for someone else’s 15-year-old game in perpetuity, and they can sell that game for about $10 maximum. Great, they did dozens of hours of work, now 1 game works! Oops, Windows 11 just came out and every fan patch just stopped working. Time for more work. For games that fewer and fewer people are interested in. That sell for $5-10. Oh and btw, GOG doesn’t have access to the source code of the games, nor do they have permission to change it even if they did.
Their competitor is Steam, who only has to provide tech support for Steam and, uh, the 5 Valve games that Valve ever made. They built all those products from the ground up so if they have to, they can tweak code. And they can sell other people’s games for $60 and do no work to support them.
You’re coming up with some great ideas that would be cool for us, but would absolutely sink GOG.
I guess someone at GOG heard you, heh. Though, classic releases tend to be on Thursdays when they happen so I had a hunch there would be a good surprise today. Three SSI titles that you can’t find on Steam in the form of Questron II, Sword of Aragon, and Wizard’s Crown.
I’m still wondering what happened to the No One Lives Forever franchise. It’s near the top of GoG’s community wishlist. I guess it’s abandonware at this point, which is kinda sad.
Heh, I’m just sitting in my lawn chair mulling the “Good Ol’ Days” when GOG was the definitive source for old games as I see their future as … a backup/archival dump site where they give up pretending to support their abandoned exclusives I guess? Maybe they’ll just end up as the Internet Games Archive hosting disk images and selling Steam and Epic keys …
Or maybe they’ll pull a complete left field move and put all their exclusives on some VMs like Stadia or nVidia GeForce Now thingy (and provide the VMs for the DRM-free bit), now THAT would be a surprise move (wait is this not a solution to the support problem?!)
That really is a shame. I install and play NOLF 1 & 2 every few years. Despite the terrible stealth in NOLF 1 (alarms that never shut off), and the re-spawning enemies in NOLF 2, I still love re-playing these games. The weapons, the gadgets, the sense of humor… so much fun.
It means that our goal is for GOG to become, once again, the best place for the classic PC games.
The newest development in the area of classics’ visibility and discoverability is the revival of Good Old Games concept. We’re starting with adding the “Good Old Game” tag, which will showcase over 500 games that our Team has deemed iconic classics** – games that are older than 10 years and are critically acclaimed, stand the test of time, defined certain mechanics, or simply created new genres.
Why did we decide to pivot in this direction? Because we believe that celebrating and preserving classic games is important. They have the power to connect generations. They have the power to evoke nostalgia. They have the power to teach us about what came before and shaped the games we enjoy today. And they deserve to be remembered, and available for everyone to enjoy.
