GOG going back to their roots a little here with the announcement of the GOG Preservation Program, with an aim to ensure various games get to live on forever. A fitting announcement for their 16th anniversary don't you think?
What's it all about then? GOG will be directly maintaining various classic games, ensuring they work on modern systems, and giving each of them a big special stamp on the GOG store page to show you. Like this one for one of my faves, Theme Hospital:
They've already been doing it for a while, and this includes the re-releases of recent classics like Alpha Protocol and the Resident Evil Bundle — but now they're putting an official stamp on it. GOG said in a press release that "100 classic games from our catalog are being re-released today with updated or quality-tested builds" including Heroes of Might and Magic 3: Complete and Dungeon Keeper 2.
However, it's not just classic retro games, they will be up for maintaining any game, even if it was only released "just a few months ago" but not brand new games as they expect the developer to do that directly. As long as GOG can commit to it, they'll seemingly look at any game to keep it going.
They won't be using community fixes and patches though, as they "want to avoid passing the responsibility of maintaining the game’s quality on to the community" and to preserve the original experience.
GOG say the GOG Preservation Program is currently Windows-only as their "priority is to preserve as many games as possible under the Program, before expanding to other operating systems". That's pretty much expected really from GOG.
See more on the GOG website. They also launched a big 16th anniversary sale.
You can install and keep GOG games easily up to date on Linux / Steam Deck with the Heroic Games Launcher.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
robertosf92 Nov 13
Man that would be awesome
Quoting: pbKinda moot, of course they need to keep the games in playable state if they want to sell them. But a net positive nevertheless.Not quite.
If they sell them on the basis of it working on a particular system (or version), and people can still install that system somewhere, they don't have to actually do anything. It's the same across Steam, Epic - anywhere. Except in this case, GOG are ensuring the games work on the latest versions.
BlackBloodRum Nov 13
Quoting: tfkI wonder whether they will keep the original versions available too for those who still have original hardware.
For what it's worth, in older adventure games where they use ScummVM (as opposed to say, Dosbox) they eventually removed original versions but not at first. They originally did include the executables as well, and people could use them on original hardware, but as ScummVM doesn't actually need those they always had the option to not include them, and eventually did remove them.
I don't think they ever announced why, unless I missed it somewhere. I always kind of assumed it was a "support thing" in that they solved complaints that the games wouldn't start or that people would get errors because they'd try to launch the games directly (in which case the simplest solution would be to remove the problem wholesale). Just conjecture on my part, but feels like a reasonable explanation.
Last edited by dibz on 13 November 2024 at 4:37 pm UTC
redneckdrow Nov 13
As long as you only receive a license, things won't improve one bit! DRM-free or not, you still lack the ability to preserve it as an individual!
Proprietary physical media is really no better, ever read the back of a CD/DVD case/game manual? Draconian EULA's need to go the way of the dodo for ownership of media (and therefore, ability to legally preserve it) to really happen; and they won't.
Sorry if I sound grumpy. The last few weeks have been rough.
Caldathras Nov 13
Quoting: robertosf92Wish they added the option of using libre engines for some of those games, imagine if they provided a installer for OpenMW along with morrowind or openrct, julius, augustus...Or even just a link to the related open source project on the download page ...
Man that would be awesome
Quoting: redneckdrowI just got to thinking: am I the only one who thinks that this doesn't improve the preservation problem?I see as ports to current/modern systems. "Preservation" use for PR to sell copies. ROM dumps, ISO cloning or what id Software (and very few others) done with source code and proper archiving, public availability - what's preservation.
Kimyrielle Nov 13
Quoting: redneckdrowAs long as you only receive a license, things won't improve one bit! DRM-free or not, you still lack the ability to preserve it as an individual!
The biggest threat to preservation isn't the license issue, but more and more large studios putting intrusive DRM/anti-cheat systems on their games that are basically guaranteed not to run on any system 20 years from now on, combined with many popular games being online games or having online modes that won't run without the devs releasing the server software.
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