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.
ambrosia_enjoyer Nov 14
Nice, yet another reason to continue preferring GOG over Steam.
This is not a black and white matter for me. I like GoG for their goal of preserving old games and offering them (alongside anything else on their store) completely DRM free, but their complete apathy towards a future free from Microsoft's monopoly, especially now that the road has been paved for them, doesn't sit well with me. You would think it's something a company like GoG/CD Projekt would be at least supportive of, but they don't care one iota.
Valve OTOH obviously doesn't seem to be too concerned about ownership rights or game preservation, but gaming on Linux simply would not be in the excellent state it's in today if not for their efforts. So it strikes me as rather odd for a Linux gamer to unquestionably prefer one over the other. Both have had a positive impact on the ability for us to excercise our personal freedoms.
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