The GOG Preservation Program Makes Games Live Forever

morrowind@lemmy.ml to Technology@lemmy.world – 412 points –
The GOG Preservation Program Makes Games Live Forever | GOG.COM
gog.com
24

[We still strive to get as many DRM-free titles as possible on GOG, regardless of when they were first released.]

This is why I will always buy a game on GOG rather than Steam if I can.

Steam is easy and my main app. But I'm going to start shifting to GOG.

This is good but can we please get a native Linux client?

Heroic Games Launcher is a pretty smooth experience on Linux for what it’s worth. It works well for GOG, Epic, and Amazon Games.

While Heroic is great and I love it, I would be nice to have official support from GOG.

The developers of Heroic are in regular contact with GOG employees, and they also get a cut from any GOG purchase made through the Heroic client.

That's what I'm currently using. It's great software, I just want official support from GOG.

I just hope they will also provide the unmodified versions for people that want to play them on original hardware.

At some point it just makes more sense to run emulators, like it is already done with the classic gaming consoles.

Ideally, we would get a push to release source after a given time, in order to have true conservation efforts.

7 Kingdoms had its source released and was almost instantly ported to run natively on Linux. And from someone who played that game as a teen and truly enjoyed it, I admit it's not that much of a game! There are thousands of titles that deserve this attention.

Off the top of my head I can think of:

  • Black&White
  • The Punisher (this title was even censored due to graphical content)
  • the original Starcraft and Warcraft
  • Pharaoh
  • Anno 1602 (I am aware a FOSS "clone" exists)
  • Evolva
  • Syndicate

I could go on forever...

Don't they just slap a custom configured dosbox in the folder and point to it for launch? Could just strip out dosbox and have the thing.

I love that they have Ultima 4 available for free. I spent SO many hours in that world. The "what kind of person are you" value judgment questions at the beginning were remarkably heavy for introspective teenage me.

Fuck gog. if I need a game to live forever I pirate.

I think you've missed the point.

Yes, they're looking to continue selling older titles and your point is that pirating / torrenting is free, but GoG are ensuring the game will actually run on a modern machine - the pirated ones will have problems (not even covering the potential malware ridden ones)

I've been there, done it, got the t-shirt, the t-shirt faded, got ripped and is now a rag somewhere... this is a good move by GoG.