this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2024
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Good for GOG, but I don't think having games still available after they're delisted is special. It would have been news if this didn't happen.
Edit: I mean you can still download the games, if you've already bought them, not that you can still buy them.
https://www.gog.com/en/news/warcraft_12_will_be_delisted_from_gogwhat_does_this_mean_in_regard_to_the_gog_preservation_program
This commitment to ongoing support is more than any other shop front offers for their delisted titles.
For these titles it probably just means updating the dosbox wrapper but its still ~~more than we get from anywhere else~~ something.
Yes.... But actually no. For these games, sure, they're committed to update the dosbox, but for more modern games there's nothing that can be done on GOG since if the binary breaks for windows lack of backwards compatibility, they're done because they don't have access to the code. This works for these games because they're being emulated, so they can maintain them by extracting the ROM and updating the emulator.
IMO what Valve is doing is leaps ahead, Proton can be used to maintain even broken binaries by providing compatibility with older versions of binaries from Windows. Not to mention the runtime library shipped with Steam for native titles.
It's always mind boggling to me how GOG does something which Steam is already doing (sometimes, like this, they do a worse job at it), yet they get all of the credit as if they're revolutionizing the way the industry works. Allowing people to download a game they bought, even if delisted, is the standard, and Proton is a much better preservation tool than whatever GOG is doing behind the stages, because it's open source and if Steam ever goes under it will continue to exist, whereas on GOG solution you depend on GOG for it to keep working.
Sure, Valve deserves a lot of praise for their work, but do they offer offline installers for their games? That and (mostly) DRM-free experience makes GOG superior to me. It leads to smaller library and less new releases, of course.
Steam also offers DRM-free games, and they don't hide them behind a closed installer. I don't like installers since they're yet another moving part that can break, e.g. an installer built for windows 95 might not work even though if you were to extract the game binary from it it would work, so having an installer could make a game less compatible.
The ideal form of distributing games is compressed folders, I recognize this is less user friendly, but it is the format that most preservation effort uses (e.g. zip of a ROM, instead of an installer that installs the emulator+ROM like what GOG is doing).
I'm also not shitting on GOG, I believe they're a good company, although I'm not their target audience since they refuse to sell me games I can play on my Linux machine. I'm all in favor of DRM-free and wished they would be more strict about it, that could convince me to buy some stuff from them. I did bought games from them in the past until I grew tired of almost no game having Linux compatibility and them not offering an official client, plus I noticed that some games had DRM and that was the last straw for me, because of I'm going to be buying maybe DRM-d games, might as well do it while giving money to a company that cares about my use-case.
I think GOG should be praised for some of what they do, particularly by their anti-DRM stance (even though they're not 100% behind it). But what annoys me is that people seem to praise them as if they were doing this amazing work that no one else is doing, when most of the stuff people get overly excited about is just a marketing move and Steam is usually doing much better work in that regard, but is usually cited as the bad guys by the people who drank the GOG Kool-aid.
It used to. I haven't used it in years, and I'm no longer sure if it still exists or where to find it if it does, since the UI has changed a few times over the years; the last of which was less than a year ago and it really overhauled everything. But also, so many games can literally just be copied from their install directory and work on another machine without Steam or cracks. There's no good way of knowing which ones without trying it, though. At least not to my knowledge.