An nameless reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The basic PC video games market is “in a sorry state,” in accordance with DRM-free and classic-minded storefront GOG. Small video games that are not at the moment promoting get deserted, and compatibility points come up as expertise strikes ahead or as one-off growth concepts age like milk. Basic video games are solely 20 p.c of GOG’s catalog, and the agency hasn’t really known as itself “Good Outdated Video games” in 12 years. And but, as we speak, GOG publicizes that it’s making “a major dedication of assets” towards a brand new GOG Preservation Program. It begins with 100 video games for which GOG’s personal builders are working to create present and future compatibility, maintaining them DRM-free and giving them ongoing tech help, together with granting them a “Good Outdated Sport: Preserved by GOG” stamp.
GOG is just not shifting its mission of offering a DRM-free various to Steam, Epic, and different PC storefronts, no less than not completely. However it’s demonstrably excited a couple of new focus that ties again to its authentic title, impressed in some half by its work on Alpha Protocol. “We predict we will considerably affect the classics business by focusing our assets on it and creating superior merchandise,” writes Arthur Dejardin, head of gross sales and advertising and marketing at GOG. “If we wished to unfold the DRM-free gospel by specializing in getting new AAA video games on GOG as a substitute, we might make little progress with the identical quantity of effort and cash (we have been attempting varied variations of that for the final 5 years).”
What sort of video games? Scanning the listing of Good Outdated Video games, most of them are, by all accounts, each good and outdated. Personally, I am glad to see the Jagged Alliance video games, System Shock 2, Warcraft I & II, Dungeon Keeper Gold and Theme Park, SimCity 3000 Limitless, and the Wing Commander collection (notably, personally, Privateer). Most of them are, understandably, Home windows-only, although Mac help extends to 34 titles to date, and Linux could decide up many extra by means of Proton compatibility, past the 19 native titles to this point. […] [I]f you see the shiny foil-ish GOG badge on a recreation, it is an assurance that GOG has completed all it may possibly to convey ahead a basic title. It is necessary work, too. “Preserving” video games would not simply imply locking a secure media in a vault, however maintaining video games accessible, and playable.