Path: ...!Xl.tags.giganews.com!local-4.nntp.ord.giganews.com!news.giganews.com.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2024 16:52:38 +0000 From: Spalls Hurgenson Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action Subject: GOG Preserves Old Games... but do they? Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2024 11:52:15 -0500 Message-ID: X-Newsreader: Forte Agent 2.0/32.652 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Lines: 53 X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com X-Trace: sv3-L9FWyYeoRlgdI6Mql7LdE+YiDRIjp/eI/j8m8myKGpZgi3PB2k+AUgfkRD+9tZQWuk8YV2opixgt5J8!IY5Qj6tA/enwjv1pJjOxRHjs4Zd3Tb95yXQBp+rZFLJonetUgDsJMcKxR/Up3wtX1590Cq6i X-Complaints-To: abuse@giganews.com X-DMCA-Notifications: http://www.giganews.com/info/dmca.html X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.40 Bytes: 3236 GOG recently announced* a launch of it's "Good Old Games Preservation Program", saying that games that are part of the program they will "commit our own resources to maintaining its compatibility with modern and future systems." Yay! Who could argue against that? An increasingly large number of games (they quote '87% of games created before 2010' are inaccessible). But... GOG's idea of preservation is focused on rejiggering the code to work on modern PCs so they can sell it, and I have to wonder... if you change the game, is it really preserving it? It's one thing if you take the original game and containerize it in DOSBox or some sort of virtualization, but GOG --and partners like Nightdive Studios-- more often create new code entirely. Now, on the one hand... does it really matter? However they do it, it gets it so we can play the old games again; that's all that matters. right?. Except that NEW code has a expiration date too; stuff that runs on Windows64 will one day be as obsolete and hard to run as C64 assembly code. Worse, this new code gets new copyright... and that only makes the IP rights of these titles even more complicated. In 2045, people wanting to update (and play) these 'preserved' titles will have yet another hoop to leap through as they have to navigate the maze of ownership for those old games. Better, I think, were GOG to focus not on individual games so much as pouring its resources into groups that create emulators; the DOSBox team, or the guys who're building PCSX2, or WinEmu, or MAME. Or even poor beleaguered Archive.org! It could help create a solid open-source framework -with a rich patron to help fend off the litigious companies opposed to emulation [cough cough Nintendo cough cough] and give it a legitimacy it has long needed. But that's not what GOG is doing. Right now all GOG is doing is bolstering its own bottom line. Which is fine for a company, but hardly deserves the praise that's getting heaped on it as a 'preserver of old games'. * here's the announcement https://www.gog.com/news/welcome_to_the_gog_preservation_program_making_games_live_forever