> The GOG Preservation Program is our ongoing effort to save classic games from being lost to time. That means working to secure rights, fixing compatibility so they run hassle-free on modern systems, and even rebuilding missing features so the experience is the best you can get, while staying true to the original.
It still baffles me how the "rights" to a game (or any IP) can be a thing when the company has essentially abandoned it. Like take the Resident Evil example FTA: Launched in 1996, 2000-2023 not available (i.e. not for legal sale). I am a bit of an extremist wrt IP laws, but that just seems so crazy to me that we would provide a legal system to "protect" IP that isn't being used and is just being (essentially) hoarded.
Just because a company doesn't have their IP available for modern systems doesn't mean they abandoned the IP, see also all the remasters and remakes coming out today.
That said, my gut feeling says it's mainly about them not willing to invest in it, because they can't see the economic viability. If GoG were to go to the rights holders and say "Hey lad, we have a platform and a lot of experience in reviving older games, you'll get x% of revenue", I'm sure some would be like "ok".
Of course, I'm also sure these rights holders have received offers like that from various parties for a long time now.
See all the remasters and remakes that didn't happen because they weren't legally able to. We are worse off as a society that enforces artificial scarcity on ideas than we would be if we returned to a world that did not have such bogus laws (not that long ago, but beyond the memory of anyone alive).
I think it's reasonable to argue something like, "some IP protection is good, but too much is bad, and we probably have too much right now." It would be impossible to calibrate the laws so that the amount of IP protection is socially optimal, but we can look at the areas where the protection is too much and start there.
It's not impossible at all. We should do 5 year copyright - 99% of all commercial profit of all media is collected within 5 years of publishing.
Copyright is granted to media creators in order to incentivize creativity and contribution to culture. It's not granted so as to empower large collectives of lawyers and wealthy people to purchase the rights and endlessly nickel and dime the public for access to media.
Make it simple and clear. You get 5 years total copyright - no copying, no commercial activity or derivatives without express, explicit consent, require a contract. 5 years after publishing, you get another 5 years of limited copyright - think of it as expanded fair use. A maximum of 5% royalties from every commercial use, and unlimited non-commercial use. After 10 years, it goes into public domain.
You can assign or sell the rights to anyone, but the initial publication date is immutable, the clock doesn't reset. You can immediately push to public domain, or start the expanded fair use period early.
No exceptions, no grandfathering.
There's no legitimate reasons we should be allowing giant companies like Sony and HBO and Paramount to grift in perpetuity off of the creations and content of artists and writers. This is toxic to culture and concentrates wealth and power with people that absolutely should not control the things they do, and a significant portion of the wealth they accumulate goes into enriching lawyers whose only purpose in life is to enforce the ridiculous and asinine legal moat these companies and platforms and people have paid legislators to enshrine in law.
Make it clear and simple, and it accomplishes the protection of creators while enriching society. Nobody loses except the ones who corrupted the system in the first place.
We live in a digital era, we should not be pretending copyright ideas based on quill and parchment are still appropriate to the age.
And while we're at it, we should legally restrict distribution of revenues from platforms to a maximum of 30% - 70% at minimum goes to the author. The studio, agent, platform, or any other distribution agent all have to divvy up at most 30%.
No more eternal estates living off of the talent and creations of ancestors. No more sequestration of culturally significant works to enrich grifters.
This would apply to digital assets, games, code, anything that gets published. Patents should be similarly updated, with the same 5 and 10 year timers.
Sure, it's not 100% optimal, but it gets a majority of the profit to a majority of the creators close enough and it has a clear and significant benefit to society within a short enough term that the tradeoff is clearly worth it.
Empowering and enabling lawyers and rent seekers to grift off of other peoples talent and content is a choice, we don't have to live like that.
I'm fairly certain that would not work at all for media such as sci-fi/fantasy books, where a system like this would result in people just forever reading older books which are free and effectively kill the market.
There is a limited amount of time to read in a day and the amount of 10+ year old content that is still amazing is more then anyone could ever read, and it's hard to compete with free.
I think video games is actually kinda an anomaly when it comes to copyright because they have been, on average, getting better and better then games released even in the recent past, mostly due to hardware getting better and better. Also any multiplayer game has the community issue where older games tend to no longer have a playerbase to play with.
Same could be said about movies/tv shows that rely on CGI up until somewhat recently where the CGI has pretty much plateaued.
I think the sales of books is pretty much uncoupled from the supply or price, as piles and piles of great books are available for free online or at the local library.
More recorded shows exist than any one man can watch in a lifetime, and yet there are multiple concurrent series ongoing right now.
I think the real kicker is that IP law was built around things like books, that don't suddenly stop working or need to be maintained, etc. Modern laws should take software into account and deal with it differently.
If it were modified to "99% of media has commercial profit collected within five years" it's probably pretty close to the mark, given how much is released and never reprinted/etc.
However, even 1% of a very large market is a huge tail, which is valuable.
Regardless, change the game. If you have a valuable, useful platform, and compete with other platforms for quality and delivery of service, then you're optimizing for the right things. If you have valuable media and the platform only serves to collect fees for the privilege of accessing the media, then you're optimizing the thing that is net negative for society, and ends up with adtech and degraded service and gotchanomics to try to nickel and dime you at every opportunity.
Imagine a world in which spotify and youtube and netflix had to compete on product and service quality, instead of network effects and legal technicalities. In which you could vibe code an alternative platform and have it be legally feasible to start your own streaming service merely by downloading a library of public domain content, then boot-strapping your service and paying new studios for license to run content, and so on.
The entire ecosystem would have to adapt, and it would be incredibly positive for creatives and authors and artists. There wouldn't be a constant dark cloud of legal consequences hanging over peoples heads, with armies of lawyers whose only purpose in life is to wreck little people who dare "infringe" on content, and all the downstream nonsense that comes from it.
Make society better by optimizing the policies that result in fewer, less wealthy, and far less powerful lawyers.
Only the PC version of the original version of Resident Evil was unavailable. It had a Remake in 2003, a port to the DS in 2006 and AFAIK has been and still is available for purchase on PSN in PS1 form for PS3, PSP and Vita since 2009 and PS4/PS5 since 2022. That's not even counting all the sequels and movies. And the PC port is generally considered, not the best.
There's better examples like No One Lives Forever that have been stuck unavailable for purchase because of rights reasons but RE1 is arguably not that.
This is related to "cadastral mapping" in real estate law systems. IP does not have such a map, or indeed any map at all. At best you might find a (no longer obligatory!) copyright notice on it saying who originally owned the rights to something. That doesn't work when the rights get sold.
There's no good way to even ask "who owns this?" for a piece of IP other than the highly inadequate and risky approach of just pirating it and waiting to see who sues you. But even then DMCA provides all sorts of problems with unauthorized groups claiming to be rightsholder representatives.
For software at least, something akin to real estate may be needed long-term if you want to codify it, allowing adverse possession if you pay the taxes, etc.
Sometimes, the legal situation is complicated, especially with old content. Sometimes the technical situation is also complicated, very typical for old games. Not releasing, can't be automatically considered abandoned; we just don't know what's going on behind the scenes.
That's how copyright law works. There's no "use it or lose it" provision. Once you create something it is yours, and others only get rights to it 70-100+ years later.
That's only how it works since 1992/1998. Prior to 1992, you had to renew your copyright explicitly after 28 years (for another term of 47 years). 1992 made that renewal automatic. (1998 extended it by 20 years).
Basically it is the problem with GOG also, I think that if you do nothing the game is Abandonware and I don't think that anyone can go after you to use it pirated or whatever, and even distribute it.
Maybe it is shady, but something like that if there is no commercial activity and the IP violation is not enforced for some many times, it can be considered that you are responsible for this and there was no legal way for the user to be able to use the software.
But if GOG comes and the restore the "commercial activity" of a game, actively selling, even if no one buys, then you can't say that it was commercially abandoned, and that will postpone of that much that it will be on GOG the legal claim of "having the IP active".
"Abandonware" is not a legal concept. It's basically shorthand for selective IP enforcement. Essentially, it's saying that if you're illegally distributing a game or piece of software that the original publisher is no longer selling, it's probably fine and they probably won't go after you due to legal action being expensive for something that has little to no impact on the publisher's revenue.
> if there is no commercial activity and the IP violation is not enforced for some many times, it can be considered that you are responsible for this and there was no legal way for the user to be able to use the software.
That's somewhat true for trademarks. If you don't consistently enforce a trademark, then the person you're suing for trademark violation can use that as an argument in court. However, it's not true for copyright (such as someone illegally distributing a game you own).
This is a deeply flawed argument. The idea that folks focused on preservation are creating a legal hazard is false. Copyright law does not care whether the "IP is active". What GOG is doing here is an unmitigated good. To be clear, there is no "commercially abandoned" element to copyright, even if there should be.
In fact there's no commercial requirement at all for copyright, abandoned or otherwise.
You can make a thing, copyright it, and also never sell, see for example open source software. You can even copyright something that nobody's seen before.
Copyright, patent, and trademark all have substantial differences.
The problem is not even this. If you knew who has the rights, you could make an offer for selling digital licenses.
It’s often much more difficult getting to know who has what rights. There is the developer, there is one or more previous publishers (can be different per region in the world), there are investors and sponsoring publishers. And then there are sales, mergers and liquidations after bankruptcy. And no-one really knows (or wants others to know) what rights where are.
If you don’t sell me a copy of your family albums, I should be allowed to freely sneak into your house and make a copy? After all, you still have the originals and are not making money from them
> Why introduce a membership now? Is GOG in financial trouble?
Glad they put this into the FAQ, because that was certainly my first thought, although I'm not sure the answer really assuages my concerns.
You have to admit that the combination of "Original founder buys back GOG from CD Projekt" and then "GOG introduces patron tier" soon thereafter does suggest a company in some financial hardship.
Yes, agreed. I’m still wondering where the co-founder got the 25M dollars. Also if he just had separated GOG (and buy his shares) before CDPR going public in 2009, it would have been much cheaper. At that time GOG only was a plattform for good old games.
So let me get this straight, GOG, a privately owned company, wants me to donate money to them so that they can buy the rights to games in order to sell them to me?
It is true, but occasionally it is a practice in some companies with certain business models to leave part of users contributions free up to the users to decide. I have bought some games from their preservation program, and gave me the option to add some extra donation for the project, which I did. I guess this is similar to that.
Moreover, if somebody is really into these old games, they may want to support it and get access to the behind the scenes material, discord, vote for which games to prioritize etc. I don't think this is very different than eg subscribing to the patreon of a creator to get some extra content.
That's what it looks like. I kind of get it, as there's no guarantee that a game they make available again will sell enough to cover the costs - it's as much a preservation effort as a commercial one.
For a lot of games it's just a matter of configuring dosbox and packaging it, I can't see how that would be very expensive. But for others it's a lot more involved.
But either case we talk about commercial products. The games are still copyrighted commodities to be sold. I assume they get licensed by the copyright holders to update them and sell them in gog. I do not see how a "charity"-based process would make sense or be honest here.
What are you talking about? Charities can sell products, they're just not supposed to make a profit, so all profits would have to go back into preservation.
I mean we can go off on a tangent about why IKEA should not get away with being registered as a charity, but as long as GoG is not doing tax evasion I don't see the problem.
The copyright holders still make profit from the sales as for-profit entities. I do agree that non-profit status would make more sense for the preservation program though. But it still would not mean that nobody makes profit out of the result.
Simplified, but yes, more or less correct. I'm a patron of theirs, and see it more or less as a donation (obviously isn't, in the eyes of the tax agency).
Yeah my first reaction was, what the heck is is this ?
Now I can imagine having specific campaigns. Let's say they need $50,000 to release an upgraded port of Shining Force.
Cool, I might be open to pre-ordering it at $25 so they can see if there's enough interest to proceed. But why am I going to literally just donate to a private company. I think the entire world has gone mad, there's not even a real product here. It's not like for that $5 a month they give you a random game or something. They just want money.
I would be happy to donate to campaigns to buy old ip (video games, but also music, movies, old tabletop rpgs etc) to then slap an open license on and release for free. Seems like a good investment for the future, to get as much content as possible away from rights hoarders.
I am also happy to buy more old games from GOG than I ever have the time to play, so they already get my money.
For many of those who like and buy from gog, that would not go well at all. The whole point of gog is that you actually own a copy of the game when you buy it. A subscription-based access to games would be antithetical to that. It is the main, if not the only, selling point of gog currently.
Seems weird to ask for donations for game preservation without pledging to release the games under an open license. Why would I give you money so you can go buy a game and then turn around and sell it back to me?
Also weird not to have an easily accessible list or some kind of plan to show which games will be prioritized.
Just a vague 20,000 game list which may or may not have games that I am interested in.
Also seems like Patrons should get access to the games that are preserved, at least after some point of contributions (e.g. after $60 were accumulated in donations over a period of time)
I would gladly pay 2x or 3x that amount if I knew I would get access to this game library hassle-free in the future.
So structure it like Kickstarter, where if we don't get X dollars and secure the rights before X date, everybody gets their money back. Some insurance like that for the customers would make it a lot less shady
That distinction doesn't really exist. You have to pay employees. You have to pay for equipment. You have to pay for office space. And the countless other costs of running a company. There's no way they can realistically say "this particular dollar we got from you was used for exactly this purpose".
A budget that is influenced by the budgets of everything else. If you have $100 in free 'foo' money for 'foo' efforts, suddenly you do not need to fund 'foo' from your general fund and you can move those dollars you would have otherwise used for it to instead be used for anything else you want.
Their FAQ is not really clear on that, my feeling looking at this page is that it is more like: this money goes directly in the pocket of GOG, so by helping us to generate more money for us, you are helping (indirectly) the preservation of games as it is what they do.
But I saw nowhere in the FAQ explicitly that this subscription money will only be used to the "active act" of preserving other games.
Yes, very old DOS-based games from before 2000 can be emulated perfectly. If you have a modern computer, even the later SVGA 3D games running in protected mode are no problem (using 100–200k cycles/ms in DOSBox).
In fact, today’s graphic possibilities and available monitor resolutions make it possible to accurately and aesthetically simulate an analog CRT monitor with its scanlines and aspect correction (DOSBox Staging). But of course you can just use big sharp pixels.
That makes total sense for eg DOS/gameboy/arcade games and the like, but is it ever that simple for PC/windows games? And there are many different issues that I have experienced when running older games myself, even if they can technically run, eg with ultra-wide and higher dpi monitors.
What I also like in this project is that they also share logs with what they worked on each game, eg for the resident evil series [0]
Speaking personally I'd rather pay a few dollars than risk my PC getting Good Old Virusy, which may or may not be a real risk, but is certainly an idea that puts me off pirating software.
This is why "social" piracy is a good thing (?? arguably, let's not get into the ethics), e.g. torrent sites with comments and a reporting and voting system.
Not only is this a sensible idea, it's also just a fancy way of running in an emulator like you would for another game.
Now I'm wondering if you could put e.g. a Windows virus into a Gameboy game, such that if someone did the opposite of what we're talking about and ran it "natively" then they'd be infected. Afaik this kind of native execution as an alternative to emulation is being done via recompilation projects - see e.g.
Honestly I find GOG's whole mission of "update old games for modern Windows" kinda weird when I compare it to what people who want to play old console games do: they just fire up an emulator. Running a virtual Windows machine sounds like a much easier solution than individually patching every crusty old executable to run on the modern OS, and re-patching every single one of them when MS rolls out yet another new graphics/controller system a few years down the line.
Their DOS releases are fantastic. I install the games, then copy the files to my virtual C: directory for DOSBox-X and know those games will always Just Work and I will never have to reinstall anything or mess with configurations. Some games I also copy to my phone to play in DOSBox in Android.
To repeat myself from old threads, it would be awesome to have something like a WindowsBOX, like DOSBox but emulating (probably) Windows 98SE, fully open source. GOG could use that for old Windows games and never have to modify the games themselves. I would be happy to support GOG developing an emulator like that, rather than making old games run on new Windows.
Really I'm surprised nobody's done "WinBox" yet. Proton kinda covers that except it runs in Linux, not Windows. I dunno how it handles old Windows games as I've got zero nostalgia for those, my Steam Deck mostly runs modern stuff from small teams.
It’s almost not necessary. Windows has – in contrast to Linux – a very good and long compatibility guarantee. You can put up any program from 1995 (at least being 32-bit) and it will start and run.
The things GOG is improving are some bugs that occur mostly in games, e.g. something with color palettes in pre-2002 games. But I think every game using DirectX 9 or later will work without any adaptations, even ten years from now.
GOG uses emulators as well. GOG has a share of games that use Dosbox or ScummVM as two somewhat common emulators they will configure a game to run in that I'm aware of.
That said, there's also something to be said that if a game is patchable, there is some value in patching it to run directly rather than "need" an emulator.
Emphasis added:
> The GOG Preservation Program is our ongoing effort to save classic games from being lost to time. That means working to secure rights, fixing compatibility so they run hassle-free on modern systems, and even rebuilding missing features so the experience is the best you can get, while staying true to the original.
It still baffles me how the "rights" to a game (or any IP) can be a thing when the company has essentially abandoned it. Like take the Resident Evil example FTA: Launched in 1996, 2000-2023 not available (i.e. not for legal sale). I am a bit of an extremist wrt IP laws, but that just seems so crazy to me that we would provide a legal system to "protect" IP that isn't being used and is just being (essentially) hoarded.
Just because a company doesn't have their IP available for modern systems doesn't mean they abandoned the IP, see also all the remasters and remakes coming out today.
That said, my gut feeling says it's mainly about them not willing to invest in it, because they can't see the economic viability. If GoG were to go to the rights holders and say "Hey lad, we have a platform and a lot of experience in reviving older games, you'll get x% of revenue", I'm sure some would be like "ok".
Of course, I'm also sure these rights holders have received offers like that from various parties for a long time now.
See all the remasters and remakes that didn't happen because they weren't legally able to. We are worse off as a society that enforces artificial scarcity on ideas than we would be if we returned to a world that did not have such bogus laws (not that long ago, but beyond the memory of anyone alive).
I think it's reasonable to argue something like, "some IP protection is good, but too much is bad, and we probably have too much right now." It would be impossible to calibrate the laws so that the amount of IP protection is socially optimal, but we can look at the areas where the protection is too much and start there.
It's not impossible at all. We should do 5 year copyright - 99% of all commercial profit of all media is collected within 5 years of publishing.
Copyright is granted to media creators in order to incentivize creativity and contribution to culture. It's not granted so as to empower large collectives of lawyers and wealthy people to purchase the rights and endlessly nickel and dime the public for access to media.
Make it simple and clear. You get 5 years total copyright - no copying, no commercial activity or derivatives without express, explicit consent, require a contract. 5 years after publishing, you get another 5 years of limited copyright - think of it as expanded fair use. A maximum of 5% royalties from every commercial use, and unlimited non-commercial use. After 10 years, it goes into public domain.
You can assign or sell the rights to anyone, but the initial publication date is immutable, the clock doesn't reset. You can immediately push to public domain, or start the expanded fair use period early.
No exceptions, no grandfathering.
There's no legitimate reasons we should be allowing giant companies like Sony and HBO and Paramount to grift in perpetuity off of the creations and content of artists and writers. This is toxic to culture and concentrates wealth and power with people that absolutely should not control the things they do, and a significant portion of the wealth they accumulate goes into enriching lawyers whose only purpose in life is to enforce the ridiculous and asinine legal moat these companies and platforms and people have paid legislators to enshrine in law.
Make it clear and simple, and it accomplishes the protection of creators while enriching society. Nobody loses except the ones who corrupted the system in the first place.
We live in a digital era, we should not be pretending copyright ideas based on quill and parchment are still appropriate to the age.
And while we're at it, we should legally restrict distribution of revenues from platforms to a maximum of 30% - 70% at minimum goes to the author. The studio, agent, platform, or any other distribution agent all have to divvy up at most 30%.
No more eternal estates living off of the talent and creations of ancestors. No more sequestration of culturally significant works to enrich grifters.
This would apply to digital assets, games, code, anything that gets published. Patents should be similarly updated, with the same 5 and 10 year timers.
Sure, it's not 100% optimal, but it gets a majority of the profit to a majority of the creators close enough and it has a clear and significant benefit to society within a short enough term that the tradeoff is clearly worth it.
Empowering and enabling lawyers and rent seekers to grift off of other peoples talent and content is a choice, we don't have to live like that.
I'm fairly certain that would not work at all for media such as sci-fi/fantasy books, where a system like this would result in people just forever reading older books which are free and effectively kill the market.
There is a limited amount of time to read in a day and the amount of 10+ year old content that is still amazing is more then anyone could ever read, and it's hard to compete with free.
I think video games is actually kinda an anomaly when it comes to copyright because they have been, on average, getting better and better then games released even in the recent past, mostly due to hardware getting better and better. Also any multiplayer game has the community issue where older games tend to no longer have a playerbase to play with.
Same could be said about movies/tv shows that rely on CGI up until somewhat recently where the CGI has pretty much plateaued.
I think the sales of books is pretty much uncoupled from the supply or price, as piles and piles of great books are available for free online or at the local library.
More recorded shows exist than any one man can watch in a lifetime, and yet there are multiple concurrent series ongoing right now.
I think the real kicker is that IP law was built around things like books, that don't suddenly stop working or need to be maintained, etc. Modern laws should take software into account and deal with it differently.
> 99% of all commercial profit of all media is collected within 5 years of publishing.
If that were true of music, companies wouldn't be buying back catalogues for (upwards of) hundreds of millions[0][1].
[0] https://apnews.com/article/music-catalog-sales-pop-rock-kiss...
[1] https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/ranked-biggest-music-catal...
If it were modified to "99% of media has commercial profit collected within five years" it's probably pretty close to the mark, given how much is released and never reprinted/etc.
However, even 1% of a very large market is a huge tail, which is valuable.
Regardless, change the game. If you have a valuable, useful platform, and compete with other platforms for quality and delivery of service, then you're optimizing for the right things. If you have valuable media and the platform only serves to collect fees for the privilege of accessing the media, then you're optimizing the thing that is net negative for society, and ends up with adtech and degraded service and gotchanomics to try to nickel and dime you at every opportunity.
Imagine a world in which spotify and youtube and netflix had to compete on product and service quality, instead of network effects and legal technicalities. In which you could vibe code an alternative platform and have it be legally feasible to start your own streaming service merely by downloading a library of public domain content, then boot-strapping your service and paying new studios for license to run content, and so on.
The entire ecosystem would have to adapt, and it would be incredibly positive for creatives and authors and artists. There wouldn't be a constant dark cloud of legal consequences hanging over peoples heads, with armies of lawyers whose only purpose in life is to wreck little people who dare "infringe" on content, and all the downstream nonsense that comes from it.
Make society better by optimizing the policies that result in fewer, less wealthy, and far less powerful lawyers.
Only the PC version of the original version of Resident Evil was unavailable. It had a Remake in 2003, a port to the DS in 2006 and AFAIK has been and still is available for purchase on PSN in PS1 form for PS3, PSP and Vita since 2009 and PS4/PS5 since 2022. That's not even counting all the sequels and movies. And the PC port is generally considered, not the best.
There's better examples like No One Lives Forever that have been stuck unavailable for purchase because of rights reasons but RE1 is arguably not that.
This is related to "cadastral mapping" in real estate law systems. IP does not have such a map, or indeed any map at all. At best you might find a (no longer obligatory!) copyright notice on it saying who originally owned the rights to something. That doesn't work when the rights get sold.
There's no good way to even ask "who owns this?" for a piece of IP other than the highly inadequate and risky approach of just pirating it and waiting to see who sues you. But even then DMCA provides all sorts of problems with unauthorized groups claiming to be rightsholder representatives.
For software at least, something akin to real estate may be needed long-term if you want to codify it, allowing adverse possession if you pay the taxes, etc.
Sometimes, the legal situation is complicated, especially with old content. Sometimes the technical situation is also complicated, very typical for old games. Not releasing, can't be automatically considered abandoned; we just don't know what's going on behind the scenes.
That's how copyright law works. There's no "use it or lose it" provision. Once you create something it is yours, and others only get rights to it 70-100+ years later.
That's only how it works since 1992/1998. Prior to 1992, you had to renew your copyright explicitly after 28 years (for another term of 47 years). 1992 made that renewal automatic. (1998 extended it by 20 years).
I don't understand your reply. GP didn't claim that the law said otherwise.
Basically it is the problem with GOG also, I think that if you do nothing the game is Abandonware and I don't think that anyone can go after you to use it pirated or whatever, and even distribute it. Maybe it is shady, but something like that if there is no commercial activity and the IP violation is not enforced for some many times, it can be considered that you are responsible for this and there was no legal way for the user to be able to use the software.
But if GOG comes and the restore the "commercial activity" of a game, actively selling, even if no one buys, then you can't say that it was commercially abandoned, and that will postpone of that much that it will be on GOG the legal claim of "having the IP active".
"Abandonware" is not a legal concept. It's basically shorthand for selective IP enforcement. Essentially, it's saying that if you're illegally distributing a game or piece of software that the original publisher is no longer selling, it's probably fine and they probably won't go after you due to legal action being expensive for something that has little to no impact on the publisher's revenue.
> if there is no commercial activity and the IP violation is not enforced for some many times, it can be considered that you are responsible for this and there was no legal way for the user to be able to use the software.
That's somewhat true for trademarks. If you don't consistently enforce a trademark, then the person you're suing for trademark violation can use that as an argument in court. However, it's not true for copyright (such as someone illegally distributing a game you own).
This is a deeply flawed argument. The idea that folks focused on preservation are creating a legal hazard is false. Copyright law does not care whether the "IP is active". What GOG is doing here is an unmitigated good. To be clear, there is no "commercially abandoned" element to copyright, even if there should be.
In fact there's no commercial requirement at all for copyright, abandoned or otherwise.
You can make a thing, copyright it, and also never sell, see for example open source software. You can even copyright something that nobody's seen before.
Copyright, patent, and trademark all have substantial differences.
Yeah, but it's a bit depressing when one buys a game (Lego: Lord of the Rings), but it promptly crashes and there's no response when one asks:
https://www.gog.com/forum/legor_the_lord_of_the_rings/crashe...
(there are other forum posts about other crashes)
So, when I had some money left over at Christmas, I got a couple of Lego games for my Nintendo Switch instead.
> Like take the Resident Evil example FTA: Launched in 1996, 2000-2023 not available (i.e. not for legal sale).
The Resident Evil IP is still alive and kicking though (with the latest installment trailered during the game awards a few weeks ago).
Why? IP including copyright and trademarks are assets that can be licensed and/or bought/sold. How hard is that to grasp?
The problem is not even this. If you knew who has the rights, you could make an offer for selling digital licenses.
It’s often much more difficult getting to know who has what rights. There is the developer, there is one or more previous publishers (can be different per region in the world), there are investors and sponsoring publishers. And then there are sales, mergers and liquidations after bankruptcy. And no-one really knows (or wants others to know) what rights where are.
If you don’t sell me a copy of your family albums, I should be allowed to freely sneak into your house and make a copy? After all, you still have the originals and are not making money from them
> Why introduce a membership now? Is GOG in financial trouble?
Glad they put this into the FAQ, because that was certainly my first thought, although I'm not sure the answer really assuages my concerns.
You have to admit that the combination of "Original founder buys back GOG from CD Projekt" and then "GOG introduces patron tier" soon thereafter does suggest a company in some financial hardship.
The patron program was introduced weeks (or even months) before the buyout of GOG.
To be fair, a buyout is probably not discussed & agreed upon in a matter of days. Probably.
Yes, agreed. I’m still wondering where the co-founder got the 25M dollars. Also if he just had separated GOG (and buy his shares) before CDPR going public in 2009, it would have been much cheaper. At that time GOG only was a plattform for good old games.
> I’m still wondering where the co-founder got the 25M dollars.
From sales of millions upon millions of copies of The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 games?
Indeed. I regularly have to remind myself that The Witcher 3 is 8th on Wikipedia’s list of all-time best-selling video games: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...
So let me get this straight, GOG, a privately owned company, wants me to donate money to them so that they can buy the rights to games in order to sell them to me?
It is true, but occasionally it is a practice in some companies with certain business models to leave part of users contributions free up to the users to decide. I have bought some games from their preservation program, and gave me the option to add some extra donation for the project, which I did. I guess this is similar to that.
Moreover, if somebody is really into these old games, they may want to support it and get access to the behind the scenes material, discord, vote for which games to prioritize etc. I don't think this is very different than eg subscribing to the patreon of a creator to get some extra content.
That's what it looks like. I kind of get it, as there's no guarantee that a game they make available again will sell enough to cover the costs - it's as much a preservation effort as a commercial one.
For a lot of games it's just a matter of configuring dosbox and packaging it, I can't see how that would be very expensive. But for others it's a lot more involved.
If this were a real preservation effort, they could set up a charitable foundation for computer game preservation, and encourage donations to that.
But either case we talk about commercial products. The games are still copyrighted commodities to be sold. I assume they get licensed by the copyright holders to update them and sell them in gog. I do not see how a "charity"-based process would make sense or be honest here.
What are you talking about? Charities can sell products, they're just not supposed to make a profit, so all profits would have to go back into preservation.
I mean we can go off on a tangent about why IKEA should not get away with being registered as a charity, but as long as GoG is not doing tax evasion I don't see the problem.
The copyright holders still make profit from the sales as for-profit entities. I do agree that non-profit status would make more sense for the preservation program though. But it still would not mean that nobody makes profit out of the result.
Simplified, but yes, more or less correct. I'm a patron of theirs, and see it more or less as a donation (obviously isn't, in the eyes of the tax agency).
Yeah my first reaction was, what the heck is is this ?
Now I can imagine having specific campaigns. Let's say they need $50,000 to release an upgraded port of Shining Force.
Cool, I might be open to pre-ordering it at $25 so they can see if there's enough interest to proceed. But why am I going to literally just donate to a private company. I think the entire world has gone mad, there's not even a real product here. It's not like for that $5 a month they give you a random game or something. They just want money.
I would be happy to donate to campaigns to buy old ip (video games, but also music, movies, old tabletop rpgs etc) to then slap an open license on and release for free. Seems like a good investment for the future, to get as much content as possible away from rights hoarders.
I am also happy to buy more old games from GOG than I ever have the time to play, so they already get my money.
Not so sure about this patreon thing though.
why not a classic game subscription
For many of those who like and buy from gog, that would not go well at all. The whole point of gog is that you actually own a copy of the game when you buy it. A subscription-based access to games would be antithetical to that. It is the main, if not the only, selling point of gog currently.
Seems weird to ask for donations for game preservation without pledging to release the games under an open license. Why would I give you money so you can go buy a game and then turn around and sell it back to me?
Also weird not to have an easily accessible list or some kind of plan to show which games will be prioritized.
Just a vague 20,000 game list which may or may not have games that I am interested in.
Also seems like Patrons should get access to the games that are preserved, at least after some point of contributions (e.g. after $60 were accumulated in donations over a period of time)
I would gladly pay 2x or 3x that amount if I knew I would get access to this game library hassle-free in the future.
Good idea overall, "meh" execution so far.
This patron thing seems weird. GOG should just accept preorders for games that aren’t available yet. And use that money to make the game available.
The problem with this is that the game might never become available. Taking pre-orders in the hope you can obtain IP is sketchy at best.
So structure it like Kickstarter, where if we don't get X dollars and secure the rights before X date, everybody gets their money back. Some insurance like that for the customers would make it a lot less shady
Terrific thing!
The FAQ should state explicitly that patron money will only be used for preservation, not put into GOG general revenue, if that is indeed true.
That distinction doesn't really exist. You have to pay employees. You have to pay for equipment. You have to pay for office space. And the countless other costs of running a company. There's no way they can realistically say "this particular dollar we got from you was used for exactly this purpose".
Every company I've ever worked for can do this so it seems logical that so can GoG. Every department has a budget.
A budget that is influenced by the budgets of everything else. If you have $100 in free 'foo' money for 'foo' efforts, suddenly you do not need to fund 'foo' from your general fund and you can move those dollars you would have otherwise used for it to instead be used for anything else you want.
Their FAQ is not really clear on that, my feeling looking at this page is that it is more like: this money goes directly in the pocket of GOG, so by helping us to generate more money for us, you are helping (indirectly) the preservation of games as it is what they do.
But I saw nowhere in the FAQ explicitly that this subscription money will only be used to the "active act" of preserving other games.
A noble goal, but I'd be shocked if they manage to compete in the preservation realm against Good Old Piracy™.
"Good Old Piracy" does not (always) help much with incompatibilities arising from running on new machines/OSes.
For those old games emulators do the job
Yes, very old DOS-based games from before 2000 can be emulated perfectly. If you have a modern computer, even the later SVGA 3D games running in protected mode are no problem (using 100–200k cycles/ms in DOSBox).
In fact, today’s graphic possibilities and available monitor resolutions make it possible to accurately and aesthetically simulate an analog CRT monitor with its scanlines and aspect correction (DOSBox Staging). But of course you can just use big sharp pixels.
That makes total sense for eg DOS/gameboy/arcade games and the like, but is it ever that simple for PC/windows games? And there are many different issues that I have experienced when running older games myself, even if they can technically run, eg with ultra-wide and higher dpi monitors.
What I also like in this project is that they also share logs with what they worked on each game, eg for the resident evil series [0]
[0] https://www.gog.com/blog/resident-evil-1-2-3/#:~:text=RESIDE...
Piracy isn't only a matter of money, it can also be convenience or outright accessibility (no way to purchase the item legally).
If you find a playable version of an old game on a piracy site chances are that it originated from GOG.
Speaking personally I'd rather pay a few dollars than risk my PC getting Good Old Virusy, which may or may not be a real risk, but is certainly an idea that puts me off pirating software.
This is why "social" piracy is a good thing (?? arguably, let's not get into the ethics), e.g. torrent sites with comments and a reporting and voting system.
For many older games, I've been in the habit of running them inside VMs for this very reason.
Not only is this a sensible idea, it's also just a fancy way of running in an emulator like you would for another game.
Now I'm wondering if you could put e.g. a Windows virus into a Gameboy game, such that if someone did the opposite of what we're talking about and ran it "natively" then they'd be infected. Afaik this kind of native execution as an alternative to emulation is being done via recompilation projects - see e.g.
NES - https://andrewkelley.me/post/jamulator.html
N64 - https://deepwiki.com/Zelda64Recomp/Zelda64Recomp/3.1-recompi...
I would sign up if they promise to release the games they get with the money into public domain.
That would be cool, but they probably only get rights to sell the games, not full ownership of all rights.
So we pay more. Many owners of very old good, but mostly forgotten, games must know that the rights are basically worthless anyway.
The IP hoarders are waiting for the day you'll be able to do a 1-shot remaster with AI and put the game back up on Steam again.
Not that it is any guarantee that it would sell at all or be successful.
Honestly I find GOG's whole mission of "update old games for modern Windows" kinda weird when I compare it to what people who want to play old console games do: they just fire up an emulator. Running a virtual Windows machine sounds like a much easier solution than individually patching every crusty old executable to run on the modern OS, and re-patching every single one of them when MS rolls out yet another new graphics/controller system a few years down the line.
Their DOS releases are fantastic. I install the games, then copy the files to my virtual C: directory for DOSBox-X and know those games will always Just Work and I will never have to reinstall anything or mess with configurations. Some games I also copy to my phone to play in DOSBox in Android.
To repeat myself from old threads, it would be awesome to have something like a WindowsBOX, like DOSBox but emulating (probably) Windows 98SE, fully open source. GOG could use that for old Windows games and never have to modify the games themselves. I would be happy to support GOG developing an emulator like that, rather than making old games run on new Windows.
Really I'm surprised nobody's done "WinBox" yet. Proton kinda covers that except it runs in Linux, not Windows. I dunno how it handles old Windows games as I've got zero nostalgia for those, my Steam Deck mostly runs modern stuff from small teams.
It’s almost not necessary. Windows has – in contrast to Linux – a very good and long compatibility guarantee. You can put up any program from 1995 (at least being 32-bit) and it will start and run.
The things GOG is improving are some bugs that occur mostly in games, e.g. something with color palettes in pre-2002 games. But I think every game using DirectX 9 or later will work without any adaptations, even ten years from now.
ReactOS has been around for 20+ years. You can run some old games on it, but it's hardly at the level of WINE and projects based on it.
30 years ^)
GOG uses emulators as well. GOG has a share of games that use Dosbox or ScummVM as two somewhat common emulators they will configure a game to run in that I'm aware of.
That said, there's also something to be said that if a game is patchable, there is some value in patching it to run directly rather than "need" an emulator.
Seems sus. I’d be happy to help fund a classics restoration trust if it was more transparent, but this just looks like a branded cash grab.
Still no word of Linux support. GOG is an everlasting source of disappointment
Install Proton and use the Heroic Games Launcher. Works on my machine™
https://heroicgameslauncher.com/
Lots of games on GOG run on Linux; not sure what you're asking for here
GoG games run just fine on Linux through Proton. GoG Galaxy too.