Blizzard Changed Their Mind, Then GOG Humiliated Them

redump.org, there are many preservation programs behind the "illegal" scenes, and we can go to libraries, read and borrow a book and it's okay, yet when we retrieve it digitally it's deemed piracy and bad. Nintendo and Sega and whatever can put up all they want, if people want it, they can get it and find a way. Finding old pc games proves a bit more difficult with so many more releases, but even certain games like simon the sorcerer 4 and 5 just barely 15 years old are already hard to find unlike other games from the dos era.

As to gog's claims about their preservation program (they just made but i thought was already their thing when they came up with the site) it became bogus, but it was already like that when they stopped releasing good old games.

Granted you have to dive deep, not everything is available for everyone, but i still fear more a time about compability and how to maintain being able to still play everything in the future. If bloody microsoft just let gog/steam use the win3x or even a win95 wrapper possibility open like dosbox.

I like GOG, but let's be honest here, they are also doing it for marketing. After all, when it was popular to have newer games, they renounced "good old games" title and tried to distance themselves from the "place for old games" fame. Now that preservation is IN, they are promoting same games that they started with as a special line... and that's all allowed ofc, good luck to them... but Blizzard also has the right to decide where their games will be sold and for how long. I'm not angry at anyone here. People who wanted Wc1 and 2 already got them on GOG, and if you wanted them and didn't get them yet, you still have a chance to do it before they are removed.

If a dev/publisher wants to sell their own games that's their prerogative, likewise if they want to release a remaster and de-list the original versions. It's just not a very good move from the PR perspective, and will piss people off who still want the original versions. Especially since there have been many remasters/upscales/modernizations of games that have turned out objectively worse than the originals.

Devs and publishers are going to do what they want with their IP, and so will people who still want to access those older games. I don't see there ever being a time when anything digital is completely inaccessible for people who don't mind looking for them.

I've always been a retrogamer. Enough said about that. It doesn't mean I don't like modern games. I mean I value being able to replay games from my younger days, or discover an old gem.

The problem is that publishers don't care about it, most of them just care about money. Not about customer's rights, not about ethics, not about things that aren't money. And old games aren't money. Actually for big publishers it's a tiny enemy. If people can play 100 hours in an old $5 game, why would they buy your 8-hour long last AAA at $59.99? In fact, if for the price of one of our games they can get ten gems, we should we worried, right? Nope. It's a niche market. The big numbers are at new AAAAAA games, and they'll sell unless they're a truly real massive failure. Look, even No Man's Sky ended being a good seller. Thus, old games are a small enemy. Quite small. Unless someone is making them look big. It's still a thorn in the side. Not a huge sword that really hurts the chest of my business, but we have lots of people here and one noticed it so now someone is worried. Someone at the basement taking care of our old library and trying to squeeze the last bucks from it saw something wrong. Then the only way to make fight it is, not sell old games anymore, and for the real classics known even today, make "X: The Remake You Always Were Waiting For, With New Features You Never Wanted And A Price That You'll Never Believe". And it will sell.

So we as digital customers are defensesless about things like "oh how I'd like to play again the original X", or even a simple right like owning forever the license of some digital good that you've paid for (not even paying less because you don't own it, just live with it). Since we changed from physical distribution (floppies, cds, dvds, whatever), we lost. Make any article, statement, video, post your opinion like me. Things will not get better. Only worse. Am I being negative? A lot. But realistically speaking I don't think I'm that far from the reality.

The only thing we can do is participate in, sorry but not grey area, but it always has been illegal preservation efforts. I did not that long ago. I did some stuff myself. Was it illegal? Yes. Was it immoral, unethic? For me not, or I wouldn't have done it. The Links Collection 90%, fuck you M$.

Negative human off.