By Nelson Schneider - 11/24/24 at 03:04 PM CT
As much as I would love to love the Polish videogame publisher formerly known as Good Old Games, I’ve been finding it incredibly difficult to overlook the fact that their audacious soapbox pontificating has never actually resulted in significant positive changes in Industrial Gaming. Little more than a week ago GOG launched their latest round of favor-currying directly into users’ inboxes with a mass email detailing their latest initiative: The GOG Preservation Program.
“Games Preservation” has been quite the buzzword in the gaming community for quite a few years, typically as the purview of noble pirates who hack the DRM out of discontinued, unsupported games or upload cartridge ROM or disc ISO images of console titles that have never received a modern re-release. However, what GOG’s so-called “new” initiative is actually doing isn’t actually “new” at all, but is rather just a slight re-wording of GOG’s DRM-free and guaranteed compatibility promises that have been a part of the company’s manifesto since they first started out creating fan content for “Neverwinter Nights” and releasing digital versions of some of the late Western PC Gaming titan, InterPlay’s, back catalog.
Unfortunately, like everything else GOG says and does, their alleged renewed efforts in the realm of Games Preservation are incredibly milquetoast and clearly predictable. Are they making old games available if nobody actually knows who owns the rights to said old games? No. That’s the Internet Archive doing that. Are they making old console games available for legitimate modern purchases? No. That’s the No-Intro group, defying the twin colossi of Nintendo and Sony, who would rather keep these games permanently locked down by perpetual subscriptions. Are they seducing more new releases from non-Indie sources with promises of increased sales to users who want to own a game license in perpetuity? No. Big publishers are still using launch window DRM to lock down new releases and only deigning to consider GOG as a platform once their games are considerably out-of-date.
In short, GOG is trying to make us believe they’re taking bold new action in the battle between users and copyright holders, when, in reality, they are doing the exact same thing that their corporate brethren prefer to do to give users a better experience: NOTHING!
