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GOG’s New Plan To Weaponize Its Community’s Wishlist Of Games To Pressure IP Holders

DATE POSTED:February 3, 2025

I’ll give the folks over at Good Old Games (GOG) credit: they’re certainly doing what they said they were going to do. We’ve been talking about GOG a fair amount lately, mainly since the platform announced it was pivoting back to focus on its initial raison d’etre: bringing retro, DRM-free games back to a public storefront for gamers to legitimately purchase. GOG stated that it was doing this in part in order to get into the business of video game preservation, a prospect that everyone knew would be tested largely due to fights and/or confusion over IP rights held by publishers, studios, and god knows who else.

But, going back to the opening of the post, the platform is absolutely putting its efforts where its mouth is. GOG has long had a “Community Wishlist” where customers could list out which retro games they wish could be brought back onto the platform that weren’t already there. It allowed GOG to do two things: know what the customers most wanted and serve as evidence to publishers that their games would sell well if they partnered with GOG.

The games GOG members picked out on what used to be called the Community Wishlist still have their votes, and they have been useful. It was often “the fuel for our actions,” Karol Ascot Obrzut writes on GOG’s blog. “When talks with IP owners hit a wall, the Wishlist kept the conversation going.” GOG attributes the newly available Dino Crisis and Dino Crisis 2 (and the bundle) in part to wishlist leverage. Those games had about 5,000 and 3,500 votes, respectively, which helped when, as GOG puts it, “two Polish dudes” approached Capcom to ask about making the games Windows 10/11 compatible and upscaling it.

A pretty cool concept for how to galvanize a dedicated community to the effect of serving as market research for both the platform and the publishers needed to make the platform useful. But with GOG’s return to a focus on retro games, versus newly released AAA games, it has also decided to revamp the Wishlist into something more robust, with a more specific goal of using it to push more publishers’ older games onto the platform. Add to that a little prodding from the folks at GOG itself and you have a community-driven demand center that will be very public.

The Dreamlist has received a complete design and interface overhaul, and it makes it easier to see what other people are demanding. At the top, with more than 57,000 votes at the time of publishing, is Black & White, the 2001 game from Peter Molyneaux’s Lionhead Studios that was a true “god game,” giving you an avatar creature that learned from your actions and treatment. Black & White 2 commands the third-place slot at the moment.

GOG has added its own “Our Pick” tag to games it wants to see brought forward onto modern systems. Among them is Freelancer, which Ars’ Samuel Axon described in our 2024 roundup of non-2024 games as “a sincere attempt to make games like Elite (Dangerous) and Wing Commander: Privateer far more accessible.” GOG selected Freelancer as one of its staff picks for the Dreamlist, citing its “dynamic economy and engaging storyline.”

The idea here is a central place for GOG customers to establish both what they want to see on the platform and, by dint of those submissions remaining on the Dreamlist, the studios and publishers that refuse to make their games available, either at all or at least in a DRM-free format. Studios and publishers have every right to withhold their works in that fashion, of course, but this new setup has the ability to apply some public pressure in a way that is beyond the old Wishlist.

It may also serve to highlight for a larger audience just how absurd some of the IP hang-ups of old video games can be. For instance, one of the other top games listed on the Dreamlist is The Operative: No One Lives Forever, a game that is in IP rights hell, as we have discussed several times in the past.

We’ll of course have to see how successful the Dreamlist program is at bringing more games into the GOG Preservation Program. Any progress would be useful, but it sure would be great if something of a groundswell was created for these preservation efforts.