GOG Decides To Re-Focus In Part On Game Preservation Of Older Games
We’ve talked several times about GOG in the past. The video game storefront was born over a decade ago, originally built on a platform of making older games compatible with modern systems combined with its insistence that any game sold on its storefront be DRM free. In the years since, GOG began to also be a source for new and AAA games. The DRM-free rule remained, and there were still a ton of older games on the platform, but company got a bit away from its original mission.
As all of this was happening, the topic of video game preservation gained a great deal of interest. Some of this was the natural evolution of an industry that both has moved and grown very fast, while also suffering from the rather unique problem of being reliant on hardware compatibility in a way that is unlike other media, such as music, movies, and television. Sure, some media for music can become antiquated, like the 8-track cartridge of cassette tape. But that is unlike what occurs in the PC gaming space, with operating system updates, processor compatibilities, and so on. That’s how you get a situation like what the Video Game History Foundation recently outlined, where 87% of the games that have ever been created are out of print and at risk for being culturally disappeared.
It appears the GOG has been paying attention to all of this. The company recently announced that it will once again be refocusing its efforts on ensuring video games are preserved and forwardly compatible with its “GOG Preservation Program”.
Classic games are only 20 percent of GOG’s catalog, and the firm hasn’t actually called itself “Good Old Games” in 12 years. And yet, today, GOG announces that it is making “a significant commitment of resources” toward a new GOG Preservation Program. It starts with 100 games for which GOG’s own developers are working to create current and future compatibility, keeping them DRM-free and giving them ongoing tech support, along with granting them a “Good Old Game: Preserved by GOG” stamp.
“We think we can significantly impact the classics industry by focusing our resources on it and creating superior products,” writes Arthur Dejardin, head of sales and marketing at GOG. “If we wanted to spread the DRM-free gospel by focusing on getting new AAA games on GOG instead, we would make little progress with the same amount of effort and money (we’ve been trying various versions of that for the last 5 years).”
Some of this is pure public relations, for sure. This is still good stuff but there is a lot of detail missing in this announcement that will determine just how effective this will all be from a games preservation standpoint. As with all things game preservation, the management and decisions around intellectual property rights is paramount in all of this. If GOG’s announcement was made alongside a commitment from a ton of game publishers to allow GOG to do the work it needs to do to make all this work, for instance, it would certainly have been all the more impactful. Nothing in what GOG has stated, though, offers any details around how these publishers, and especially publishers that are no longer around that made games that are also no longer around, will influence the preservation of these games.
In fact, GOG even hints at these challenges.
Not every game is going to end up with the “Preserved” stamp. As GOG Managing Director Urszula Jach-Jaki told Destructoid in December 2023, “specific contract provisions” mean that GOG does “not possess the rights to modify the game build, and if bugs are reported, only the developers can address them.” So, some games are largely repackaged with a version of the DOSBox emulator and sold as they are. There are notable exceptions, like the Unity port of The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall.
So, with only 100 games getting the official GOG “Preserved” badge, this is preservation on the margins. The real work is going to be developing a program through which publishers and rightsholders are incentivized to allow GOG to do the work they’re unwilling to do themselves. Truly making these older and endangered games available and compatible on modern systems is the mansion we want to live in, but those same publishers and rightsholders currently have the keys.
Until we see a plan for that, game preservation is still in its infancy.