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[nighthawk86]

I remember when Good Old Games started, I thought it was very nice online store for exactly that. But the last couple years it seems like for every actual good old game / classic title, there are like 99 obscure new indie titles I've never heard of. It kind of kills the point of the site IMO. It gets too cluttered.



Any thoughts?

[Japo]

Well yes they are no longer focused on any specific type of games. They also release as many brand new big hits as they can (e.g. Witcher 3). They even changed their name so it's just "GOG" and doesn't stand for "good old games" or anything any longer. This kind of rebranding is used by many longstanding companies, e.g. EY or ASML.

These changes are normal consequences of success. At least I get more choice of vendors on top of Steam and whoever.

Also Abandonia has changed its focus over the years. Originally Kosta wanted to publish only the best quality old games. The reason was that at the time there were many other abandonware sites doing the same thing, and in particular HOTU already had almost every DOS game, good or bad. They had also changed focus, originally they published "underdog" games (good but underappreciated) but as games were added year after year they just added every game they could get. The same happened to Abandonia, after the best games were all in, we kept adding every game we could get, and at the time the archival/preservation aspect was stronger because games were becoming so old as to be at risk of being lost, the more the older and actually the crappier; and many other abandonware sites were disappearing, leaving Abandonia on top. Finally HOTU too was lost in a day, predictably after years of complete inactivity, so Abandonia kind of tried to fill that remaining void as well.

Long story short, we changed focus. So has GOG, in a commercial sense. Given the ease of software sale to fall into monopoly which can force all kind of crappy middleware and DRM, I'm happy to have extra choice of outlets for any kind of game. It doesn't really hurt you how many games there are on the site?

[Smiling Spectre]

Originally Posted by Japo

Well yes they are no longer focused on any specific type of games. They also release as many brand new big hits as they can (e.g. Witcher 3).

They made Witcher 3, actually.

[Japo]

Originally Posted by Smiling Spectre

They made Witcher 3, actually.

[Mighty Midget]

I agree with Japo here. Just a few thoughts from me: While the main idea behind GoG was to have good old games available, GoG is also a business that needs to be flexible and as such, they want as many games as they can get their hands on, to sell, to stay in business. As far as AB's "mission" is concerned, like Japo said, it too has changed and for me personally, AB is now about making sure games that are under threat of disappearing altogether, are still available to be played. I'm not bothered in the slightest that GoG or any other store make money on it. The important bit is, these sites keep old games alive, just like AB attempts to do. We're basically in the same "business" except we're not making money out of it. If GoG gave new games a miss, then that would be bad for their business and if they go down, so does a (legal) source for old games.

[nighthawk86]

I see your points. But I still think that thay should try to stick to quality software, put more effort into obtaining more oldies and focus less on stuffing the site full of indieware. I bet very little of that is bought anyway. In my opinion they should stick to the course they set from the beginning.

Also when buying old DOS titles I really wish gog could offer original disk images for download. If games are after xx number of years taken out of abandonware status, and sold as retail don't we deserve to own the proper images? What source do they use for their releases? Abandonware sites? I have seen DOS games sold, that are not up to their latest version.

And often I see a games Manual listed as "Bonus content". That is bad practice. A manual is an expected part of the game.

These are just my thoughts. GOG does nice work in general and has made fixes to get a lot of older windows titles to run, which I am grateful for.

[Mystvan]

I agree with what was posted earlier, but I think GOG.com should balance in releasing newer games and old games. There are many classic games that still expect to be released:

• Dune series (Dune I, Dune II, Dune 2000, etc.);
• Flashback;
• Gods;
• Reunion (fix the bugs, please!);
• etc.