
10 years of gog.com - dsego
https://www.gog.com/10years
======
manfredo
Wow, GoG is a decade old - it's hard to believe. GoG has always had the image
in my mind of a scrappy new startup competing against the big likes of Steam,
Microsoft Store, Origin, etc. I was probably a bit too young for the crowd
that it's games were initially aimed at. My earliest gaming memories stretch
back to the N64 era, but really only start in earnest with the Xbox and I only
really got into PC gaming in the mid-2000s. A of classics like the old
Infinity Engine games (Baldur's gate, Planescape Torment), Stronghold
Crusaders, Heroes of Might and Magic, and others were largely unknown to me
until I bought them through GoG. Despite their age I thoroughly enjoyed many
of these games, and experiencing playing these games gave me a better
appreciation and enjoyment of more modern games that draw on these older
titles.

I think the tendency for the availability of games to quickly decay is one
barrier that prevents video games from having the same prestige as a lot of
other works of art, like film, books, or visual art. In movies or books it's
not uncommon for works to become recognized for excellence and remain widely
explored decades after their release. With video games, it's often becomes
increasingly difficult to legally acquire old games and as time goes on
eventually getting them to run in a modern machine becomes a challenge. It's
great to see that GoG has created a market for old games and created an
incentive to maintain the ability to easily play them on modern machines - CD
Projekt's efforts go a long way of reducing the "media decay" of video games.

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georgespencer
Congratulations for ten great years!

If you've never used it, Gog is a really nicely thought out experience from an
ecom perspective. I'm not wild about the app store they've built, but it's
worth creating an account and tooling around a little on the website. It's
terrific.

Tonnes of the games from my childhood are on their platform. The only
annoyance is having to boot into Windows for many of them. I know it's easier
said than done, but it'd be great if they could crack a way of wrapping a
WINE-like emulator around each game so I can play on macOS.

~~~
zinckiwi
That would be great; in the meantime PortingKit [1] has a decent hit rate on
select titles, and the GOG installables are always recommended over the Steam
alternatives for obvious (DRM) reasons.

1: [http://portingkit.com/en/](http://portingkit.com/en/)

~~~
georgespencer
Yippee thanks! Comparing the Steam Store experience on Mac to the GOG
experience is an exercise in itself :-)

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Tsubasachan
Love these guys. Gaming like it was when I was a kid in 1998. No community, no
achievements, no always online license account DRM crap, no overlay.

My Adventurer Mart is the finest shopping in all Faerûn: widest selection,
lowest prices, and nary a fancy illustration. Just the goods, bare and plain.

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TimGremalm
Noclip did an interesting documentary about GOG. "GOG: Preserving Gaming's
Past & Future"
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffngZOB1U2A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffngZOB1U2A)

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kolderman
Please don't shut down, please don't stop providing the DOS compatible
original game files, ever.

~~~
Nition
You might like Archive.org's collection of DOS games if you haven't seen it:
[https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games](https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games)

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everyone
I hate steam, and love gog. But there is one issue that makes me buy certain
games on steam.

Games that get released full of bugs and that then get fixed with frequent
updates.. This tends to happen with ambitious indie games from small teams
(the best games!).. I fully trust the team to fix the game, but when it
releases usually there are a lot of bugs they didnt find as they have no QA.
Eg. I just bought ' Frozen Synapse 2'

Steam seems to get updates earlier and more frequently. Why is that? Is it cus
the devs dont bother updating gog? That doesnt seem likely from these teams.
GOG should definitely do everything they can to have update/patch parity with
steam, if that means making it part of the contract when u release a game
there, so be it. Then I would never buy anything on steam.

ps. Why do I hate steam? 1\. Its an unnecessary program on ure system, that
wants to always be on, always be updating, have all kinds of access it doesnt
need jusr for u to play games. 2\. It has a lot of social features and whatnot
(that I dont care about cus I only play single player games) but at its core
it is simply a DRM system and DRM is terrible. 3\. It obfuscates the game
files, putting them all in a 'steam' folder. So you cant easily manage / back
them up. 4\. Double click game icon .. loading steam.. updating steam..

~~~
manfredo
Do you use GoG Galaxy? It's GoG's desktop client that automatically updates
games. I usually find that games are updated more or less simultaneously
between Steam and GoG. After all, it's the developers or studio that dedicates
resources towards producing bug-fixes, the same version is usually uploaded to
all the online distributors so there's no real reason not to push updates to
all the distribution services. Maybe GoG gets different builds because it's
DRM-free, and that adds time to release updates?

~~~
ratiolat
There's no Linux version of GoG galaxy.

~~~
ThatPlayer
I think this has prevented some games from being released on Linux at all on
GoG. Tooth and Tail has a Linux/Mac/Windows release on Steam, but is missing
the Linux release on GoG. It uses Galaxy or Steam for multiplayer.

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qwerty456127
GoG and HumbleBundle are the only ways I buy games ever. I don't want to pay
for DRM-ed stuff I can't just download and use at any computer I want.

~~~
eksemplar
Humble bundle is the reason I have 250 steam games that I’ll never play.
Honestly I wish I could delete most of them, to easy my ocd.

GoG in the other hand is pure magic. I really love that store.

~~~
ThePadawan
You can tag them in a special category and IIRC also hide that category.

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yread
Congrats! It would be cool to read about the technical challenges that go with
making good old games work on new operating systems.

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ognarb
Still waiting for a linux client.

