"Champions" of preservation GOG wont promote the STOP KILLING GAME campaign...

[Ikagura]

Yes, most old school PC games use unsupported versions of Direct X and they have to write custom wrappers to get them to work with Direct X 11. Plus getting the games to support the new OS quirks from Win 10/11.

That's why I have to download patches and .exe but I'm always paranoid about viruses...

 

[Strategist's iconStrategist]

Abandonware =/= public domain though.

It just means that nobody has claimed the copyright of a product.

Right but GOG has to communicate with publishers to be able to sell them and get them to reclaim their rights to a piece of software, essentially blocking it from being abandonware.

 

[_oBSOLEte_]

Yes, most old school PC games use unsupported versions of Direct X and they have to write custom wrappers to get them to work with Direct X 11. Plus getting the games to support the new OS quirks from Win 10/11.

I think most old school games they sell are running an old version of DOSBox. You mean WinXP games? Dont they use DGVoodoo for that?

 

[Strategist's iconStrategist]

I think most old school games they sell are running an old version of DOSBox. You mean WinXP games? Dont they use DGVoodoo for that?

Windows 95 and later PC games use Direct X. The older versions of Direct X have deprecated functions that need to be refactored in order to work with the latest Direct X versions. Plus there are additional work to make it work in widescreen and with other newer OS features. That's what I've seen on their patch notes, at least. No idea what DGVoodoo is.

 

[_oBSOLEte_]

Windows 95 and later PC games use Direct X. The older versions of Direct X have deprecated functions that need to be refactored in order to work with the latest Direct X versions. Plus there are additional work to make it work in widescreen and with other newer OS features. That's what I've seen on their patch notes, at least. No idea what DGVoodoo is.

Patch notes of which games? DGVoodoo2 is an openGL wrapper for early directX games, in widescreen if you want. I think it's FOSS, just like DOSBox, DXVK, D3D Extras, VKD3D and all the stuff developed for Wine, and not really affiliated with GOG.

Speaking of which, it's quite sad that GOG, Steam and the likes don't properly communicate which of their games use which open source tool. Between stripped versions of ScummVM ant DOSBox games it's impossible to get them to run on a real DOS PC now.

Some resource link about that :

GOG games that use DOSBox - DOSBoxWiki

www.dosbox.com

Playing DOSBox games on DOS Retro Gaming PC

In this video I am showing you how to create an Installation CD from GOG.com DOSBox games that use ISO images The process is fairly straight forward: 1. Rename the ISO file 2. Burn the CD Software...

www.philscomputerlab.com

 

[Leon]

Hey there! If you are interested by videogame preservation and consumer rights in general you might have already heard about the "Stop Killing Game" initiative. This movement was brought by retrogamer/youtuber Ross "Accursed Farm" Scott. Today they announce they got denied promotion by GOG after nearly a year of discussions.

Spoiler: A bit of context :

"Stop Killing Games" is a consumer movement started to challenge the legality of publishers destroying video games they have sold to customers. An increasing number of video games are sold effectively as goods - with no stated expiration date - but designed to be completely unplayable as soon as support from the publisher ends. This practice is a form of planned obsolescence and is not only detrimental to customers, but makes preservation effectively impossible. Furthermore, the legality of this practice is largely untested in many countries.

The main piece of the campaign has taken the form of an European citizen initiative. It's a system specific of the European Union aiming to develop new laws by means of a petition, and their goal is to have one million electronic signatures (via European ID cards) so that the EU parliament start working on some new consumer laws to solve the problem. They're halfway there.

In his last vlog Ross gets in the details of the campaign updates and the work they're doing to contact influencers, sponsors and promoters. It's interesting to hear his piece and get some insight about how difficult it is to get some traction when the industry rooted itself with a massive network of influencer's partnerships. After one year long of negotiation with GOG representatives, while they showed interests at first to promote the movement in their newsletters (reaching millions of users worlwide), Ross's correspondent there got fired and GOG now decided it would be bad for their business.

So what's your opinion on this? Were you ever affected by forced game obsolescence? Are you interested by "Stop Killing Games"? Dont you find ironic that GOG spend so much time on marketing themselves as the new "champions" of videogame preservation, but turned their back on the campaign? Are we witnessing a big enshitification of that service, now that they announce just going to cater for a few hundred good ol'games they can still profit of, while destroying more and more abandonware sources?

Have you signed the initiative yourself?

As much as it disgusts me gog won't back it, it doesn't surprise me, from a logical standpoint gog would also be stepping on the toes of game publishers that publish on their website, hence why they probably are refusing, still disgusting though.

Most petitions are useless sadly. One million people is nothing in a world scale.

This is a bit different in that he's also consulting lawyers around the world about his options, he knows it's a uphill battle but it's better than doing nothing, not to mention it has had some effect as ubisoft is in hot water with the french and californian government over the crew debacle.
Either way my stance on this has always been simple, i'm someone who despises the idea of lost media, which is why imo it should be law that some form of game preservation should be required, what form that takes isn't as important as not forgetting the past, so many movies and books are lost due to lack of preservation, probably the most famous ones are the bible and beowulf, which both have missing books/chapters respectively.

 

[Strategist's iconStrategist]

Patch notes of which games? DGVoodoo2 is an openGL wrapper for early directX games, in widescreen if you want. I think it's FOSS, just like DOSBox, DXVK, D3D Extras, VKD3D and all the stuff developed for Wine, and not really affiliated with GOG.

Its there on the product page for one of their Good Ol' Games. For example Resident Evil 3 boasts the following features:

• Full compatibility with Windows 10 and Windows 11.
• 6 localizations of the game included (English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese).
• Mercenaries Mode included.
• Improved DirectX game renderer.
• New rendering options (Windowed Mode, Vertical Synchronization Control, Gamma Correction, Integer Scaling and more).
• Improved graphics engine initialization and restart.
• Improved video subtitles.
• Improved options dialog.
• Issue-less task switching.
• Improved mouse cursor visibility.
• Full support for modern controllers (Sony DualSense, Sony DualShock4, Microsoft Xbox Series, Microsoft Xbox One, Microsoft Xbox 360, Nintendo Switch, Logitech F series and many more) with optimal button binding regardless of the hardware, hotplugging and wireless mode.

 

[_oBSOLEte_]

Its there on the product page for one of their Good Ol' Games. For example Resident Evil 3 boasts the following features:

• Full compatibility with Windows 10 and Windows 11.
• 6 localizations of the game included (English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese).
• Mercenaries Mode included.
• Improved DirectX game renderer.
• New rendering options (Windowed Mode, Vertical Synchronization Control, Gamma Correction, Integer Scaling and more).
• Improved graphics engine initialization and restart.
• Improved video subtitles.
• Improved options dialog.
• Issue-less task switching.
• Improved mouse cursor visibility.
• Full support for modern controllers (Sony DualSense, Sony DualShock4, Microsoft Xbox Series, Microsoft Xbox One, Microsoft Xbox 360, Nintendo Switch, Logitech F series and many more) with optimal button binding regardless of the hardware, hotplugging and wireless mode.

Yeah, maybe they dont use DGVoodooo2 for that port and got access to Capcom's sourcecode. Maybe. Why so much effort for the PC port of Resident Evil 3... I dont think it's the best version to play that game, you'll have a better time with an emulator.

Here's the last game I played :

GOG version : stripped ScummVM files, only English available, MIDI music, people complaining about bugs in the forum.

Phantasmagoria

I feel its presence, the icy fingers upon my throat. I hear its eerie sounds, unsettling

www.gog.com

And here is how I fully played it with the original ISO, in French, MT-32 music, with a gamepad, savestates, fast-forward, a CRT shader and videos in widescreen :

Hey at least for RE3 we still got the link up here... And Saturn's port of Phantasmagoria as well. Phantasmagoria PC CD-ROM ISOs on My Abandonware, tho, that's dead and gone.

 

[Android 18]

As a long time user of the platform I can be a pragmatic consumer and see now that their marketing is bullshit.

As for the "writing on the wall" of Stop Killing Games success, you might precise your thought a bit, because I don't know where you got that. 500k people already signed in would disagree.

Unfortunately, 500k is a pittance if this amounts to a plea to 'stop being bad to consumers, please'.

 

[_oBSOLEte_]

Unfortunately, 500k is a pittance if this amounts to a plea to 'stop being bad to consumers, please'.

500K people reached doing the 5 min effort of taking their eID and logging in to a gov website is already a success.

It's a great conversion rate, considering the target demographic is fat gamers with stockholm sydrome for their Uplay and Steam and GOG, who sit on their asses to play games all day, I'd say it's already quite impressive. Anyway, there's still a few months to reach 1M.

 

[mistymermaid]

Fighting for game preservation is morally correct. You don't think so?

Some opinions are indeed more valid than others.

Some of us have a rather pessimistic opinion of GOG that, to be entirely honest, gets irritating. All things considered, having publishers on board with a service with little DRM is remarkable.

 

[_oBSOLEte_]

Some of us have a rather pessimistic opinion of GOG that, to be entirely honest, gets irritating. All things considered, having publishers on board with a service with little DRM is remarkable.

Realistically, you're talking about the same publishers who told us we just need to get comfortable with not owning our games.

I think your irritation may just be due to that dissonance.

 

[soulsas]

Hey there! If you are interested by videogame preservation and consumer rights in general you might have already heard about the "Stop Killing Game" initiative. This movement was brought by retrogamer/youtuber Ross "Accursed Farm" Scott. Today they announce they got denied promotion by GOG after nearly a year of discussions.

Spoiler: A bit of context :

"Stop Killing Games" is a consumer movement started to challenge the legality of publishers destroying video games they have sold to customers. An increasing number of video games are sold effectively as goods - with no stated expiration date - but designed to be completely unplayable as soon as support from the publisher ends. This practice is a form of planned obsolescence and is not only detrimental to customers, but makes preservation effectively impossible. Furthermore, the legality of this practice is largely untested in many countries.

The main piece of the campaign has taken the form of an European citizen initiative. It's a system specific of the European Union aiming to develop new laws by means of a petition, and their goal is to have one million electronic signatures (via European ID cards) so that the EU parliament start working on some new consumer laws to solve the problem. They're halfway there.

In his last vlog Ross gets in the details of the campaign updates and the work they're doing to contact influencers, sponsors and promoters. It's interesting to hear his piece and get some insight about how difficult it is to get some traction when the industry rooted itself with a massive network of influencer's partnerships. After one year long of negotiation with GOG representatives, while they showed interests at first to promote the movement in their newsletters (reaching millions of users worlwide), Ross's correspondent there got fired and GOG now decided it would be bad for their business.

So what's your opinion on this? Were you ever affected by forced game obsolescence? Are you interested by "Stop Killing Games"? Dont you find ironic that GOG spend so much time on marketing themselves as the new "champions" of videogame preservation, but turned their back on the campaign? Are we witnessing a big enshitification of that service, now that they announce just going to cater for a few hundred good ol'games they can still profit of, while destroying more and more abandonware sources?

Have you signed the initiative yourself?

In the Brazilian market — especially when we look at the retail landscape in São Paulo — the situation becomes even more paradoxical. On one hand, we’re seeing game prices reaching absurd levels, often hitting or surpassing R$350 at launch, which is simply out of reach for a large portion of the population. On the other, major retailers like Americanas (before its collapse), Casas Bahia, Magazine Luiza, and marketplaces like Amazon BR and Submarino are desperately throwing around wild promotions — endless installment plans, aggressive flash discounts, or bundles with random freebies — all in an attempt to keep a market spinning that’s clearly lost any balance between price and accessibility.
It’s an improvised response to a structural problem: even with discounts, the actual cost of a game is completely out of step with the average consumer’s purchasing power. And these retail tactics, as creative as they might be, just paper over the deeper issue — we’re dealing with an industry offering a volatile product, often tied to servers and policies that can vanish overnight.
With Sony’s recent price hikes, things have gone from bad to surreal — new releases are now landing straight in the R$400+ range, making them virtually inaccessible to most Brazilian gamers. It’s a pricing model that turns a blind eye to local economic realities and further pushes digital entertainment into elitist territory.
I hadn’t heard about the Stop Killing Games initiative before, but now that I have, it’s obvious how badly it needs to be more widely shared — especially in Brazil, where conversations about digital consumer rights are still few and far between. It’s a conversation that needs to happen. Ensuring that the game you bought keeps working years later isn’t a luxury — it’s basic fairness. Especially in a country where every game purchase can represent a serious financial sacrifice.

 

[_oBSOLEte_]

In the Brazilian market — especially when we look at the retail landscape in São Paulo — the situation becomes even more paradoxical. On one hand, we’re seeing game prices reaching absurd levels, often hitting or surpassing R$350 at launch, which is simply out of reach for a large portion of the population. On the other, major retailers like Americanas (before its collapse), Casas Bahia, Magazine Luiza, and marketplaces like Amazon BR and Submarino are desperately throwing around wild promotions — endless installment plans, aggressive flash discounts, or bundles with random freebies — all in an attempt to keep a market spinning that’s clearly lost any balance between price and accessibility.
It’s an improvised response to a structural problem: even with discounts, the actual cost of a game is completely out of step with the average consumer’s purchasing power. And these retail tactics, as creative as they might be, just paper over the deeper issue — we’re dealing with an industry offering a volatile product, often tied to servers and policies that can vanish overnight.
With Sony’s recent price hikes, things have gone from bad to surreal — new releases are now landing straight in the R$400+ range, making them virtually inaccessible to most Brazilian gamers. It’s a pricing model that turns a blind eye to local economic realities and further pushes digital entertainment into elitist territory.
I hadn’t heard about the Stop Killing Games initiative before, but now that I have, it’s obvious how badly it needs to be more widely shared — especially in Brazil, where conversations about digital consumer rights are still few and far between. It’s a conversation that needs to happen. Ensuring that the game you bought keeps working years later isn’t a luxury — it’s basic fairness. Especially in a country where every game purchase can represent a serious financial sacrifice.

Stop Killing Games started a lawsuit in Brazil against Ubisoft about the game The Crew but the court rejected it as they required sales figures for the games Ubisoft wasn't willing to disclose. I think you could get more information about their actions on their Discord.

 

[Graves Ruinwalker]

Its the act that counts.

GOG will get the money as long as the preservation is holding up . And if it aint , thats why piracy is there for.
The true back up that holds up more than enough decades and never dissapoints. Its always the best solution to a backstabber to stab them back if it happens and with piracy and communities like that , its always good to have a back-up plan ready .

If we can and it is possible , then we should do our part of the whole game-preservation too by technical improvements which makes games run on newer hardware and even doin our own ports.

I would like to trust GOG but you can never trust a company nowadays . They arent our friends , they just want our money .

(Doesnt wanna sound edgy but that what i think about it )

 

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

All things considered, having publishers on board with a service with little DRM is remarkable.

Indeed.

And credit where it's due: when they had trouble with the rights to the Fallout trilogy and had to delist it, they not only allowed us to keep our copies (even if gotten as giveaways), but also worked tirelessly to restore them.

 

[mistymermaid]

Realistically, you're talking about the same publishers who told us we just need to get comfortable with not owning our games.

I think your irritation may just be due to that dissonance.

Backhanded remark aside...
Of course publishers know digital services refuse to allow users to trade/sell licenses between accounts.

 

[_oBSOLEte_]

Backhanded remark aside...
Of course publishers know digital services refuse to allow users to trade/sell licenses between accounts.

There's no backhanded remark, I sincerely think you shouldn't be irritated by all that.

And don't be pessimistic, in Europe the law allows to trade software license "ownership". It's yet another grey area where publishers and platforms make everything in their power as confusing and as unhandy as possible so they can escape to conform to that. But it's possible.

I'm done with GOG, got maybe 70 games there but I have a better time playing those classics on the latest DOSBox. You seem to like the service a lot tho. If you're interested DM me here I'll send you the list and we can work something. Fallout 1, 2, Tactics, Toonstruck, I already got those in CD-rom I'll just pretend I ripped the ISOs myself.

 

[mistymermaid]

There's no backhanded remark, I sincerely think you shouldn't be irritated by all that.

And don't be pessimistic, in Europe the law allows to trade software license "ownership". It's yet another grey area where publishers and platforms make everything in their power as confusing and as unhandy as possible so they can escape to conform to that. But it's possible.

I'm done with GOG, got maybe 70 games there but I have a better time playing those classics on the latest DOSBox. You seem to like the service a lot tho. If you're interested DM me here I'll send you the list and we can work something. Fallout 1, 2, Tactics, Toonstruck, I already got those in CD-rom I'll just pretend I ripped the ISOs myself.

I think we have a misunderstanding. I'm criticizing those who take a pessimistic stance toward GOG.

But still. I'll agree I find that too many people have a mistaken idea of what preservation is, and what it can achieve.

Being able to run a game on modern devices is just one part of preservation. The usual routine of "load up a rom in an emulator" deprives the game of its historical context.
For instance, emulating an N64 title without the ghastly blurry graphics, doesn't give a person the complete picture of what contemporary players saw and experienced.

 

[_oBSOLEte_]

I think we have a misunderstanding. I'm criticizing those who take a pessimistic stance toward GOG.

*Realistic* stance. GOG only started in 2008 with very few games and didn't prove they could preserve anything yet. It's a gaming platform, they only sell unilaterally revocable, non-transferable game licenses (but I still can sell you my whole account, the offer stands). They are not in any shape or form bound by contract to maintain an archive for, let's say, the next twenty years.

Other industries are bound by laws to ensure data integrity for their customers for the span of time they established by contract. They're audited for that. By their customers or by the government.

GOG marketing be like :

It's complete bullshit. ForeverTM we *enhanceTM*.​

Ubisoft called and they said they don't want Stop Killing Game to be mentioned next to their Heroes 3 discount ad. Might make people less comfortable not owning their games. And GOG happily obliged.

 

[fake-kun]

I have a feeling that the OP has a grudge against GOG.

 

[_oBSOLEte_]

I have a feeling that the OP has a grudge against GOG.

Speaking like a true GOGBot. Discuss the topic, please.

 

[fake-kun]

Speaking like a true GOGBot. Discuss the topic, please.

How classy. /s

For the record, I don't really care either way about GOG, I was making an observation.

 

[_oBSOLEte_]

How classy. /s

For the record, I don't really care either way about GOG, I was making an observation.

Sure hon, You were only sharing your feelings... XD And you don't care at all. XD

 

[Strategist's iconStrategist]

I think we can have a more nuanced view on GOG than simply demonizing them for not supporting a petition. They are doing preservation in their own way while also creating value for their company. They also work with the IP holders to bring these games to the public, which means it will be longer lasting than putting it on an abandonware site and hoping the IP holder forgets it exists.