When GOG’s new Preservation Program was announced last November, the very welcome scheme to make sure video games maintain operating on trendy machines in-perpetuity had some lofty objectives. The aim is to create a hundreds-long record of video games that the Polish CD Projekt subsidiary will decide to always sustaining, even—it seems—if the GOG storefront loses the rights to promote them. A lifelong dedication to protect video games, irrespective of how deserted they may be by their unique publishers. Hooray, we cried, as a gaming public. And whereas the mission may be very positively pushing forward, it seems it’s proving quite a bit trickier than the corporate first thought. It’s even concerned hiring a non-public detective to establish the proprietor of a selected sport.
Talking to The Games Business‘s Christopher Dring (thanks RPS), GOG’s senior enterprise improvement supervisor Marcin Paczynski and its managing director Maciej Gołębiewski defined that the velocity at which video games cease working, and the multifarious methods by which it occurs, is proving a really hefty problem. “To be perfectly honest, it’s harder than we thought it would be,” Paczynski advised the podcast.
A part of the issue is that during the last couple of many years, lots of the 3,000 video games GOG beforehand restored and ensured might work have already began to develop into unplayable once more. So the plan was to return over the archive and replace the video games with extra trendy options and fixes, whereas promising the “lifetime guarantee.” However, as Paczynski places it, “what we found out when we started working on it is that the games and how they work has deteriorated way faster than we thought.”
It’s not simply so simple as fixing points with the video games not launching, however extra particular points inside. “We are talking about more subtle things,” Paczynski explains, “like the game not supporting modern controllers, the game not supporting ultra-wide screens or modern resolutions, or even a simple thing like being able to minimize the game.” The implications of this are removed from devastating, nevertheless it’s tempering GOG’s ambitions a bit. The aim had been to succeed in 500 video games within the Preservation Program by the top of 2025, however as an alternative its now 300 to 350.
That is all made much more sophisticated by many older video games having been launched entangled in all method of DRM, and the way in which by which IP holders may be extremely troublesome about accessing supply code, not to mention attempting to work out who precisely holds the IP rights to video games. The rest of the interview is well worth a watch, because the GOG guys get into the peculiar world of attempting to safe out-of-publication video games, which apparently may even embody reaching out to grease refineries. However most terribly, the corporate has even resorted to utilizing personal detectives to trace down reclusive rights house owners simply to make sure it could proceed to make a sport accessible.
Alongside the person who owned the rights to many video games GOG needed to publish who had since develop into a millionaire oil magnate, there was additionally a British man who had inherited the rights to a set of video games, who then fell off the grid solely. “So we hired a guy in the UK that was supposed to find him,” says Paczynski. It turned out he was dwelling so remotely he didn’t personal a cellular phone or have web entry, and wasn’t even conscious that he had the rights to those video games. However after they discovered him, it turned out he was “super-supportive to preserving the legacy of his family.”
Clearly GOG is a enterprise, and this isn’t altruism, however we’re in a time when publishers are abandoning video games even in the identical 12 months as they’re being launched, so preservation is turning into extra urgent than ever. It’s good to know this mission is pushing forward regardless of the difficulties, even when it has to barely mood its ambition.
