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Blizzard's pulling of Warcraft I and II tests GOG's new Preservation Program

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Re: Blizzard's pulling of Warcraft I and II tests GOG's new Preservation Program

#101

Post by anthk »

hyperman1 wrote: post #43
thaumasiotes wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> like other game companies (cough Nintendo) their old library is viewed as direct competition with their current set of games/subscription products. That's nothing special to game companies. All entertainment companies are the same way. That's why they push for longer and longer copyrights. Copyright is what protects Disney from having to compete with its own past work.

Microsoft in the XP era said their main competitors were windows 98 and office 97.

Well, w98 was already "dead", it was a rehashed win95 with better plug and play, some fixes, activeX/IE4 down your throat an the same atrocious stability.

Re: Blizzard's pulling of Warcraft I and II tests GOG's new Preservation Program

#102

Post by [deleted] »

vanderZwan wrote: post #89
im3w1l wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are over a billion chinese people. 10,000 negative reviews means that ~0.001% of them felt strongly enough to leave a bad review in protest.

How many of those reviewers actually owned the game?

[deleted]

Re: Blizzard's pulling of Warcraft I and II tests GOG's new Preservation Program

#103

Post by graynk »

maeil wrote: post #9

Interesting how GOG is willing to take such a hard stand of this and fight Blizzard on it, when they immediately pulled the Taiwanese horror game Devotion for political reasons [1]. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/games/2020/dec/17/taiwanese-horr...

I like GOG, but I'm still pissed off about this one, yeah. BTW you can buy it from the developer's website, it's great.

https://shop.redcandlegames.com/app/devotion

Re: Blizzard's pulling of Warcraft I and II tests GOG's new Preservation Program

#104

Post by Etherlord87 »

0dayz wrote: post #48
smolder wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blizzard started down the path to failure when they merged with Activision, though I'm not sure they would have lasted much longer outside of that. It's apparent to me the only way "make quality stuff" survives as a strategy long term is to stay private like Valve. Public ownership ruins companies. They grow into inefficient messes and lose any edge they had while alienating their customers in the interest of short t…

Nope, it started waaay before that. * The sexual misconduct most likely happened way before it came out publicly as all the sleezebags stayed until it was public * real id debacle * Diablo 3 * shutting down blizzard north, despite working on d3 * spending 10 years on trying to make starcraft 2, when the rts genre was in a major slump * x years on the project titan, only to get cancelled * spent years trying to create…

Starcraft 2 murdered RTS genre, it was and is so good, that nothing comes close. I have no idea why you put it on the list.

Activision Blizzard was 2008. Shutting Blizzard North was 2005.

So indeed it seems it was rotting before official Vivaldi-Activision merger.

I think, just like with Starcraft, you misread the situation with "hype of the genre was gone" about moba. I think Blizzard was very good at creating extremely polished products, but LoL already was polished and well established.

Project Titan's assets were used in Overwatch, but yeah, spending so much time on a big project to abandon it really shows poor management skills and overall bad design of the project.

Re: Blizzard's pulling of Warcraft I and II tests GOG's new Preservation Program

#105

Post by xandrius »

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #11

If you only read the headline, GOG is still selling both games until December 13th. Now, I have to weigh the calculus: do I buy the games just because, knowing there is basically zero chance I boot them up? What if that was Blizzard's end game -to drive scarcity?

I mean, let's not pretend that GOG is the only way to have access to these files.

It might be the only way to legally "own" the game but if we want to blur that then it's pretty easy to get in possession of the files.

Re: Blizzard's pulling of Warcraft I and II tests GOG's new Preservation Program

#106

Post by thaumasiotes »

izacus wrote: post #60
thaumasiotes wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have another policy specifying that they maintain the games they sell. They don't sell as-is, they warrant that the game will run appropriately. But we know they don't honor that policy. What would you conclude?

Why the heck do you think it's the stores job to employ developers to maintain games for you forever? How do you think that actually works out? For games that are sold for usually less than 15 bucks?

Because that's what they say their job is? Did you read the rest of the comment thread?

I believe what _I_ said about it, personally, was "that's not worth much" (because they don't do it).

Re: Blizzard's pulling of Warcraft I and II tests GOG's new Preservation Program

#108

Post by graynk »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #33
danielskogly wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tales of Monkey Island is not part of the GOG Preservation Program as far as I can tell[0]. This policy update is for games part of the program. https://www.gog.com/en/game/tales_of_monkey_island

They have another policy specifying that they maintain the games they sell. They don't sell as-is, they warrant that the game will run appropriately. But we know they don't honor that policy. What would you conclude?

> They have another policy specifying that they maintain the games they sell. They don't sell as-is, they warrant that the game will run appropriately.

Would be helpful if you've linked to that policy :)

They do update some of the classics, that's true. Expecting them to fix bugs in every single game on the store is madness. They do have tech support that you can reach out to and they refund games if they don't work for you. That's as much as one can expect.

Re: Blizzard's pulling of Warcraft I and II tests GOG's new Preservation Program

#109

Post by Etherlord87 »

izacus wrote: post #57
maeil wrote: post #9

Interesting how GOG is willing to take such a hard stand of this and fight Blizzard on it, when they immediately pulled the Taiwanese horror game Devotion for political reasons [1]. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/games/2020/dec/17/taiwanese-horr...

It's more interesting how y'all always find ways to tear into everyone that makes a stand - no true scotsman style while giving a pass to much worse actors. Companies like Activision, Ubisoft, EA and Microsoft can do outright horrible things and you'll be sitting by quitely, but god forbid someone like GoG shows up with an idea to fix something and you tear into them just because they didn't solve all the worlds poli…

It's not about not solving a problem, it's about being a part of the problem. GOG took part in bullying a developer for political reasons. We don't want to live in the world where you can't criticize China or you will be cancelled.

Of course Microsoft is guilty of removing the Tiananmen Square massacre result from Bing on an anniversary of that event. Did they ever explain why that happened? I think not.

Re: Blizzard's pulling of Warcraft I and II tests GOG's new Preservation Program

#110

Post by pshirshov »

proc0 wrote: post #8

Well I bought WC2 already and have the files. That's the best part of GOG, you can just make your own backup. I think with hard copies going away, the ability to make backups of what you buy should be protected by law, at least for software that is no longer supported (of course one side effect is that all games become services, but there have been single player games recently that prove it's still a good business mo…

Usually you don't "buy" DRM-protected stuff but lease it.
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