31–40 of 85 posts
A noble goal, but I'd be shocked if they manage to compete in the preservation realm against Good Old Piracy™.
Speaking personally I'd rather pay a few dollars than risk my PC getting Good Old Virusy, which may or may not be a real risk, but is certainly an idea that puts me off pirating software.
Emphasis added: > The GOG Preservation Program is our ongoing effort to save classic games from being lost to time. That means working to secure rights , fixing compatibility so they run hassle-free on modern systems, and even rebuilding missing features so the experience is the best you can get, while staying true to the original. It still baffles me how the "rights" to a game (or any IP) can be a thing when the com…
There's better examples like No One Lives Forever that have been stuck unavailable for purchase because of rights reasons but RE1 is arguably not that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Basically it is the problem with GOG also, I think that if you do nothing the game is Abandonware and I don't think that anyone can go after you to use it pirated or whatever, and even distribute it. Maybe it is shady, but something like that if there is no commercial activity and the IP violation is not enforced for some many times, it can be considered that you are responsible for this and there was no legal way fo…
This is a deeply flawed argument. The idea that folks focused on preservation are creating a legal hazard is false. Copyright law does not care whether the "IP is active". What GOG is doing here is an unmitigated good. To be clear, there is no "commercially abandoned" element to copyright, even if there should be.
You can make a thing, copyright it, and also never sell, see for example open source software. You can even copyright something that nobody's seen before.
Copyright, patent, and trademark all have substantial differences.
A noble goal, but I'd be shocked if they manage to compete in the preservation realm against Good Old Piracy™.
Speaking personally I'd rather pay a few dollars than risk my PC getting Good Old Virusy, which may or may not be a real risk, but is certainly an idea that puts me off pirating software.
So let me get this straight, GOG, a privately owned company, wants me to donate money to them so that they can buy the rights to games in order to sell them to me?
Yeah my first reaction was, what the heck is is this ? Now I can imagine having specific campaigns. Let's say they need $50,000 to release an upgraded port of Shining Force. Cool, I might be open to pre-ordering it at $25 so they can see if there's enough interest to proceed. But why am I going to literally just donate to a private company. I think the entire world has gone mad, there's not even a real product here.…
I am also happy to buy more old games from GOG than I ever have the time to play, so they already get my money.
Not so sure about this patreon thing though.
Honestly I find GOG's whole mission of "update old games for modern Windows" kinda weird when I compare it to what people who want to play old console games do: they just fire up an emulator . Running a virtual Windows machine sounds like a much easier solution than individually patching every crusty old executable to run on the modern OS, and re-patching every single one of them when MS rolls out yet another new gra…
To repeat myself from old threads, it would be awesome to have something like a WindowsBOX, like DOSBox but emulating (probably) Windows 98SE, fully open source. GOG could use that for old Windows games and never have to modify the games themselves. I would be happy to support GOG developing an emulator like that, rather than making old games run on new Windows.
I would sign up if they promise to release the games they get with the money into public domain.
That would be cool, but they probably only get rights to sell the games, not full ownership of all rights.
Emphasis added: > The GOG Preservation Program is our ongoing effort to save classic games from being lost to time. That means working to secure rights , fixing compatibility so they run hassle-free on modern systems, and even rebuilding missing features so the experience is the best you can get, while staying true to the original. It still baffles me how the "rights" to a game (or any IP) can be a thing when the com…