For one, they didn’t anticipate having to hire investigators to hunt down phoneless rights owners

Image credit: GOG

Given how quickly older games can be delisted or end up near impossible to run properly without tinkering nowadays, efforts like GOG.com’s preservation program are always nice to see. There’s obviously a money-making motive behind it for the storefront, but keeping retro works in working order’s a noble way to earn that cash. As it turns out, though, the folks behind the CD Projekt-owned site underestimated just how difficult an undertaking the program would be.

That’s not to suggest they’re giving up though, just that they’ve had to re-evaluate some of their ambitious early goals.

“To be perfectly honest, it’s harder than we thought it would be,” GOG senior business development manager Marcin Paczynski told The Game Business. “What we’ve found out is that the games and how they work has deteriorated way faster than what we thought. And we are not talking only about the game not launching. We are talking about more subtle things as well, like the game not supporting modern controllers, or the game not supporting ultra-widescreen or modern resolutions, or even a simple thing like being able to minimalize the game, which is an essential feature today. Modern gamers expect to be able to minimalize the game and then to bring it up without issues.”

So, it’s turned out that the sellers have had more work on their hands than they anticipated to bring older games up to “the standards that we defined”. As you might expect, that’s led to the revamped games pot not filling up at quite the rapid rate GOG predicted, with the preservation program now forecasted to end 2025 with somewhere between 300 and 350 titles, rather than the 500 originally set as a goal. As of writing, it’s 232 games strong.

GOG managing director Maciej Gołębiewski also picked out the ancient DRM tech old games have often been saddled with as a headache when it comes to performing these updates, suggesting that companies should consider making the DRM easier to ditch once it’s protected the game around launch. The other side of that coin, of course, is that companies will always want to cover their own backs - convincing them to compromise early on in the name of a future comeback project surely resembles a chat with a tie-wearing brick wall in a lot of cases.

Finally, Paczynski picked out a couple of cases which have seen getting the rights to preserve games present a different challenge than simply convincing a lawyer people still dig classic Resi. Amongst other things, GOG have hunted down ex-shooter devs turned Texan oil magnates, and hired a private investigator to track down one bloke living totally off-the-grid who’d inherited the rights to some games.

Imagine, you’re living in a tent in the wilds of somewhere like the Scottish highlands. As you snooze, the zip gently winds down, startling you into fight or flight mode. It’s Tom Selleck. ‘Oi, people want to play Links: The Challenge of Golf without running into weird popping audio,’ he declares. You reach into an old tin and hand him a bit of paper which reads ‘Do what you want with it’. He leaves. You accidentally forget to check that none of the berries you’ve picked for breakfast are poisonous.