Well, if GOG chose NOT to indicate that most of old games run flawlessly on Win XP (showing Win7 as minimum specs for them) - I don't care much, if Microsoft doesn't support XP anymore blah-blah-blah, they can go to hell.

OK, guys, but we all do know that DOS-era games or Heroes of M&M or whatever - they all will run on XP like charm.

And now I am forced to ask, will GOG installers always run on Win XP, or one would need at least Win7 soon just to install old games?

Please, no need of the same old reasoning "man, XP is dead, you must upgrade your system" and so on. I don't give a **** about such reasoning, I've bought literally hundreds of old games here while GOG was still supporting XP, and I plan to run them on XP, and I want to know, whether my GOG installers will be ever XP-friendly.

Is... is this an angry rant about something from an unspecified point in the future?

No. GOG do not support XP any more.
Some very old installers still support it, but do not expect newer installers do the same.

Make your own backup, and contact GOG Support if you need really old installers.

GOG never confirmed it, but many people (including me) believe that, GOG have backup for their old installers.

YES, they will ALWAYS work on XP. 200 years from now, they will still work on XP. We no longer use Windows, but the installers still work on XP. gOg can promise you this!!

Windows 10 should have never been released; Microsoft is getting away with stealing people's private data. This should be illegal ffs!!!

Here, I made you a tinfoil hat!

Unknowingly most of people.

Dies it come in extra large? I never have time to get my hair cut. Something I learned with software from back on day one back in 1981. Every computer is different. What works on one computer will not work on another. Software isn't perfect.

I don't know if GOG has already broken installers' compatibility with XP. It's possible though. By upgrading their tools its easy to break some older library dependencies.

But if the problem was just the installers, we could possibly workaround it by extracting the files ourselves.

What is known, is that about a year ago GOG began injecting Galaxy libraries (dlls) into games (not the installers, but the games themselves) breaking Windows XP compatibility. Fallout New Vegas was one of those games.

It's possible to use Linux plus Wine (or the most of the times less compatible combination BSD plus Wine) to run many of those games.

I think that Windows XP are not as dead as the industry wants to believe. Just many of those systems are completely offline and out of all statistics. I still use an offline Windows XP system too.

No thanks! I've got a spare.

For those who are still interested, the answer I got from GOG support

My question:

Hi, GOG.

GOG officially ceased to support Win XP due to various reasons, and even the specs of games that are known to run on XP perfectly now show "Win7 minimum" ;) Well, nevermind.
My question is about OLD games, those of DOS-era and up to about 2010, games that were made to run on XP. I purchased literally hunderds of such games here, and I got 'em in times when GOG still supported XP officially, and I play 'em on my secret old-school desktop PC with XP. So my question is not even about games themselves but rather about GOG standalone installers (I backed up many of GOG games but still not everyone): will GOG standalone installers of old XP-friendly games continue to run on XP machine?

Thanks in advance.

The answer:

Hello,
We discontinued XP support because we don't have any XP machines anymore, so we wouldn't be able to test anything on XP. We don't actively break installers or make them incompatible with that system, so there is a possibility that games that were running on XP will still be compatible with it. However, we have no way of confirming or denying that, as we don't have any access to this system here, so we can't check.
I apologise for the inconvenience.

Oh, great, at least, they won't "actively break installers or make them incompatible" with XP. I can sleep again now.

But not having a machine with XP at hand while 75% of games you sell are pre-XP or XP era - it's a bad way to make business, IMO. And saying it's a would-be reason they dropped the XP support - it's a bad way too. And saying "sorry but we don't care that you've bought >500 XP-running games from us to run 'em on XP and now you've got the inconvenience" - it's a bad way too.

I am a big fan of XP and I used it a long, long time - all others already switched but I kept to it because I liked it. Then there came the time when several games required at least Win7 and I struggled hard to switch (no, I did not mind the missing XP updates as well so I can relate). In the end I used some tweaks and tools to make Win7 look and feel much more like Win XP. There are still some things I don't like on Win7 (don't let me even start talking about Win10) but I managed.

In my opinion Win7 and WinXP regarding compatibility are not really so different. I am pretty sure that at least the GOG installers (which in most cases don't do much more than extracting the files and/or adding a few registry entrys ( those are a bit different on XP but should not be an actual problem). So I would guess you won't have much problems installing games.

On the other hand - and that is what GOG told you - GOG is unable to guarantee this for you. It's a bit unfortunate that GOG won't guarantee you that games that were designed to run on XP will actually still be able to do so. This has already been discussed back and forth in the past and in several threads and everything leads to the fact that everytime GOG would give you an official guarantee they would also be accountable if a game won't work. Given the fact that they officially stopped supporting XP you won't get this guarantee from GOG. It might suck and I feel you but for GOG it's difficult enough to make sure that all actual systems will work with all games (and no, unfortunately XP can not really be described as being an "actual" system given the fact that it was released in 2001 - 17 years ago). My advice would be to switch at least to Win7 - as I said it's not that much different especially when you use tools like "classic shell" which will let it look and feel nearly identical. Regarding compatibility of older games so far I was able to get nearly every game to work.

Regarding GOG's reply "we will not actively break installers or make them incompatible". What they wanted to say is that it MIGHT happen in future that the installers (or some games) won't run on XP anymore but not because they wanted it but because they changed a thing they needed for additional features or to stay compatible with those systems that they still officially support. So the incompatibility with XP that MIGHT happen will never be intended.

GOG's business is to make (also) old games work on modern PCs and OSes, not ones that MS has dropped years ago. GOG's reply to you made complete sense.

If you want to make sure your purchased GOG installers keep working on XP (those that originally did), you should have downloaded them and kept them to yourself.

That said, I have installed some of my GOG games on Windows XP pretty recently, like Dark Reign 1-2, Empire Earth and Broken Sword. At least they worked, not sure if they will in the future.

GOG's business model with old games is to make them work as flawlessly as possible on modern OS's. WinXP was a great OS in its' time, as already mentioned 17 years have passed since its' release and I can understand why GOG can't support it any longer.

There's also many pre-XP games, so why is GOG not supporting Win95/98 or even MS-DOS 5.x too? I'm not trying to be sarcastic here, but you probably get the picture. They have to draw a line somewhere, and I think Windows 7 is the perfect balance Probably not even GOG themselves know that. To be on the safe side you try any new installers before deleting the old ones.


Edit: timppu beat me to it (yes it took me 45mins to finish posting this due to interruptions) :-))