Ah, this good OLD discussion again.

But it isn't even Tuesday!

I want to see Hexx Heresy of the Wizard here too

All I want is good games, never mind their age.

On the one hand, it's definitely true that the downward spiral started when they decided to stop being "Good Old Games", and the whole thing exploded (or should have, according to their own statement made only about half a year before that) when they decided to actually focus on new and AAA titles and gave up all principles bar DRM-free for single player for it. From those points of view, I'll of course always wish for GOG to get back to what it was before that happened and just get whatever older games and perhaps some indies and crowdfunded titles that would agree to such a release due to backer pressure it can under the original terms, just striving for that release pace from back then, of 2 games per week (and possibly none during major sales), but rather dropping releases than giving in on principles again. And possibly CDP having a separate store for other games.

On the other hand, they have continued to release classics, quite a number of them even recently, so you can't actually argue that they gave up on that. Just that with extremely rare exceptions they no longer release them under those original terms and they can get buried under the flood of newer stuff, including the pile of roguelikes and even some casual games that do make it harder to even maintain the will to keep paying attention to all releases. And those classics that are missing are, as already pointed out, usually either in legal hell, with rights holders unknown or scattered all over, or rights held by companies that are firmly against DRM-free, or awfully difficult (usually true for Win 9x-era games) or impossible (all 16-bit Windows games - you'll never see those here until MS will allow legal Win 3.x emulation) to get to run on modern systems.

But then there's the obvious fact that any game becomes an old game after a while, and the ever-worsening problem of GOG games missing patches or even content available elsewhere, and of said patches and even content being tied to Galaxy and appearing later or even not at all in offline installers, would largely go away if they'd at least switch back to mainly focusing on games that have ended development, to know that they'll get the final and complete editions, however old said games would need to be for that.

Since it seems to be somewhat common grounds that "old" means 10+ years old I suddenly realized that Witcher will be halfway there on May 19th... 0_o

A million times this!! I actually think for me there's not that big of a disconnect though granted my own standard is kind of nebulous. I am here for what I call "big" releases DRM-free. I primarily consider that to be the "semi-new AAA" releases like you mentioned; Fallout New Vegas is the game that got me here forever (well, until the optional Galaxy becomes wholly mandatory at least). But I also consider certain old releases to be "big" by my standard. Diablo, Warcraft, Mafia 1, all Elder Scrolls games here. To give contrast, there are only select newer indie releases I consider "big" monumental type releases (e.g., Kingdom Come Deliverance, Dead Cells, ...does Daymare 1998 count?) and on the other side of things I may not in some cases consider an old release to be "big" even though I would still welcome it and generally would welcome an old game over an indie game...I do love rogue-likes and -lites though.

It's funny because I frequently find myself thinking "oh that's a recent movie/game I haven't gotten around to yet." Then I find out this "recent" movie or game is like 7 years old or something. Time flies the older you get. Your parents tell you that and you shrug it off but holy crap is it true.

I globally agree but :

1) The current GOG customer base disagrees on this, and many other things that were core to GOG years ago.

2) GOG has probably gathered all the gather-able old games by now, and the remaining ones are certainly very difficult and slow to get, yet they still arrive from time to time, merely drowned in the increased quantities of new releases.

3) There is little in common between GOG and GOG and you seem to confuse both. You should adjust your expectations and take this GOG as it is now, as if it had just been created this morning. Forget about your memories of Good Old Games or treat them as pertaining to a different company, with a different community.

Yeah, last night I watched that brand new remake of Total Recall... from 2012... *ummmm*

(We watched both movies btw. Original first... was an interesting thing to do).



Well, enter "good old games" into Google or DuckDuckGo... guess where you'll end up ;-)

Another thing that doesn't get brought up that much is that, with regards to selling old games via digital distribution, GOG was something of a test case. It's probably safe to say that that aspect of their business model was a "victim" of its own success: it showed bigger storefronts and publishers that there was a significant appetite for old -- even obscure -- games, and so those began to be sold more and more on other stores. There are now game publishers whose business model is mostly or entirely centered on resurrecting old games in some form -- from "merely" getting the rights in order and re-releasing them in a more-or-less untouched state, to doing like Night Dive and also working with fan communities to make new enhanced editions and new PC ports of unique legacy-console versions. (There's also definitely a trend of making brand-new games with old IP, but that's less relevant to the discussion at hand.) Such companies understandably don't want to limit their sales by only selling in a niche "underdog" store -- they want to sell someplace like Steam, where all the customers already are. Thus, lots of people will just get their old games at the same place where they already get most of their new ones, and where their gaming friends already hang out. And GOG loses out.
GOG used to have a lot more exclusives than they currently do; these were all old games (naturally), many of which they did the technical work on to get them running on modern systems, and/or they did the legal-rights legwork to allow the games to be sold once more. For games where the publisher is doing most of that (and I'd guess that's the case with a majority of the old games released here these days -- assuming a fairly expansive definition of "old"), GOG doesn't have much bargaining power to get any sort of exclusivity, and that means, at best, a simultaneous release on both stores, and at worst, the game won't be released here for years, if ever.

If most bigger "general purpose" stores have some old games available, with one or two of the biggest of those stores starting to have lots available, and many of these games are the same ones sold by a store selling nothing but old games, then what's that store to do? If you're a niche game store whose main niche becomes more mainstream -- and consequently gets "invaded" by mainstream game stores -- the answer is, "Adapt, or die." (And if you fail to even try to adapt to competition, you will almost certainly die, be it quickly or slowly.)
New and recent games are cheaper to carry, business-wise, since the development studio and the original publisher (which, in the case of indies, is often the same entity) probably still exist, so you won't have to work out rights issues, and they should be the ones to handle compatibility issues, fix bugs, et cetera (emphasis on "should"...). Older games tend to require a decent outlay of resources up front, often with little guarantee on return. Little indie games are presumably less risky to carry for several reasons, and are less of a stone around the store's neck if they turn out to not sell well.

Well, this turned out to be quite a ramble. I guess the TL;DR version would be that GOG management didn't just randomly decide "We don't care about old games now LOL". No store exists in a vacuum, so competition must be taken into account; and there are different levels of expense for selling and supporting 20- to 35-year-old games and, say, 0- to 5-year-old games.

You mean Witcher 3. And yeah, that is a strange thought... stranger still for me, since I only started it last year, and have yet to finish the final expansion.

Then again I've been "behind" with games for a long time now. There's just so many titles being released, I'm not sure how anyone can keep up. Then again, spending untold hours replaying Disciples would probably be a good start :P

I disagree because as other have said GOG doesn't stand for Good Old Games no more and it has been years since they went by that name.

Also modern titles are also a welcome in my mind because I just don't play classic games only I play stuff that's all over the place as far as the timeline of games go.

One thing seems to be, maybe mostly in millenials' minds, that the gap between "old" and "new" is roughly 2004/2005, maybe because 2004 can feel like "The Last Great Year For Gaming" to some, especially because of exciting technical innovations?

It was a GREAT niche and catchy acronym. And GOG never exactly pounded the change into peoples' heads. I remember TET saying something like, "Name changes take around 5 years to really "stick" in peoples' minds," and I think because "Good Old Games"/GOG had such a uniqueness that it's been even harder to break free. (plus "GOG" doesn't mean anything now, there was no replacement :p)