I have been afraid of it for a while - as it happen in some online games in the past.
And it looks that this calamity is taking its way to GOG now.
I'm talking about updated downloads available in library no longer compatible with some of OS'es it was shipped for initially, or at least was compatible as it was being sold here on GOG - with no way provided to bypass this limitation.
Apparently some people were already affected by this issue.

Let me be clear, I have paid GOG for DRM free game versions, games with each compatible with a list of OS'es, and I expect it to be delivered, especially I do not see any reason/difficulty facilitating such limitation. Windows 10 is DRM (even admits it) and also met definition of a virus. Claiming you sell DRM free software and yet make it impossible for your customers to use it if they did not install DRM themselves is not even unethical, this simply won't fly in a court (as favourable it would be). Not to mention that if you have any understanding of your own business strategy, you know that quite many people will not be happy with this. Many of your customers purchased on GOG even when STEAM dominated the landscape, often paying more to get the very same thing - what other reason there was than DRM-free?

If you must be constantly messing up with those links, either provide linux version of your games, provide download links for old versions or keep old versions as a startup/installation option (I guess last option would be least of the hassle - as in most cases increments should not be significant). Keep in mind that active support (people having to download and test their software before (if) they can receive support) will inconvenience your best customers the most.
You made a presentation some time ago, for developers, and were enticing them by saying how users are not abusing their accounts for piracy - and supported it low average download count per account.
Now there must have been few !@#$% that completely abused their accounts, and I'm curious ,how many people trusting you haven't made a copy for you to even up those "entrepreneurs" and make that sweet average.


Ps. I know company top brass often start suffering from brain necrosis (based on their decisions) soon after company start earning descent money - god forbid this being an microsoft as-kissing reconnaissance attempt to get yourself saved from (or embraced by) their dreaded store. Not only won't it work, I doubt GOG would even survive long enough for them to back-stab you (which they will inevitably do, since "greed is good")

PsPs. Please vote people, make your own wish or submit your own post.
Lets not get robbed of privileges you paid for:
www.gog.com/wishlist/site/keep_games_compatibile_with_old_nonwin10_windows_versions


TL;DR: (well, all is in this post topic - but if you must)
Don't want games puff-gone, vote above.

If you have old versions of the downloads and the new versions are updates for win 10, then just save and use those, since it sounds like you are talking about games no longer underdevelopment, and there probably isn't any more patches coming out.

Do you have any specific examples of games broken?

GOG's idea was never "sell games for old systems", but "sell old games packaged to be compatible with modern systems" I have no doubt they will drop official support of Windows seven in a few years, just as they dropped official support of Windows XP.

Linux versions are there for the games that they're allowed to sell as Linux releases.

Just download the installers and save the latest one that works, and don't rely on Galaxy's autoupdate.

You could also try asking support about getting an older version if you haven't made a backup of an installer that works on your system (at least I think you can, or my case was a special one, I don't know).

Yes and no ;)

He does have a point (if true, never encountered a problem so far).

Let's assume you bought XYZ like 5 years ago, running fine on XP. He is even now running XP. He sees there is an update (or Galaxy did update) and suddenly it doesn't work anymore.

On the other hand GOG claims DRM free, you buy it you keep it. Nice, but what do you want to do if you can not get the old installer anymore?

And asking support every time? hmmmm.....

He does have a valid point there. And as GOG/devs quite often do not provide info about the update, how do you want to make a decision? You can only guess.

And not everyone is as crazy as like me, having all my installers downloaded.

Also, what if a user decides not to go with a newer Windows version, instead having a i.e. XP machine just for games and doing the other stuff on Linux?

But back to his valid request. there are still a lot of people around having XP only. But if a patch will prevent it from running on the older system, what shall they do? When they bought their copy it was supported but now not anymore. So how shall keep enjoying their game? (another example, this XP has a HDD crash and needs to be rebuild?)

Sorry for the lengthy reply ;)

It's a very good thing gog.com isn't stopping Windows XP support.

I purchase almost all of the video game on Windows XP from gog.com, even the video games that only support Windows Vista and up.

My main PC is Windows 7 though, but I'm going to stick to Windows XP for life.

Asking support every time? No, you ask once for that game, then you store the older installer somewhere safe because you realise future updates won't work. Then maybe, just maybe, you make a realisation that updates may break the game for your OS, so you start to store all installers and don't remove an old installer until you've made sure that the new one works.

You (not you personally) already made it difficult for yourself by staying on an old OS, why do you expect others to pander to you?

I already made it difficult for myself by choosing Arch Linux over some version of Windows, a recent OS X, or one of the supported GNU/Linux based systems, thus I don't expect others to pander to me, but I instead try to make do by figuring out how to make stuff work, or patching together fixes from all over the web.

You (and I mean you ;) ) really made it difficult for yourself ;)

I nearly spilled my drink when reading your you part. Aren't languages nice ;)

One problem out of experience in support is that users quite often don't think beforehand. They see something, they click.

Best example IMHO, you remember the old warning about attachments in emails, do not click them. It took ages for people to NOT click there anymore. And? Now on smartphones the same type (in form of don't click) problem is back again. And what are users doing: clicking,

Nowadays it is all just clickediclick, but no thinking involved (No insult meant, just observation). So, you (as not in you) see an update flag, what do you do, clickediclick and problem is there.

And as the OP said, afterwards you can not download the old version anymore.

Which to be fair for the OP is normal behaviour for drivers though:

Example and I really just used the first one of the search:

http://www.asus.com/support/Download/1/10/13/1/1/

You even see drivers for 95 still around.

So for this he does have a valid point.

You (yes you) do have a valid point as well, never touch a running system.

For storing all installers, that could get users into problems. They need storage space, maybe even a lot, which they might not have.

I do agree with both of you, but I think that the OP is more 'right' than you. If you compare it like with drivers, Linux distros and so on, you almost can find the older versions.

Oh and by the way, even the backup of your installers might crash, what do you want to do then? Were do you want to get your correct version from?

Yes a bit nitpicking and playing devils advocate here ;)

oh yes updates breaking games, or updates of Win breaking windows, I doooo remember those moments....and realising that the last backup is was already ages ago ;)

PS: I did just recently see a downgrade patch for one of my games, I'll try to find it again and why it exists. So it might be already there. I think a downgrade patch would also be a possible solution.

I will edit my post once I found it.

EDIT:

https://www.gog.com/forum/il_2_sturmovik_1946/mod_compatibility_downgrade_from_413_to_4122

So they do it for mods (or the devs did it)

The wishlist item says:

"It seem new downloads you provide may be loosing(sic!) backward compatibility in favour to Windows 10."

Sorry, that is too vague. I am not going to vote for a wishlist item which is (deliberately?) unclear in what exactly is the problem.

For instance, have some GOG games stopped working on Windows 7 or 8.1 in favor of Windows 10? Or are you specifically talking about some problems on XP, problems that didn't happen before with those specific games? What games? Give some examples and exact problems you have (so maybe people can check whether they have similar issues on XP).

Also, are you talking about the standalone offline installers, Galaxy, or both?

IF the issue is e.g. that some GOG standalone installer games, which earlier worked fine on XP, now have serious issues on XP due to changes (for Windows 10 or whatever), then yeah, I agree it would be nice GOG keeps the older XP-compatible installer still around, in extras or whatever. Then again I can kinda understand they don't test the compatibility anymore with XP, considering it is an unsupported OS even by Microsoft. So it might be even GOG doesn't realize some change has broken the XP compatibility.

But I must ask again: please provide some examples of games, and what are the exact problems. Maybe there is even some simple fix or workaround for them.

"Wish we could turn back time to the good old days"

Man nothing like forever living in 2005. Back when ISIS wasn't a thing, even an idiot president like bush made you feel safe.

It's cause of people like you that the rest of us are stuck with compatibility issues in windows 10 lol

Hello everyone. Thanks for your answers.
Please allow me to share my opinion on some of your comments,
I will try to be general so you may find most of your points addressed below.

A. So regretfully, I cannot use earlier downloaded installers, as I simply haven't had time to download/play majority of games I purchased. Also, for a while I was stuck with mobile broadband, what meant I mostly played what I got on disk at local stores and used GOG as virtual shelf I stored interesting stuff for later.
Another matter is storing of purchased games. Unless you buy on GOG/STEAM only a handful of games, amounts of bandwidth and space required to store them quickly become unreasonable for non-commercial solutions (not to mention different installer versions adding up to it). External drives in my experience are not really reliable as archiving solution, having problems with interface and susceptibility to software and hardware failures (thermal/shock). It is also possible at any time for virus to encrypt/infect/damage data you stored. NAS servers are better in from HW reliability standpoint, but they are expensive both to buy and maintain (time and money) and they are often as susceptible to malware as a PC, so you can as well stack up your PC with disks up to very top and hope for the best. BluRay drives and disks got significantly cheaper recently and I think this is least problematic way to address it. Still, huge part of digital purchases convenience go <replace with more appropriate for of: "away"> :p if you still have to micromanage Disks/HardDisks data and procurement because vendor act like 3yr old child and cannot be trusted with it.

B. For for broken games, I think someone mentioned FEZ, you can also often find compatibility issues mentioned in some games comments, although I usually take a note of those the purchase time and just don't buy those.
This likely will vary quite a lot between people. Even in case of one user, simply if there will be a need for me to reinstall my windows I will loose my patch level and get back in time to around 2011 which will likely alter system compatibility.
Acting only on broken game basis, is not really manageable as there is no way for a GOG user to enforce the solution. How will you force them to provide you installer if all they need to do is not to reply?
Will you sue them for every single title for court to support your claim that this do not qualify under standard license non-liability clause? Availability of old versions is cheap for them to provide, de-facto often a standard (even free amateur projects can afford it) and it is something that can be enforced and at least to some level safeguard backward compatibility. It is also something clear and visible at the time of purchase.

C. As I see it: If GOG sell game that is supposed to support WinA, WinB and WinC, and it does support them at the time of purchase (and X following days afterwards during which I am entitled for refund) I do not see how they can suddenly make game I purchased impossible to download, replace it with version that no longer contain (compatibility) features it advertised (because version+ now work only on WinC and WinD) and call it an improvement. There are actually laws against behaviour like this. Another matter is that they also advertise themselves as selling DRM-Free games, but I will address it in follow up post.

You mean there's more!? :P

I hope Gog isn't going to drop Win7 support, because I'm not getting that Win10 malware.

I would love for GoG to keep compatibility with older versions as well. I understand that it's not always possible, but I hope that when it is you are keeping the older versions. I would hope that the library will be updated as newer OSs come out, although I understand this is a hell of a project. I spent literally thousands on my GoG library, even though they are not as supported as the Steam versions, to support DRM free and to have a permanent digital copy of my games. Many of the games that I own on GoG, I already have the disc version (the entire Star Wars library for example). Many of my old games aren't compatible without heavy modifications and I risk ruining the discs by constantly using them. Some of them, like XCom Terror from the Deep and Tie Fighter, I don't even have a floppy drive to use them anymore.

I am a huge GoG supporter, but I do hope they plan to continue supporting as many OSs as possible with each game they sell, to include updating for new OSs. I still have an old XP laptop that I use when I travel and purposely bought my last PC with Windows 7 due to the horrible compatibility as Windows releases new versions. 7 is supposed to be much better than 8... with how bad I've found 7, I can't imagine 8 and 10 must be unusable outside of GoG or Steam.

It seems very simple to me - I paid for a specific product. A game working on specified operating systems. That's what I should have in my library until GOG is no more. Just like games I purchased, that have been removed from GOG's catalogue remain in my library. Anything else is simply unacceptable.