Yeah I know its all about licensing and publishing rights it just seems like a lot of classic games arent anywhere on their priorities, and the classics people wish for are stupid console shit they found out had a PC port in japanese and expect it to get translated and released on gog *cough* suikoden *cough*

I wonder if magog updates these numbers.

Which is patently false because, as per Jmich's data, GOG has actually released more "classic" games in the last 12 months compared to the same time period last year. It only looks like GOG isn't releasing any more classic games because:

a) Many remaining classic titles are in a state of legal limbo (see: NOLF), or have (based on speculation and conjecture) very likely been withheld by the rights/IP holder for sale on their own DD platforms

b) More indie/day 1/InDev games have joined the release list alongside classic/old games, thereby creating the illusion that there are more of the former and less of the latter

c) Old/Classic releases may be seen as "Not the game that I want, therefore it doesn't count as a classic or old game."

Why don't you go over to steam they have their summer sale on...

I was curious... saw ZERO games I would buy that gog does not have.

According to his data they went from above 40% of the games being released to below 20% looks like a shift in focus to me. Why does steam have a bunch of apogee games that aren't on here like Mystic Towers or the good version of raptor. Easy enough to get a license from apogee if they have done it before.

There's also the factor that various older games may not work properly on newer systems -- GOG tends not to release older games that don't pass a certain level of compatibility, since they do actually have to provide support as well.

I can understand your frustration though -- there are various games I'd like to see, but we'll never know which older ones are in the pipeline, since GOG don't want to put them in the "upcoming" tab, only to pull them at a later date due to some incompatibility.

that is because there are more games period which means they have more employees working on licensing deals than they had before so they are going to release more games period. The problem is still ratios and a shifting focus.

Pretend I am an fruit salesman and I start selling apples, the first year I sell 55 oranges and 45 apples. Next year my business picks up and I sell double the amount of fruit but its 75 oranges and 125 apples, yeah I did sell more oranges but most of my attention was selling apples.

I understand thats just business though and they will focus where the money is, I just wish they could put some more focus into old games instead of indie poopoo

One little extra point, given your comparison of old games to fruit -- apples and oranges are always going to be consumable by humans. Various old games are much harder to get working, and in quite a few cases are not compatible at all, so it's not quite that simple. :-)

Hehehe, every time I see the inevitable post show up on this topic once every few months/weeks/days, my very first thought is "JMich will beg to differ with you, and has facts to back it up", then I click on the thread and am never disappointed. :) Indeed, they would have 12000+ games on GOG.com instead of ~= 1575 games.

So you would be happy even with the current rate of released classics, as long as the number of newer releases had not increased? Or?

You are literally comparing apples to oranges there.

First thing, you are comparing the number of sales (of fruits) to number of released titles (on GOG games). The correct comparison would be to GOG game sales (ie. GOG is selling that many copies of old games, versus new games), but then that doesn't tell anything.

Second, there are lots of other reasons beyond mere GOG's willingness to release games to releasing those old classics. Like the technical problems (more of these in the Windows era classics compared to DOS era classics), licensing problems, the fact the likes of Electronic Arts nowadays rather release their older games on their own Origin store (instead of GOG) etc. The low hanging fruits (classics) have mostly been released already, especially for those where it makes any real economic sense to release them, ie. GOG can expect enough sales to recoup the costs. Not all old games are classics that people would buy in droves.

I personally believe the releasing of newer (indie) games isn't necessarily taking that much resources from releasing the old classics. With newer games you don't have to try to find out who the publishers are and trying to untangle their rights etc., you just go ahead and release it on GOG, as long as the publisher is ok with it. Even the maintenance is probably much lower for newer games as it is not GOG who needs to try to make it work with the next Windows version, or come up with a Linux/Mac release, etc.

You can also think of it that way that maybe the newer releases, bringing more money to GOG, allows GOG to hire more people to keep up releasing older games as well. If they had concentrated only on old DOS Apogee games, Jill of the Jungle series and crap like that, maybe they could hire only two people to work with the rights and technical issues.

It is a bit similar question that the release of console versions of AAA games may be the reason the publishers even afford to port the same game(s) to PC as well (while PC-only gamers tend to complain about the console releases and console-to-PC ports). GTA V PC wouldn't possibly have happened at all, or at least in its current form, without the console versions. Or, CDPR could probably increase their budgets for the later The Witcher games when they went to release them also on the consoles.

What games did you have in mind that you wanted to see here? We seen lots of "most voted" games (in general) released here in 2016, like X-COM, Factorio, Bloodlines, Homeworld, etc.

First, just because you sell more apples doesn't mean you're selling less oranges. If you decide to stop selling apples and decide to focus entirely on selling oranges, what happens when there's a bad year and there are less oranges? What happens if it's too expensive to sell oranges, or if the market decides that they want other varieties of fruit other than oranges? That was the problem that was addressed with the "Bigger Fresher Newer" update many years ago. A lot of people didn't like it, but it was something that GOG had to address sooner or later. The alternative? Winding up like DotEmu. And that hurts, given that I spent a fair amount on games there as well.

Second, your analogy ignores the fact that there's a lot going on behind the scenes that we're not privy to, and a lot of it is out of the hands of GOG entirely. Sure, you may want GOG to sell more oranges, but their hands are tied if their suppliers either want to sell their oranges themselves, or if there's no easy or clear legal way to sell the oranges they want to sell at a fair and reasonable profit.

Take the NOLF series, for example. It was revealed that Night Dive studios was in extensive three-way negotiations and talks with Warner Brothers (the current owners of Monolith) and Activision (the original publishers of NOLF). We would have very likely seen NOLF et al. here on GOG had those talks succeeded. Those talks broke down, however, due to WB walking away. Some have speculated that GOG approached WB directly to sell and publish the game like with SSI's strategy titles, but that's still speculation at this point.

Then there's the 3DO FPS classic Killing Time. On a Reddit AMA NDS said they thought they had the rights to sell the game and were apparently going to create a remaster. Apparently they were wrong and lost a lot of money as a result. The game is apparently still coming to GOG under Retroism, but it highlights how unexpectedly difficult, and drawn out the process can be.

And then of course there was the long, tortuous process that got us SS/SS2, as well as the absence/return of Fallout when the rights went from Interplay to Bethesda. As well as the abscence of Duke Nukem when the rights went from 3DR to Gearbox.

And then there was LucasArts. I can't find the relevent post, but IIRC one of the GOG staff remarked at how they were very, very, very close to sealing a deal with LucasArts to get their games on GOG. Then Disney bought LucasFilm, and they had to start all over again.

Assigning "more resources" to this issue isn't going to magically solve this problem, not if it involves a long and drawn out process of (re)negotiating terms with another large company regarding pricing, regional pricing/availability, the availability of extras, or porting to other platfoms. That's especially if the company is going to play hardball with regards to pricing, as Nordic Studios apparently did before.

What you consider "indie poopoo" is a very subjective judgement call. Some of the best indie titles I've played were indie games I've discovered on GOG, and I've gathered that many of the indie games we've seen here have been very well recieved, like recent releases such as Broforce and Defender's Quest DX.

Broforce is awesome but most indie games are horrible it just happens to be an exception. Some of the games I want to see on here barely get any votes despite being amazing games a lot of them just got over shadowed at the time so not many people got to play them, I hope to see them come out here but that just isnt realistic

No, it's not silent. It's implied.

Uhm, I'm not sure how to explain the distinction. Sorry. :-(

Any linguists out there? I fear a grammarian won't be enough for this… (but grammarians never are anyways…)