Omnimaxus: Hi - where are all the "classic" games? GOG.com used to be really good with releasing a lot of them, but now the focus seems to be on either more recent games, or indie releases. Where are the "classics" that many of us grew up with in the 80's and 90's? Maybe someone from GOG.com could respond here? Thanks.
They release about as many old games as they ever have -- there's just a much larger quantity of newer games in between. So while the
percentage may be lower than it was before they dropped the "Good Old Games" moniker, the
number has remained in the same ballpark. Plus, the money they make from all the newer games helps with untangling the rights to more older games, getting licenses to sell them, fixing them up, etc. I seriously doubt they would've been able to afford to buy the rights to all those old SSI games that they released last year without the extra income, for example.
But if your definition of "classic" is limited to "released in the '80s or '90s", I've got bad news: there's a limited number of capital-c Classics from that period, and what ones they haven't already released are probably stuck in one of four broad situations:
1.) The rights holder(s), for whatever reason, has no interest in allowing it to be sold (or, at least, not here), or is asking an absurd price, or has other stipulations GOG can't or doesn't want to meet;
2.) The rights have been so heavily fractured and/or changed hands so many times that no one even knows who really owns the game anymore, and who would have to sign off on it being sold again (this is a big one);
3.) There are problems with getting the game running on modern hardware/software that they haven't been able to reliably overcome;
4.) They (GOG, or the owner(s) of the game, or both) simply don't see a digital re-release being profitable enough for them to bother spending the time and resources to untangle the rights or try to get it working on modern PCs (this one is where the
Community Wishlist comes in -- it can tell both GOG and potential publishers that there is still a market for [
game x]).
Also, remember that "old" is a moving target. Games that were just a few years old (in other words, still fairly recent) when Good Old Games opened its figurative doors are now more than a decade old, and would probably have been considered old enough to be released here even if GOG had never started allowing newer games in. Quite a few of those are also classics, and deserve to get exposure, too.
