But, Windows 7 is a mo- checks pocketwatch. Blimey guv, it appears that my once reliable pocket watch is running a little slow. I confess I haven't been able to visit Greenwich to calibrate my timepiece to the meridian in quite a while, it appears I am overdue a visit.

Doom 1 and 2 were recently rereleased by Bethesda, 8th of August in fact, as a brand new version developed from the ground up by Nightdive Studios. It was then natural that the system requirements were upped, but it gets even better, because Doom + Doom II demands at minimum, 8GB of RAM and a beefy GPU. My laptop is less than the minimum but somehow, this release works wonders on it.

You still got access to the DOS versions of the Doom games, anyhow. And by filtering my library to just Windows 7 supported games, you can still play the Enhanced versions of both Doom games, but not the new release.

That said, game devs and even GOG themselves target the OSes with higher adoption for support, this includes basically Win10 and Win11 plus some version of Ubuntu if Linux is supported and I dunno about Mac. At some point, it becomes more of a hassle for all parties to support an old, deprecated OS simultaneously with the current one. You may want to use dev features or libraries that make your life easier but are incompatible with older OSes because they didn't exist then.

I know it's hip to hate on Microsoft, but this is just not it. There's plenty of stuff to hate about Microsoft, but parties other than Microsoft phasing out old operating systems, that's just how this thing works and not some capitalist plot by Satya Nadella.

Good Old GAMES is about old games in new systems. Not old games in old systems, those don't need help.

And I'm not seeing Good Old Operative Systems in the name. Which, it also stopped being Good Old Games, is just "gog" now, which means gog, is just a name made out of letters which had meaning before but not now.

So no, they don't support Windows 7 the same way the entire online world doesn't support it anymore (doesn't mean you can't use it, or even that things lack compatibility... just that it's not supported).

GOG have certainly shown themselves to pick & choose when that applies. Hence why we see "Supported : Ubuntu 14.04" (released Apr 2014, end of Standard 5-year support = Apr 2019) meanwhile the current version of Ubuntu is 24.04 isn't even mentioned on many Linux builds here. That's the equivalent of supporting W8 but not W11 in 2024. So the old "GOG sell old games for new systems not older OS's" chestnut seems quite... 'flexible'... ;-)

Edit: And I'm not even going to mention Mac build's where apparently half the games here are made for the "new" silicon and the other half for the "old" silicon...

It's all about window of opportunity isn't it.

If you were lucky enough to buy a game when GOG still supported an earlier version of Windows for it, and you kept that version, then you are likely good.

However, GOG is all about supporting old games on latest OS, so the goal posts keep changing.
With that in mind, I guess we should be thankful, when they continue to update a game to work on latest OS. That was not something that used to happen, and one of the big reasons why GOG came into existence.

That said, the issue is really about GOG continuing to give access to older versions they used to support. This is one major failing of GOG, no access to an archive of older versions. Sure, Galaxy has a bit of a rollback feature, but generally we are limited to the version a game was when we bought it ... but only if we have backed up and kept that version or that version is still current.

Not much can be done about an old game that is released on GOG for the current Windows OS. GOG or whoever provides the game, are unlikely to build in backward compatibility or support ... that costs time and money, and likely not seen as worthwhile enough, based on who they think would want that.

So generally a new release here, even if an old game, is about getting it to work on latest Windows.

And as much as GOG talk about Game Preservation, they do an extremely limited version of that, bordering on not really being game preservation at all.

But perhaps game preservation means different things to different folks, especially when you consider all aspects.

True preservation means being left in an original vanilla state. And is preservation about access as well, or just being stored somewhere safe for posterity and spread widely across the world? Or is it about being able to use on latest OS? Or is it all or some of those things etc?

Eventually of course, many games will become Public Domain ... maybe not in our lifetime or just toward the end of it.

I'm a great believer in playing a game on the OS it was designed for.
And it isn't a crime or foolish to keep an old PC that still works, for old games.
That doesn't mean you don't also maybe have a new PC for newer games.

Okay, how about Good Old Customers?

Windows 10 was released in 2015. Any customers who were GOG customers before that, must have been using some other OS than Windows 10 (some beta testers being an exception).

So at least the minimum assumption would be that a large number of customers is something else than Windows 10 users to begin with, maybe many of them getting new OS with new computers later on.

Ironically, I am writing this on a Windows 10 laptop, but I have a Windows 7 sitting next to it, and a Windows XP machine as a desktop computer (with a working 5.25 floppy drive and stuff :-). So unless it's absolutely necessary, there's no point in deliberately making things incompatible with older systems. Especially long time GOG customers don't probably care so much about anything that's new, but rather stuff that is years or decades old.

Steam updating its client becoming incompatible with older Windows versions was bad (and yes, I know workaround tricks for it), we expect better things from GOG.

Yepp.
If someone has all their old PC systems (MS-DOS (X.0), Win 1.0 - 3.1 - 95 - XP - 7 - 8 (and whatever else they may have used inbetween)), still sitting in a working state at home, they don't need GOG.

They have all that's necessary, to run the old games, which were programmed for and supported by those old OSs.
(I'm assuming, of course, that they own the games in their original form)

And well, you can. Being better than the other store is a low bar. You can download the installer and if for some reason it doesn't work, innoextract will pick up the slack instead. This is all better than the entire OS being unable to access any part of the client - your only way to interface with your purchases.

Since Steam stopped supporting their client on windows 7 (and by that breaking all their games on older OSs), GoG got a big advantage in this department here. Since most older GoG games still work on older OSs, and it would be incredibly stupid on GoGs part, to brake compatibility with older OSs!

With that said, if a game uses DX 12 it won't work on windows 7, if it's DX 11 or lower it should run, not always the case though.

For instance Intravenous has Windows 7 and above and DX9.0c listed as requirements, but apparently the latest "update" broke that compatibility, though that's less GoG and more developers messing things up! Since that last comment actually mentions, that the game is now having issues even on win 10.

Cyberpunk 2077 launched with DX12 and Win7 support.
Not sure if VKD3D is already working on Windows 7 but people are using a similar tool on Windows 10 on older GPU's to boost up performance, is just a matter of time before it's working under Win7.

Not really. The market is tiny. At the last count, there are more people on Linux than on W7.

That's a good question, but even better question would be who checks that those requirements make some sense?
Some of them are ridiculous.

For instance, King's Quest 1+2+3 collection.

Minimum system requirements:

System: Windows 7
Processor: 1 GHz
Memory: 256 MB RAM
Graphics: 3D graphics card compatible with DirectX 7 (compatible with DirectX 9 recommended)

Why would a very basic 1980's game with 2D graphics that isn't even mouse-controlled require 3D graphics card??? :-O

"Why is GOG killing it off?"!!! "Why did Microsoft kill it off?", I guess you meant to say. I didn't want to install 10 either. I preferred Win7.

It is more to cover themselves, especially when it comes to support. They would need to test for every OS that is listed on the store page and provide customer support which can be a costly and time consuming venture.

Ensuring each member of the support team has access and is knowledgeable in years, or even decades old hardware would just bog things down.