That's just speculation. You can't know that for sure :P

Of course, and this is great thing about giving something for free in business.

GOG will add more free games in the future, I am sure about that. But I think it's better when for example they would release Wizardry Series and give Wizardry 1 or 2 for free, to encourage people to buy the rest of them. (of course that would depend on publisher's acceptance)

Giving away games that are avaible for free everywhere else isn't as good as giving "free exclusive" if you can call it that way (as Worlds of Ultima)

I wouldn't want random free games here. Because it takes too much effort to make them playable on all systems (GOG does that for all games, including free ones) and additional goodies.

I'd rather want them to invest that effort, time and money into standard releases.

In short:
Making one of the games from a series free? = YAY!
Hosting freeware game? = OK, but not yay :P

This thread is just a HUGE lol. What kind of question is that.. "Why?"

I want to ask you something. Why don't you give GOG money for no games at all? And when you stop to give them after a while they will e-mail you "we want more money and if not..why?"

:)

Can someone please send me some cash? Just pm me and I'll give you my bank account info. I just love free cash.

GOG's front page == 3MB
Ultima 4 (core program) == 1.2MB

Don't see what you guys are fussing about.

I'll do CTRL+F5 a few times and it would cost GOG more bandwidth than a user downloading a few MB game. What they won't gain is the cheap marketing.

Now imagine if GOG offers Arena and Daggerfall for free. It will surely bring more people on the service.

It's not like GOG can host any game that is freeware.

GOG is making revenue on selling video games. Even though the game is freeware, GOG would still need permission from Bethesda to host Daggerfall and Arena here.

If they did it without Bethesda's permission, Bethesda could sue them, because GOG would be making money on it (indirectly) without right holder's permission.

Freeware doesn't equal free to host everywhere.

Oh, is that Distributing software: 101? :D

Of course they would first need to get the rights. Didn't see a point in mentioning that.

Only legal issue there is they need to have Bethesda agree to allow them to host the games, just like while Ultima 4 has been "free" for sometime it was only a certain version(a version that was released in a PC gaming magazine CD complation) and on select sites that Origin and now EA have given permission too.

Well, if they managed to sign Bethesda, I would be far more excited about Morrowind than Daggerfall :P

would it? free games means more potential customers signing up...

As for the free games it's up to the right-holders not GOG, and yeah GOG would ideally want to have a somewhat low ratio of free games/paid-for games.