I just have one question about the Doom 64 game: how on Earth can it be that a game that used to run in 1997 on the 4 Mb RAM of a Nintendo 64 now requires 8 Gb (!!) of RAM? There are brand new games that don't require as much! I didn't bother checking the processor and graphics card, but I suspect these are also far beyond the hardware of 25 years ago. Ok, it's not running in its native environment, so it likely needs some kind of emulator, but how much hardware can that need?

Can anyone confirm whether this is an actual requirement (i.e. the game won't run decently with less than 8 Gb RAM), or the developers just wrote that for some other reason (e.g. they thought "Of course everyone has 8 Gb RAM!")

No it's not an actual requirement and no it's not running in an emulator. It's a native engine derivative of Doom64 EX.

"System requirements" have generally had nothing to do with actual hardware requirements for a long long time now, and I don't recommend paying attention to them.

I see... thanks. Why are minimum requirement still there, then, if they don't mean anything? To scare away potential customers? And what are we supposed to do as customers? Buy a game and only afterwards find ouy whether we can actually play it?

They mean something (vague), but they're a total misnomer.

They are not requirements for your hardware to run the game. They are requirements for your hardware to meet in order for the publisher (or store) to give you support if you have trouble running the game.

The idea being that you can't hold them liable or claim the "product is defective" if it turns out not to run well enough for your tastes on whatever old toaster you got. You know, the line below which you're on your own and not entitled to waste support staff's time (money).

Speaking of time and money, finding out the theoretical minimums required to run a game at all is surprisingly complicated. So nobody does that. Even if they did that, theoretical minimum doesn't mean the game runs at acceptable performance for the average gamer. So they'd still have to draw an arbitrary line somewhere.

This is further complicated by the nature of computers and software where a large number of variables affect performance and can cause a bottleneck.

So explaining the requirements in a meaningful way, with all the potential tradeoffs you could make to sway performance into "acceptable" would get absolutely and ridiculously complicated and the vast majority of games would not be equipped to understand it. "Hey you need 6 gigs of ram except maybe not if you're not running that PIG antivirus and have at least two gigs of swap on a SSD that has at least 200MB/s of random-access read bandwidth for 64kB blocks and latency better than 100 microseconds *or* if your ram is zstd compressed and you're only running at 640x480 with low res textures, 8 audio channels, small or medium map size, no more than 4 players, 200 unit limit, and 300MB RSS before loading the game.."

Of course there's a less ambiguous and more technical way to express it but that would be even less useful for the average consumer.

So once you realize that these "requirements" are 99% bullshit anyway but you still kinda maybe need them to have some protection against stupid 'murican customers who would otherwise start a lawsuit against you because the game doesn't run on their 286, you do the one thing that kinda makes some sense: grab a reasonably contemporary system that you expect to run the game well enough, make sure the game does indeed run and that there's still headroom to account for future bloat from drivers, OS updates, obese antivirus, chat applications, and other trash people run in the background.. write down that system's base specs and call it the minimum. Problem solved, now you have drawn the line in sand below which the customer is responsible for any issues.

Do that process today and you get requirements that make absolutely no sense for a game that was released 25 years ago. But no publisher is going to organize a field trip to the computer museum to figure out which of the lowest spec PCs they find can still run the game. It's just not worth their time.

The status quo is that you've been able to find budget laptops and desktops (<500 eur) with at least 8 gigs of RAM for many many years now so that's probably what they chose as their low end baseline. I see it more as an arse cover, but .. maybe there's a bit of that too? I imagine they don't want anyone gaming on a potato to feel too entitled to support. They aren't making much money on a 25 year old game that sells for $5 when not on sale, and a few minutes of worth of customer support agent salaries would eat it all away. The thinking is probably that it is better to scare away a few poor potato gamers than it is to risk wasting the sale's profit multiple times over trying to support one of 'em who's somehow having a performance issue they can't diagnose themselves. Better safe than sorry?

In any case, the market of PC gamers on less than 8GB of ram is very small and even fewer care about these requirements, so anyone being scared away is a rounding error. Pretty much. It seems that these days GOG has a rather generous refund policy (as long as you don't abuse it). So if you're tight on money and there is a title you really want but aren't sure whether you can run.. yeah, I'd say your best (legal) bet is to buy the game and try it. And then beg for a refund if it doesn't run.

I don't care much, none of my systems meet the requirements for any game on GOG.

I played through the game on a GPD Win (Cherry Trail Atom SoC, 4 GB RAM) when the remaster first came out and it ran fine. Honestly your browser is probably more demanding than Doom 64.