Here's a new interview with GOG's managing director:
https://www.cgmagonline.com/interviews/drm-free-gaming-future-with-gog/

https://www.pcgamer.com/gog-has-quietly-killed-off-its-steam-import-service/

There's a two part interview with GOG's Head of Biz Dev and Senior Biz Dev Manager:
Part 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEM_aJfmrKA
Part 2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aseobWShEO0

GOG interview at The Gamer:
https://www.thegamer.com/gog-video-game-preservation-consoles/
Some interesting tidbits about console game preservation:
“One of the blockers that we encountered, which was raised by one of the publishers, was that with emulation it’s really hard to remove some of the video parts available in that version of the game. Let’s say back in the days when the game was released, there was some licensing agreement and there’s something in the startup of the game, it’s hard for us to remove something like that.”

Matt Chat 504: Oleg and Artem of SNEG

"SNEG is bringing back some of the best CRPGs and strategy games of all time to GOG and other distribution platforms. Gold box, Black box, silver box and more! Oleg and Artem are super fans of the games they're publishing and have ambitious plans to bring back even more games from the golden age!"

Should be not too out of place here, with both Oleg Klapovskiy and Artem Shchuiko being former staffers of GoG's business development department.

One thing Oleg Klapovskiy said stood out:
"Plus again, I think the best tool for people who want some old games to be back is actually to go to GoG.com, and vote on the fantastic wishlist because, trust me, it's being used by the GoG business development team and not only by them."

There's a 6-page interview with GOG's biz-dev department in the December 2023 UK issue of PC Gamer.
https://www.pcgamer.com/pc-gamer-uk-december-issue-on-sale-now-cities-skylines-ii/
No groundbreaking new info, but an interesting read nonetheless.

Thank You for all this info. On it

There's a new interview with GOG's Managing Director Urszula Jach-Jaki over at Destructoid.
https://www.destructoid.com/gogs-urszula-jach-jaki-discusses-game-preservation-and-the-business-of-retro/
There's a tease about upcoming classic re-releases:

Other bits that might answer some questions that keep repeating: But the "if" here is very concerning:

Was this a reference to SNEG or are we yet to see these classic titles?
I still really wish that they'd bring Alone In The Dark 2008 to GOG. THQ Nordic are willing to work with GOG, if GOG initiate it.

Matt Chat 517: eXo of eXoDOS

"This is an interview with eXo of eXoDOS, a totally rad collection of DOS games, manuals, magazines, you name it, and we're not just talking major releases here. Not sure how to configure DOSBox but still want to play the classics, complete with features like MT-32 support for kickass audio? You're going to love what this man is doing. Beyond that, he's a great preservation evangelist and has some of the best arguments I've heard for why this work is important and worthy of our support.

Learn more about eXoDOS here: https://www.retro-exo.com/exodos.html
eXo's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@RetroeXo
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/37FYaUZ"

Pertaining to the much too often "suboptimal" versions or packages of DOS titles offered on GoG:

MC: "One of the interesting things you talked about, eXo, in this write-up I thought was fascinating was there's actually some negatives about downloading a game from GoG/GoodOldGames.com, I know a lot of people... it's one of their cherished sites, you know, so we don't mean any disrespect, you know, for them but there is a, you know, if I understand this right there, there's I guess a version of the game that's kind of easy, the easiest one to get up and running on a modern PC and that kind of becomes a defacto version and that everybody plays nowadays or downloads even though it's not optimal, right, there's ways you could tweak that and, you know, like we talked about the MT-32. There would be other ways to present that game that would be more, uh, impressive, I suppose. We're kind of stuck with an inferior version of a game sometimes."

eXo: "Well, I look at it this way - optimal and inferior are completely subjective to the person playing it, um, I have made a game run in a way I thought was the best presentation: Alley Cat came out on the Tandy and PC, uh, IBM, early IBM PC DOS and the PC version is a really low qualitiy CGA graphics with beeps and boops on the PC speaker whereas the Tandy version, had, like, 16 colour and had really nice sound, so when I set up the pack I said, oh, Tandy is the way to go and I got a lot of pushback on that because that's not the one people grew up playing. They played the other one and that's how they wanted to experience it today, so that was my lesson: Don't assume what anybody wants, give them every choice I can.

And so while one might be technically better that may not be what someone wants but I guess the way I look at it is, and again, like you said, I appreciate the fact that a website like gog.com exists and that there is someone out there trying to sell these games, that's a good, that's a positive thing.

What I find negative about it is this belief that, and not that they're perpetuating this, it comes from the community, that because GoG is selling a game that game is preserved. And not only is that not true I find it to be the opposite. The GoG version of a (DOS) game is destructive to preservation because if I go buy the King's Quest Pack right now and I get King's Quest 1, 2 and 3 - that's packed with one set, the other ones are packed with the other - I get King's Quest SCI version which was the later 1991 remake. I do not get the original 1987 PC DOS King's Quest that was on the AGI engine, they just don't even include it. And then with the SCI version I get AdLib Sound Blaster, the most common way of presenting it, which is fine, right, but they don't even leave the drivers in the game if you wanted to go reset it up with an MT-32. If you had the înstitutional knowledge to do it, they're not there, they've removed the drivers, they've removed the setup file. And we're talking about files that add up to one or two kilobytes.

So it's hard to justify, in my opinion, the removal of these files because you're not saving a lot of space on the backend for your server and, I mean you could argue: Well, maybe they don't want to support it, maybe if they include it they have to support it but as it stands right now their forums are full of people explaining how to circumvent these issues by getting the files from other places and putting them in your GoG folder and then type this and type that and copy this, you know, resource file over and now you've got MT-32.

So if you've already got all this time and effort being put into getting the game working in a way that was more original to how it was distributed - why not distribute it that way. I mean they've got the rights and they're putting it out there and I think that it ties into something we're seeing recently which I mentioned when we, when I wrote you earlier: If you look at these game preservation packages, like The Making of Karateka or Atari 50 (The Anniversary Collection), they're approaching these from a collector standpoint, they're... you don't just get Karateka, you get all these games Jordan Mechner made leading up to it, you get design docs, you get interviews, you get this giant package and so they can sell that for like 20, 30 dollars, even though if it was just Karateka alone they'd be lucky to make 2 bucks off of it.

If they packed the King's Quest games, with, okay, here's the deal: Here's King's Quest 1 through 8, all the sound cards are supported, all the video cards are supported, because late Sierra games had these EGA versions that are really rare, uh, where they would make the game in VGA, Super VGA and then dither it down to EGA for the few people that were still out there that didn't have it yet. And these, they didn't put those drivers on the VGA copy, you had to mail order or find a store that sold the EGA copy so that made them pretty rare.

But, again, it's like, if that's the version you had back in the day that's the one you want to play today, that's the one you remember."

MC: "I'd be just curious to see it."

^ He makes some good points. LOOM is "preserved" far better (for me) on my HDD in including the EGA version with the VGA versions (that cut out a lot of content). And preserving old DOS games definitely doesn't mean deleting half their files just because they come packaged with ScummVM. Eg, Lure of The Temptress (GOG version) = only 4x datafiles (Disk1-4.vga) and GOG deleted the Lure.exe and *.ega files. Meanwhile on the ScummVM website's own Freeware page, a simple zip file of the same game is 1/5 of the size of the GOG installer yet includes not only the Disk1-4.vga files but also the missing Disk1-4.ega and Lure.exe files.

End result gives me the choice of EGA or VGA for both DOSBox and ScummVM for both games and took me about 2 mins max per game to setup. Sometimes The GOG Way of 'preserving' old games by deleting half their versions and half the ways of running them is completely over-engineered in all the wrong areas vs downloading a zip file from elsewhere...

Thanks much, wasn't aware of this collection and effort, and the Matt Chat is really interesting. Learned quite a bit I didn't know.

GOG's not to blame for these "inferior" versions/packages, I'm sure they'd love to have as many different versions and audio options as possible included with the DOS games they're selling, but I imagine they simply have to accept and work with what's given to them by the publishers and/or developers in order to be able to sell the games at all.

You realize that website has a link to an extremely large torrent, right? Piracy! Don't do eet!