Greetings

Sometimes when i get an update notification for a game, i go check the changelog, and i can see a message of this style (not sure of the exact wording):

"[insert country/langage here] version of the game added, provided by [insert username]"

How does this all work, exactly ? Some users send original physical version of a game of a yet unavailable localized language, to GOG...
Then i suppose they fiddle with the files and such to create an installer that would be patched to same version number through official patches, and then add it to their catalog and depository ?
Then what... do they keep the physical edition they were sent and it is considered as "gifted to GOG" for the science, or do they give back the physical version to its owner ?

I ask that because several good old games i know of GOG catalog, and that i own here too, had localized versions in my language (some were even "good" and not buggy/Game breaking, which is not a common thing when talking about older PC games in my country)
But i happen to already own the old physical versions of them in my own language.

So, i wouldnt mind helping GOG adding more localized editions of older games, but i would also like to keep my old boxes collection as well (some of those were gifted to me by relatives or friends, and so, have sentimental value... some are in pristine state as well... and so on)

So if anyone have more precisions about the whole supplying/submitting localized versions of older games to GOG that could explain to me the process in detail, i would be glad to hear about it.

Greetings. You should get in touch with JudasIscariot, who should tell you all the details about this process:
https://www.gog.com/u/JudasIscariot/chat

yeah. this is descriminatory to an extent. users can submit gamedata to gog, which they patch but when other gog users do it such as myself, we are not worthy?

Remember they also need to aquire legal permission to use it.

People usually do not send physical media but disk images, manual scans, etc.
GOG provides a FTP server where you can send all this stuff.

As suggested by Grargar, you should get in touch with JudasIscariot if you want more details.

Well, for a few of the games i had in mind, they were of an era when there was some kind of physical copyprotection on the disk medias themselves, and (at that time) not every cd drives were able to read them to convert to iso.

i dont know how those original disks would behave on modern dvd drives.burners and with wich iso making tools... hope it would work, because the computer i had from that time is not in working state anymore :)

i sent a chat message du judas, and will wait for reply for now

thanx for everyone's info

Yeah, note Themken's post. If it's 100% text, it should be ok, but if there's ANY voice acting whatsoever in the localized language there's most likely some rights issues to work out.

To be on the safe side, I tend to try to contact the translators themselves when I build a translation archive for a game that is no longer distributed on the language I’m working on. I do this for text translations as well as voice translations.

I know that legally I should ask the editor, but morally I feel better asking for permission to the artists who did the translation. As an added bonus, it is quite fun to discuss with them of work they did decades ago, and that they sometimes don’t even remrember today ;)

There might be rights issues to work out in either case.

The main publisher for the game probably has world-wide rights for the English text and voice, but the case may be that translations are owned by a local publisher/distributor, and in that case, GOG (or the primary publisher) need to come to an agreement with that company for world-wide distribution.

The voice actors (if it's voiced at all) were probably paid a fixed amount back when the work was done, and has likely no rights to it now.

It was years ago I offered GOG over 156 games or so with language versions they did not have (talked with JudasIscariot about it). I ended up sending them 15 (and a few manuals) directly to Poland. From these 15 games they still did not use 8. However I also sent them addidional games by simply uploaing the files which they sometimes used and sometimes not.

The whole thing has nothing to do with discrimination at all but rather with legal issues and time. As you can see only very few games I offered were accepted (mostly due to legal reasons) and even those few still have not all been used yet.

If you offer them games/files/manuals you should be aware that even though it might be a step to add additional language versions to the GOG catalogue you won't get a guarantee. Also be aware that even if GOG decides to take the time to work on it and get the legal permission from the publisher that it still might take quite some time.