Does anyone know if there's been any progress in getting more Square-Enix titles on GOG? I don't mind waiting a little longer for certain titles to make it to GOG, but most of the Final Fantasy games were released on Steam a while ago. I'm sure Square-Enix wants to get as much money from the DRM market as possible before releasing the DRM-free version, but I'm starting to think they're complete morons, incapable of making any sound business decisions. Seriously who pirates 20 year old games?

That being said, is there any progress at all on the Final Fantasy games? At this point I'd settle for Mystic Quest.

Chances are, that if Squeenix actually developed it, then it won't be coming to GOG.

Sorry. Take a look at the entire Square-Enix catalog on GOG. None of the 29 titles currently here were actually developed by Square-Enix, Square, or Enix. Only published by.

To be honest, you probably should have thought of them as morons about the time they decided that a sequel to Final Fantasy 13 was the good idea.

Or back when all those Kindom Hearts games had ridiculous names instead of being called something like "The Twilighttown days".

Or back when they hired on Mr. "Belts and Zippers" as a main thinker.

Or back when they made the movie.

Of course those are mostly Squaresoft sins, and not Enix sins.

Can't really think of many Enix sins.

For the time being, GOG's success with Japanese publishers is almost non-existent. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the Square Enix on board is nothing more than Square Enix Europe, aka former Eidos and not allowed to sell anything else other than Eidos games.

Until GOG can find out what clicks with Japanese publishers, I don't expect any Japanese releases, unless they come from Western publishers (like the Neptunia games from Retroism or the Ys series by Xseed).

They merged with Square.

Region locking seems to be a big thing for Japanese publishers. Burrrrn.

As far as I'm aware, the only way that anyone could know for sure about things like this were if someone was an employee of Square Enix or GOG and directly involved in the process of bringing games here to the GOG platform, or otherwise aware through their employment at either company. In both cases the employees of either company are almost certainly bound by non-disclosure agreements to not publicly disclose such information until such a time that both companies are ready to make an official statement about a given game or games coming to the platform.

In the overwhelming majority of cases these days and in the past, what this means in practice is that the very first that we ever hear about a game coming to the GOG.com store front is the release day announcement of it just being released here. In other words it is very rare that we ever get any form of official confirmation from GOG or the publisher of a given game that their game is coming to GOG.com with any certainty. Occasionally a developer or other employee of a publisher or dev studio may speak out of turn or unofficially thereby leaking such information in specific or vague terms but that doesn't happen too often, and companies like Square Enix are pretty locked up like Fort Knox in terms of public communication from employees. They might even keep their employees locked up in an underground bunker isolated from the rest of the world, unable to speak or interact publicly with "outsiders". :)

So the best anyone will generally get for queries of this nature about just about any game company is "no, nobody knows and if anyone does they are legally obligated to not disclose any such information", and the only end-run around that is unofficial or accidental leaks of such information and those get highly publicized in mainstream gaming media already. Exceptions to that may exist but as is the case with exceptions to general rules - they are rare and shouldn't be expected.

I am hoping that the Nintendo Switch will change a lot of minds in regards to region locking, since the system will be free from region locking. Although that doesn't mean these companies will go completely DRM-Free.

What would the Nintendo Switch change? Nintendo's region lock was the outlier, not the rule.

It's possible GOG could convince Square-Enix and other Japanese developers to release their games DRM-Free in most of the major markets at the cost of regional sales restrictions in a select few.

Ironically, with Nintendo *finally* abandoning region locking, the PC is now the only platform out of the four big ones that utilises region locking - including within Europe (UK versions not working in Germany for instance). It's basically a straight 180° of the situation 15 years ago where PC gaming was the only platform without regional locks.

Of course that's more a technical lock due to actual data encoding; unless you meant locking as in, "Germany can't get this game because X", which isn't so much locking as it is barring.

Whatever the semantics, it's still deliberate technical measures designed to prevent legally purchased games being played outside of their designated territory. For instance, many boxed versions of PC games bought in Russia, for instance, cannot be activated in Europe or the US. A copy of Modern Warfare 2 or Black Ops bought in the UK cannot be activated in Germany. Wolfenstein: The New Order cannot even be run in Germany on the PC, regardless of previous activation.

There are certain games that people from Germany cannot currently buy from GOG, but there's no DRM within the games restricting people from playing them in Germany. It's my understanding that someone from Germany can still be gifted restricted games and if they were to buy them while in another country (or using a proxy) they'd still have access to them in their homeland.

To add to what Grargar said, it's wasn't even just Eidos titles; it was Eidos titles that were having issues on modern machines. Back in 2014 I tweeted a Squeenix guy about seeing Hitman Blood Money here, and he said it wasn't a priority since it worked fine on new machines. It's like, any Eidos games past 2005 are a no show. :(

That's the law. You want to change that, then you live in a country where you thankfully can make a difference thanks to having a sane voting system. Sure, it might be easy to get it on the ballot, but it's been an issue for German gamers all their lives. See if you can't join a movement or pass something though your local district.