Totally agreed, as I'll never blame GOG for the Warcraft delisting. On the other hand, if they've got any market power at all, they should at all time strive for including the original game as a freebee with the remaster/remake/reboot/whatever. As the distributor/creator gets paid anyway. Some of us really do buy these remasters because the originals have been on our wishlists for a while, but given the reviews/hands-on experiences with previous remasters, we don't mind paying but we _DO_ mind paying just for uglifying the original. -=>;-{

Can a GOG blue or staff member chime in on if the original Soul Reaver will return to the store? (for preservation sake) or is this remaster it as far as the publisher is concerned?

Common sense ; GOG could highly suggest to those publishers to include the original version (for various reasons) as "Extras" content. That would benefit to everyone...
Too many publishers are arrogant and often forget without customers they wouldn't exist.

If anybody wants to vote who hasn't, here's the community wishlist entry for the original

https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/legacy_of_kain_soul_reaver_back_on_gog

Maybe it's on a site like Internet Archive

If GOG has no control over what is being sold, then what kind of "game preservation" we are talking about?
Today we are selling.. no, preserving! this game, but tomorrow , oops, it's gone, we are going to "preserve" something else. How convenient..

GOG has control over what they sell, but they don't own the rights of any game, unless the publisher agrees to some sort of contract that guarantees that they won't pull the game from GOG for a period of time, there's nothing they can do

They can only preserve what the owners of the IP want preserved

so we have to save the games by ourselves for all

If they care about game preservation so much, maybe they should try to get the IPs itself instead.

Yes, GOG is providing us with the tools to help preserve games by making them DRM-free. However, it's important to remember that GOG is still a business and must adhere to certain rules when selling other companies' IP

Putting complete faith in a company to fully preserve gaming is dumb. Imo, but at least they are making it easier for consumers to preserve our games. I much rather have GOG try, than do nothing.


Using two accounts?

Well they figured wrong, as some of us actually have some, if not all of our older gaming computers still in working condition and thus we would like to be able to run the latest compatible versions on them without having to commit into downloading and keeping every single update for every single game backed up in multiple backup sets until we can find the time to determine which pointless in-between versions we can safely delete, not to mention the fact that future customers with a collection of old computers might also be buying more games from GOG if the older, but relevant versions could still be downloaded for any game that is still sold here.

Sure, because why wouldn't the publishers be eager to relinguish all of their potential future sales from any IP with the amount of money that GOG could ever hope to be able to afford to pay them for that IP...

It looks like Aspyr won the remaster war this month. ND might need to step their game up now.

Why not? Nightdive are very successful at this. Legacy of Kain doesn't seem that relevant today. Yeah, but in most cases it's a legal issue about finding out the current IP holders, especially if it is shared between multiple entities.

There is a difference between licensing an IP and acquiring ownership of an IP.

Many remaster and remakes are done through licensing where a company gets permission to use an IP but ownership is still held by the original company. Many of PIKO games came from licensing for example and when the licensing deal ended those games got pulled.

To aquire an IP completely the owner of the IP would need to be desperate to sell for quick income as we can clearly see many big publishers just sitting on IP letting it rot rather than sell it or even licensing it put.

Sony owns the Psygnosis catalog which includes big PC games like Lemmings but they do nothing. Warner Brothers has tons of Atari and Midway IP's and they have been approached about them but they are just fine with ignoring them.

ND not that successful at this or they would release the original version with most their remasters.

I think not including the originals is more a support issue for studios like Nightdive. They remastere the titles with new assets and often you get the option to switch between the old and the new look. They don't bother making the original port of the game compatible with modern systems as opposed to GOG who do exactly that.