It doesn't appear that GOG has console games, there are a lot fo great greats exclusively for consoles.

Is it planned to expand with console titles?

You could use emulators and then provide more games, I like not having to deal with DOS Box when playing your games.

...no? Illegal?

They currently only do PC games so unless there was a port to PC it's not going to show up here.

They did have a survey quite a while back about console ports, but I don't think that ever went anywhere. What's more it would be really hard to do as the systems requirements for BSNES are quite high and anything less would sacrifice accuracy. I don't think there's an equivalent for Sega or anything newer than SNES. Not any more so than any of the games they have on the site currently. Which is to say not at all.

Ah.

On one hand it would make sense. I mean, Steam has half of the Genesis catalogue on it.

On the other hand, I prefer PC games so they would definitely have to rework the release system.

It's a good idea but probably not going to happen, Gog would need to sign nintendo or sony before they'd be allowed to emulate the consoles and also need to sign the publisher/developers for any games they want to sell as roms as well.
Not likely to happen since nintendo & sony both already sell old games through their own stores and don't want competition.

Genesis games have been ported to pc and so that might happen. No unofficial emulators and only sega to deal with..

Get working on some C64 and Amiga releases instead;)

I guess OP has a point in some way, afterall there are console/arcade titles that appeared on PC later like the SEGA MEGADRIVE collection on steam and other places or the Irem Arcade collection at DotEmu but I highly doubt it's going to happen with new titles at this point

besides, GOG still has a Bazillion PC games it needs to bring here so I think Console titles aren't it's biggest priority

If the games contain proprietary code to get them working on those platforms then it could be illegal to sell them as emulated titles.

The reason why console manufactures might act is because it would mean that the console manufacturer is not getting a cut of the profits, which is something upon which console manufacturers rely to see a return on their investment.

Naturally if these titles were ported over then it wouldn't be a problem. But emulators and the games themselves often contain code which renders them illegal without consent.

I disagree, there's absolutely nothing illegal about emulation, at least in the US, provided that it's a clean room implementation. Nintendo might throw a hissy fit about it, but I doubt very much that they have any right to prevent Activision from signing a licensing agreement with GOG for 20 year old games.

As for the legality, the patents on the NES, SNES, Genesis and anything older have long expired, at least in the US, as far as copyright goes, it really doesn't apply. That is unless the emulator developers got hold of official source which most likely doesn't even exist at this stage. And even that is iffy as you can't copyright headers and that's the bit that Nintendo is likely to throw a hissy fit about.

Also, I'm pretty sure that there have been legitimate rereleases that used ROMs in the recent past and I have yet to hear about any lawsuits covering it. Fact is that it's unlikely that a court would be impressed with Nintendo or Sega claiming to still own exclusive rights to a game that hasn't been sold new in probably close to 20 years.

GOG has to deal with international copyright law though. Something which the US has a tendency to selectively disregard. But if the copyright / patents have expired then great! That's all that needs to be said. But if so then it strikes me as odd that the only people putting out emulated games are Sega and Commodore.

I think this is a different concern from user emulation. Console devs may have used libraries or middleware provided by Nintendo or Sony in the creation of their software and not have rights to use those on different platforms.

edit: added quote from article discussing challenges of the FF7 PC port

"Not only this, Sony's development libs (PSY-Q) were only authorized to be used on the PSX, so they had to rewrite the graphics libs and change the art formats."

http://q-gears.sourceforge.net/index.phtml?content=4

nothing is illegal with permission from the copyright holders.

So gog can sell ps1 games with emulators if sony and whoever owns the right to the game tells its okay to sell the games.

In terms of IP we tend to be much more strict about it than most other parts of the world.

And yes, I'm pretty sure the patents on the SNES and Genesis have expired, I have in my possession a NES/SNES/Genesis machine and the only way that's possible is that the patents expired. Which given the typical term for patents in the US, is to be expected.

Emulation itself has never been illegal around here provided that it didn't infringe on any patents or make use of privileged information.

Newer systems are more likely to run into patent problems though, and at any rate any games from after the SNES/Genesis period are likely not to be hard to get ones hands on anyways, even those systems are often times still pretty cheap as well.

My main concern would be the ability of GOG or somebody else to accurately emulate those newer systems as my current computer can't even run BSNES at full accuracy.

This....Oh please this.....lol