GOG’s New Plan To Weaponize Its Community’s Wishlist Of Games To Pressure IP Holders
from the making-dreams-come-true dept
I’ll give the folks over at Good Old Games (GOG) credit: they’re certainly doing what they said they were going to do. We’ve been talking about GOG a fair amount lately, mainly since the platform announced it was pivoting back to focus on its initial raison d’etre: bringing retro, DRM-free games back to a public storefront for gamers to legitimately purchase. GOG stated that it was doing this in part in order to get into the business of video game preservation, a prospect that everyone knew would be tested largely due to fights and/or confusion over IP rights held by publishers, studios, and god knows who else.
But, going back to the opening of the post, the platform is absolutely putting its efforts where its mouth is. GOG has long had a “Community Wishlist” where customers could list out which retro games they wish could be brought back onto the platform that weren’t already there. It allowed GOG to do two things: know what the customers most wanted and serve as evidence to publishers that their games would sell well if they partnered with GOG.
The games GOG members picked out on what used to be called the Community Wishlist still have their votes, and they have been useful. It was often “the fuel for our actions,” Karol Ascot Obrzut writes on GOG’s blog. “When talks with IP owners hit a wall, the Wishlist kept the conversation going.” GOG attributes the newly available Dino Crisis and Dino Crisis 2 (and the bundle) in part to wishlist leverage. Those games had about 5,000 and 3,500 votes, respectively, which helped when, as GOG puts it, “two Polish dudes” approached Capcom to ask about making the games Windows 10/11 compatible and upscaling it.
A pretty cool concept for how to galvanize a dedicated community to the effect of serving as market research for both the platform and the publishers needed to make the platform useful. But with GOG’s return to a focus on retro games, versus newly released AAA games, it has also decided to revamp the Wishlist into something more robust, with a more specific goal of using it to push more publishers’ older games onto the platform. Add to that a little prodding from the folks at GOG itself and you have a community-driven demand center that will be very public.
The Dreamlist has received a complete design and interface overhaul, and it makes it easier to see what other people are demanding. At the top, with more than 57,000 votes at the time of publishing, is Black & White, the 2001 game from Peter Molyneaux’s Lionhead Studios that was a true “god game,” giving you an avatar creature that learned from your actions and treatment. Black & White 2 commands the third-place slot at the moment.
GOG has added its own “Our Pick” tag to games it wants to see brought forward onto modern systems. Among them is Freelancer, which Ars’ Samuel Axon described in our 2024 roundup of non-2024 games as “a sincere attempt to make games like Elite (Dangerous) and Wing Commander: Privateer far more accessible.” GOG selected Freelancer as one of its staff picks for the Dreamlist, citing its “dynamic economy and engaging storyline.”
The idea here is a central place for GOG customers to establish both what they want to see on the platform and, by dint of those submissions remaining on the Dreamlist, the studios and publishers that refuse to make their games available, either at all or at least in a DRM-free format. Studios and publishers have every right to withhold their works in that fashion, of course, but this new setup has the ability to apply some public pressure in a way that is beyond the old Wishlist.
It may also serve to highlight for a larger audience just how absurd some of the IP hang-ups of old video games can be. For instance, one of the other top games listed on the Dreamlist is The Operative: No One Lives Forever, a game that is in IP rights hell, as we have discussed several times in the past.
We’ll of course have to see how successful the Dreamlist program is at bringing more games into the GOG Preservation Program. Any progress would be useful, but it sure would be great if something of a groundswell was created for these preservation efforts.
Filed Under: community wishlist, copyright, drm, preservation, retro games, video games
Companies: good old games
Comments on “GOG’s New Plan To Weaponize Its Community’s Wishlist Of Games To Pressure IP Holders”
If (and that’s a very big if) GOG can somehow manage to get the three different companies that claim ownership of No One Lives Forever to agree to the game being re-releassed, it’ll be nothing short of a miracle.
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I feel like GOG needed a minor miracle to convince Capcom of the value of re-releasing the original PS1-era Resident Evil trilogy and the first two Dino Crisis games. But hey, if that can happen, No One Lives Forever (and its sequel) don’t seem like a huge stretch.
(Maybe pray a little bit for a miracle wiht NOLF, though. It can’t hurt to hope!)
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Capcom re-releasing old games I’m not really surprised by – as the sadly defunct Australian gaming magazine Hyper put it: “Capcom not only likes to beat a dead horse, they occasionally give the horse electroshock therapy, too!”
An excellent idea
Remaining atop such a list for long enough ends up becoming a badge of shame, and that kind of negative PR can be effective.
Obviously anyone who has voted for say, Half Life is kidding themselves if they think Valve is going to allow their flagship franchise on a rival store, but those exceptions and games in ownership hell are far from a majority among those on there, and a quick glance shows quite a few that either have been or more recently fell under Microsoft’s umbrella, a company getting ever more open to selling its products on rival stores.
Given how Freelancer has been freely available for over a decade on all popular abandonware sites, its popularity on the GOG list is quite the vindication of the business model. A game people can get and play for free right now, and tens of thousands actively go out of their way to make it known that they would pay for it, if it was available to buy.
If they get Freelancer on there, I’ll buy it without hesitation. It’s one of my favorites, and sadly I never got a chance to buy it when it was still being sold (poor student then).
Tomb Raider on the other hand, I’ve repurchased probably 3 or 4 times by now. That’s what happens when you continue to sell/release games, publishers. 😉
When they put up a bunch of classic Star Trek games, I bought every single one of them. Armada was another classic I played as a kid. Well, I played hundreds of hours with the two mission demo that came with a gaming magazine CD. I’m still hoping they’ll get the other Star Trek games from that era (Birth of the Federation, New Worlds, Orion Pirates).
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I just went and added my vote to a bunch of the Star Trek classics from the 90s on there. Been playing Armada II with the Fleet Ops mod since nabbing it in a GOG sale.
The old RTS game, Paraworld, is one I’ve wanted to see come back since forever. I wonder that’d be within their reach, considering its developer studio no longer exists.
Fun fact: there’s at least one dedicated website hosting “pirated” fan-patched copies of NOLF that anyone can just download, that are fairly easy to find. Rock Paper Shotgun even linked to one of them in an article highlighting this. Speaks volumes about how the supposed rightsholders don’t give a damn.
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And about how hollow many of the arguments against GOG’s DRM-free model are. There are games throughout this list hosted all across the web on abandonware sites, but plenty gamers are willing to do what amounts to signing a petition asking to be allowed to pay for them.
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To be fair, people are signing that petition because, at least with regards to the Preservation Program, GOG is doing actual work to make these games playable on modern systems (and beyond) without people needing a patchwork of fanmade mods that might only be found on some sketchy-ass website or require a bunch of other programs to install/run. Paying for games in the Preservation Program enables GOG to continue preserving games this way—and it tells companies on the fence about this sort of thing that people will still buy and play older games if they’re made available through legal channels.