Nice rant, with zero connection with reality.

Well, because dropped support is dropped support. You might lose out on functionality, introduce strange new bugs, have to deal security holes, and in some cases, having to program for an arcane language or dead architecture that even most cookbooks don't mention. Like [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_(programming_language)]B[/url].

Simply put, staying with an old abandoned program isn't often worth the effort, free or bought. Why deal with the crufty old interface of ZSNES when you can use SNES9X or Higan?

No sense beating a dead horse trying to get companies to support something they have no interest in. The Internet will fix it.

People have been getting games working or running them unsupported long before GOG existed and will be doing so long after GOG is long forgotten. I just spent an hour or two this week figuring out how to get HL2 retail build 2187 installed. and playable without steam. Does Valve care or provide a way to play this version? No. Can you find information on how to do this or find a copy on the Internets? Yes.

Why play HL2 build 2187 when you can play the 2014 version you may ask? Why the hell not?

GOG has been butchering games from the very start. Seems strange to expect them to do anything different now. If they were going to provide original copies of the games they would have done it by now. They obviously have no interest in doing so. If that bothers you then spend your money elsewhere.

[[citation needed]]

Honestly, this is something they could hire a consultant or two to implement, and then use interns or cheap labor straight out of school to convert old versions of games to a downloadable format. All it would really require from GOG's side is a lead and manager that would keep the project on track and consultants focused.

Most of the time would actually go into tracking down or converting old versions into this format. We're probably talking at least about a couple of hundreds of hours into that part alone, and it would probably make up about 95% of the actual "development" time. That's what unpaid interns or cheap labor are for though.

That would get you most of the way. Then you would basically only need to integrate it into the current publishing tool of developers, so whenever a new copy was published to the public release channel a copy of the game would be thrown at the automated process and made into another delta patch to store on the cold storage. QoL changes and features then come after, such as indexing frequent versions on a slightly faster storage media to lower recovery times for those versions.

So if GOG hade a guy or two available that could serve as the project leader/manager then the rest of the labor could be found externally.

I doubt they would do it, still, but it's not was if much prevent them from actually rapidly developing this feature over a couple of months at most.

I agree so much with this. Can a Blue please comment on why this hasn't happened yet, now that XP compatibility is on the way out? Sure would be an easy solution for those who want an XP version still.

I agree with your agreement, and hereby nominate Mr. Beer to be the new CEO of CDPR!

If being the keyword here ;)
As far as I understand there is ONE game affected so far (Fallout: New Vegas). And this game never had a "previously-good" installer available, so your proposal doesn't even apply here.

all the drama in this thread seems blown out of proportion at this point.

I rather doubt we'll see that many old WinXP games suddenly getting updated to support achievements.

I can't disagree with you, for the most part. F:NV did work on XP at one time, but that was before gOg added it to the library. So yeah, in this particular case the discussion drifted a bit and there is a lot of speculation.

I think it's a decent discussion to have anyway, for a few reasons:

- gOg has shown a willingness - in the recent Galaxy-included episode - to needlessly mess with installers. At least they warned us ahead of time.

- gOg, for the most part, do not provide access to older versions of installers. Galaxy rollback is a workaround (though I don't know how far it goes and how well it works) but it's not an option for XP users since Galaxy doesn't play with XP any more. That is, if I read that particular thread correctly. If it still works with XP then the misunderstanding is on me. Even so, Galaxy is supposed to be *optional*, which to me means that store-side functions should not require the client.

- Expeditions: Conquistador has recently had the requirements changed, to no longer include XP. That came down from the developer, apparently, but still.

Those are factors that might cause someone to become concerned about the ability to get a version that runs on their PC.

Should the customer have their own backup? Yes, from a practicality standpoint. But gOg have stated in the FAQ that they will, in effect, work as your cloud backup of the installers. This is part of the service you bought with the game license. And things happen in life: your primary copy failed, and maybe your backup hard drive also crapped out without you knowing about it. Well, at least gOg has you covered. That is, if they will provide access to the old installers.

Hopefully the civil discussion in this thread will help gOg make plans for the future of games under the older OSes. Yes, it's mostly an "IF" at this point, but in the event it becomes a problem (and there are some warning signs) then I think most folks would be happy to at least have access to older versions without using *optional* Galaxy, whether or not Support drops the OS.

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I should add, my perspective is skewed by a couple things:

- Our PCs at the house are running Win10, and I have a NUC running Win7. So the XP discussion doesn't affect me directly. Though it might someday: Win7 isn't getting any younger, and the January 2020 cutoff isn't that far away.

- For work, I support machines running software that operate under MS-DOS 6.22 and Win98SE. As it happens, a customer just yesterday ordered from me a PC for their machine running the DOS software.

*shudders*

LOL - not as bad as it sounds. On the plus side - and it's the same with XP at this point - those OSes are no longer changing. So solutions from 10-20 years ago are generally the same solutions today. FWIW, I'm no IT pro but I have a good idea what the machine software needs in order to run under those old OSes. Point is, I can see why people get nervous about no longer having working versions, and that's why I would like to put a bug in gOg's ear that availability of old versions is customer-friendly and a bit of a necessity. That applies to all OSes, not just old XP / Vista.

Yeah... but the problem is some businesses take those machines online and they are hugely vulnerable. I remember in 2010 a local insurance business that was using a Win 98 zip server for medical information and yes it was networked online. *headdesk*

If the network is properly configured, not running scripts, active x controls and whatnot, and no one in the office is doing stupid shit like surfing, where's the vulnerability?

If you have a good hardware firewall, where's the vulnerability?