Posted February 26, 2019
TentacleMayor: *forever being possibly less than 10 years due to OS/hardware compatibility issues. A lot of these games had to be heavily worked on by GOG to even work on modern systems. Already there are games that are only officially supported for discontinued OSs.
I'm a lot more optimistic. Eg:- - For the oldest games of all here (pre 1995 stuff) the bulk of the compatibility work has been done by DOSBox / ScummVM team without which 16-bit games wouldn't run at all on 64-bit OS's no matter how GOG repackaged it.
- Other games like Doom 1-2 & Quake run 1000x better on source-ports like GZDoom than the vanilla tweaks GOG have done.
- Others still have involved unofficial patching from dedicated communities (eg, Kentie's Launcher for Deus Ex, Tafferpatcher for Thief 1-2 & SS2, Morrowind & Oblivion Unofficial Fixes, new DX8-10 renderers for Unreal Engine 1 DX7 games, etc).
- WSGF (Widescreen Gaming Forum) is the largest repository for community patches that add widescreen to old games.
- PCGamingWiki hosts a huge database of fixes & enhancements for games.
I certainly hope that GOG continue to have a long & healthy life but if the absolute worst happens, alternative compatibility fixes for many old games are out there on the web. It may involve slightly more effort than a one-click installer, but many of us are already used to that anyway due to owning a lot of old games on disc that GOG don't sell. And those of us who do know various tweaks & fixes are always happy to help those who don't when asked. :-)