Welp, I guess I phrased poorly some things in my reply. I was talking about dm36's view on exclusivity to sell games. On consoles, as far as I am aware, you can buy digitally games only through their stores whereas it's not the case for computer games.

Praise Half-Life 2.

Even if you buy through a 3rd party site, steam gets their cut. A game can be locked. Or are you focused on how the platform itself is locked to a store, rather than the game? Even then, that is slowly creeping up on us as well, just microsoft has their own sneaky way of getting their cut without providing the store.

Steam gets their cut through 3rd party sites but we are talking about having a certain game being provided by only one website.

Consoles games : their own store (and 3rd party sites ?).
Computers games : GOG, itch.io, Steam, Origin, UPlay, Microsoft Store and others I may have forgotten. 3rd party sites also compete with the main stores to make users buy through ther sites.

links-386-pro],just go to their site and pay and install.Look up Links Country Club and Links Corner.

What ZFR said, free != public domain.

I don't think this is true. If you buy a Steamworks game on Amazon then Amazon get the store cut, not Steam. No way publishers are paying 30% to both. Valve still benefits because Steamworks brings people to Steam.

How many Good Old Games are still missing?

When does a game count as old? Does that mean 10 years ago or more? If so, then you could just get what was released 10 years ago released every year here as GOG has released most of the Good Old Games from prior to that.

Also, the best Good Old Games they haven't released are games they are never going to get because other platform holders aren't going to put them on GOG. So forget about getting the Diablos, StarCrafts, WarCrafts, Age of Empires, Fables, Portals, Left4Deads, Half-Lifes or games stuck in ownership/rights limbo (which is why games like RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, Star Control get pulled).

Steam does sell DRM free games. They aren't exclusive to gog, hell, gog isn't even the only DRM free store in the web.
What gog users tend to ignore is that most of the changes were sitting in the wishlist for ages. Early access titles, a client, etc. People wanted that and gog gave it to them. And when it comes to games themselves, there's so much you can do when the legal paperwork to get them is eventually more complicated and/or expensive than anything you'd make by just selling it. And that's considering if the owners are still in business.
That said, for some hilarious reason companies seem more comfortable with gog offering a client. It's just a marketing checklist. And some devs directly refuse to sell their games on gog *because* they are a DRM free store. And I'm not talking about big companies either, I don't know if you guys have noticed, but by buying a large portion of the games this site sells you're still giving money to EA, Activision and Ubisoft. Having a DRM free position is ok but sometimes people go overboard with it and ignore facts.

See, the problem with getting more "classics" is that the more classic a classic is, the more legally tangled it becomes.

Sure, a game like Tony Hawk would be nice to have on there, but good luck untangling that many licencees.

I thought no one cared about DRM, and that it was a scam perpetrated by the media.

Damn, I gotta stop believing everything I read in here. :P

GOG has pretty much secured all the low-hanging fruit with respect to pre-2K games. Getting more of them is now much more difficult for several reasons:

1) for many of these games, it's very difficult to track down the IP/rights holders so GOG can secure a contract to sell the games.
2) for many of these games, the publishers/rights holders are very reluctant to allow a DRM-free release.
3) since the rise and success of GOG, many rights holders/publishers are starting to realize their back catalog is worth something and they're holding on to them either to release them on their own platforms to sell, providing them to the 900 lb gorilla (Steam), or just not willing to let them out for sale yet.
4) probably a number of other reasons I've not even thought of.

Then there's the definition of what a 'good old game' actually is. Is it, in fact, a game that was released before 2000? Is it a game that's more than 15 years old? 10 years old? There's no hard and fast rule here. If you consider only games released before 2000, then you're in for disappointment, since as I noted above, all the low hanging fruit has been plucked. But I personally figure that anything more than 10 years old is 'old' in the gaming world. That's still a good number of 'old' of games being released by GOG, I believe.

Besides the things, others have already mentioned, I also would like to add this:
Why should GOG offer a download for games, that, as you said, are free to download elsewhere?
Why should GOG reserve serverspace for these games, if they get nothing in return?

Maybe you're right - GOG shouldn't. But my reply was to
EA has nothing to do with first C&C games absent on GOG. In fact EA made quite an effort to make good old C&C as accessible as possible.

P.S. I'm not trying to say that EA is a good company. In fact their bad reputation is well deserved. But while EA made their fair share of crappy decisions, doesn't justify to put on it something that it didn't do.

I do not really care whos the dick responsible I cannot get/buy DRM free C&C on gog but somebody at some point said "no" and that ones a dick. That is usually a right holder (maybe there are more than just EA; have not called them out specifically) because I cannot imagine gog saying no to sell classic C&C.

edit: exaggeratedly spoken; I myself am not really a C&C enthusiast but would probably grab one for nostalgia reasons should it get released here.

Quite a few tbh.