That is not how intellectual property law works. The owner of a copyrighted work solely decides who to license their creative works to and under what licensing conditions. Under the Berne convention nobody else has any rights to any copyrighted work whatsoever unless the copyright owner grants individual rights in writing explicitly.

Copyright law does not implicitly grant rights to creative works to others ever, regardless of what the owner chooses to do or not do with their property.

If any video game company chooses to not provide support for their old games, or even if they choose to no longer make them available publicly for sale or free, that is their sole choice to make and they do not in any way shape or form lose their exclusive ownership rights to those properties.

As such, regardless of whether a game is available for purchase or free legally on some storefront or not, nobody else has any legal right to copy, distribute, modify, redistribute or any of the other rights associated with copyright law unless explicitly granted by the owner in writing in the form of some sort of legally binding license. That's just how copyright law works.

Furthermore, these rights last for 75 years after the death of the creator. I'm not exactly sure how that is calculated in the case of a game owned by a corporation that is still in business, but suffice it to say that every single video game ever written in the history of video games, even if the author died the day the game was released, will have copyright protection for 75 years, meaning every video game ever written is currently protected by copyright law. Unless the legal owner of any of these games publishes the games somewhere online themselves and makes them available for free under a license that permits people to download and play them, share them, sell them etc. then nobody has any such rights to do so, and doing anything of that sort would put someone or some company in solid violation of copyright law.

As such, GOG does not, can not, and never will sell games in their store to which they do not have any legal license to distribute in their store, as negotiated by the copyright owners.

Nope, no chance in hell this will happen anytime soon. I'm still playing Diablo 1 BTW. Just started a new game with the Rogue (first time for me) the other night....

Well put. +1 rating for you.

diablo does not work at all in windows 8.1. what i have in mind is that gog can ask blizzard for the rights to publish the game. i read somewhere that that is what they do.

Sure they could ask, but the odds of Blizzard giving the rights to anything are about the same as one of us having an oral bowel movement.

Diablo works flawlessly on Windows 10, I bet it's the same for Windows 8.1...

If I were a developer, I wouldn't dare to release "balancing" patches for a game that's 18 years old. I mean... What does it say about the quality of your game if you still didn't get the balancing right after all those years?!

;P

I will pay triple price if both good diablos will be available on GoG, lol

Huh? I was pretty sure I got it working on 8.1...
Maybe I'm wrong. *shrug* a few games I moved over to a guest OS to stop abusing my CPU, but I think I got past the problem on normal installs.

Who's to say GOG hasn't contacted Blizzard. In all likelihood GOG has probably contacted Blizzard many times, as that is indeed what they do. They regularly get in touch with publishers of old games to try to bring said games back from the dead, and if they don't succeed, they try again and again over time in case situations may change, or in some cases the legal rights owner changes. Practically all of the Blizzard games are listed very high on the GOG community wishlist, so GOG Is highly aware of the popularity of these games both themselves because they know what they're doing without us having to prompt them, but also because well... we have prompted them via the wishlist. :)

In the case of Blizzard, they are a company that likes to run their own show, always has and probably always will. They have never entrusted one of their games to some other company as far as I'm aware, and they've taken it to task themselves to revive and remaster Starcraft, and now Warcraft III also. They even updated Diablo II not long ago if memory serves correct although not a full remaster like the other games got.

Blizzard has endless reams of cash from the popularity of their gaming franchises, so if they ever intend to re-release Diablo or Diablo II games or remaster them, they will almost certainly do it themselves in house where they can make it into a big deal and not just shim bug fixes into the games and put a lick of paint on the front, most likely doing a full remaster. The chances that they would ever consider reaching out of house to some other game company to sell their own game that they could simply put up in their own store tomorrow if desired is pretty slim I'd say.

We can never say never, as we've seen some "unlikely" titles come to GOG in the past over time, but we've never seen something on the scale of a company like Blizzard or Valve show up here, and if you look at those company's business models and other factors it seems pretty unlikely they'd make arrangements with GOG or even acknowledge GOG's existence IMHO.

We can all fantasize about it though, no harm in that so long as we don't hold our breath and turn blue. :) At the end of the day though we need to be realistic about how this video game business works, and what are the plausible scenarios and which are pie in the sky.

Puff... puff... pass as they say... :) Ok, this made me spontaneously laugh with such force that it caused me to blow a snot bubble. :)

Hi Skelly

You'd have better luck running the game in Wine on Linux or following the troubleshooting steps here.

i got it working without issues in windows 10 and windows 7. diablo is a very good game that have no official support.