Wha... but... you started... AARGH! >eats keyboard Cookie Monster style<

New topic: Breja/cookie monster: recommend me a good (gaming) keyboard :-P

Oh, there are clear cases. Dan Brown making a fortune off completely ripping off holy blood holy grail. Jk ripping off every fantasy novel or cultural myth possible etc. Protected now by IP rules. Disney is another good example, highly protective of the IP they have “acquired” over the years.
It’s a funny thing because if you look at other industries this doesn’t happen. Drug manufacturers for instance have an exclusivity window and then generics can move in on it. So why is the Tolkien estate, those who never created any of it, still sitting on the IP 100 years down the line (and yes, that itself is based heavily on WW2 and a lot of local cultures history from around Europe).
We look down on bankers and hedge fund managers and such like for profiting from others, yet accept it in media.
Perhaps there should be an advisory board on it like age rating, this beamdog product is 98.25% the same as the previous product for instance.
The world is flat, and cyberpunk is a great game.

Aren't Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines and some similar titles considered "cult classics?" What is the definition of the term, again? Plus, sure would be better than some of the new trash: at least we could see gaming history for what it really looked like rather than only our favorite examples that everyone cites.

Yeah, that's an important aspect. The famous classics alone are not the whole picture, without the backdrop of average and just plain bad contemporary games a lot of the cultural context is missing.

Sure, as alreay noted by others - it's not a business venture's task to preserve such context, but then the question is not if we expect GOG to release such games, but if we'd like them to.

World War 1 if anything. Also, Tolkien's work is a great example of myths being an inspiration for an entirely new creation. The way you're presenting it absolutely no work could ever be considered original - everything is created in some cultural context, influenced by previous works in some ways. Also the Tolkien estate is a pretty piss poor example for "who never created any of it" seeing how for decades, right up untill his death recently, Christopher Tolkien who was in charge of it has been finishing, editing and releasing numerous works of his father. The Silmarilion, Children of Hurin, Beren & Luthien, Fall of Gondolin, all the writings collected in the numerous volumes of History of Middle-Earth... most of Tolkien's legendarium is available thanks to that work.

It actually does the classics more justice, too. A given game doesn't age well especially because we don't see how it compares. Looking at an old wing commander privateer game today, sure looks bad. But let us see how it compared to it's contemporaries.

As for expectations, that's a wholly other topic, one which i have much, much greater cynicism. I've recently been browsing a few other storefronts that are drm-free, one of which has some amazingly different and more interesting games coming out than what GOG has been releasing as of late. The downside is, well, it's more useful to someone like me who speaks the language of the majority of the games.

I hate this common lie about IP. No, Disney never got the copyrights for the story of Cinderella, instead they got the copyrights for their new characters that they added to the story.

People who complain about copyrights usually are the same as those who are willing to steal other people's hard work rather than pay for it and the reality about them is that they complain about copyrights because they want to feel justified in stealing.

It has never happened that someone copyrighted the concept of an orc and then sued people who used orcs in their games. Now if you decide to copy a particularly unique orc design or use the name someone else created to call their version or orcs then you get into trouble. But despite the criminal lies, copyright has never been a negative thing to anyone except criminals.

Even the my little pony MMO that got rightfully shutdown came back with no problems after stripping the infringing material out of it. Criminals of course have to lie and say "but but but it's nonprofit so IP rules don't apply." Those same criminals have no problems with selling their fanart at conventions or otherwise profiting in some manner.

"Abandonware" is piracy, GOG staff have said this many times, GOG's business model used to consist of patching old "abandonware" and selling it with permission. Only criminals pirate, and only criminals complain when a corporation upholds their right to protect their IP.

They've already created a precedent with the listed examples. I honestly hope they don't. If they do decide to publish more though, they should upgrade the tagging system and store filters. Tag the applicable as "cult classic" or "shovelware" and transparently advertise it as a bad game requested by fans. This isolates their curation team from responsibility, protects uninformed buyers, and lets normal people avoid them like the plague by excluding them in searches.

There's SBIG, Mediocrity of the blur, painfully average, and Truely Vile.

I've played several games that fall into the morrow categories, but very few that fall into either outer category.

Such as Blockhood. Blockhood is just sad. (Because of how boring it is.) Forager runs out of fun. Eschalon manages to get outpaced (in a very literal sense) by Avernum. Windforge was stillborn. But those are all subjective.

Starbound is dead to me, even though I got several hundreds of hours out of it. It was a rare example of the rating ticking down over time as more was revealed about it.

But then there's games like AD 2044. Which from reading even base outlines of the plot: What the fresh hell. The fascinatingly bad, where you wonder what the devs were smoking. They're The Apple (The 1980 film, not the other one) of bullhonky.

Yes, but if you release works with similar names and characters as their current IP, they can always threaten with C&D or litigate you to the death of a gamedev's studio. In 1994, Disney sued a Canadian mall because the latter used the same 'Fantasyland' name for its amusement park, which Disney argued damaged the marketing brand of that trademark. Subsequently, Disney won and set a legal precedent from that point.

If you're a small indie studio with little funds, why bother taking that risk? Why spend unnecessary costs hiring a copyright lawyer to verify your work doesn't violate Disney's copyright when you can change ambiguous commonalities and avoid the issue completely and repurpose that money into improving your game? Would be interesting to see a citation on this. In the US, copyright expiration durations are very generous: death + 70 years OR MIN(95 years from publication, 120 years from creation) for corporate authorship. That is more than enough time for the original authors to benefit for their entire lives plus a handful for their estate or for corporations to drain every single drop of money their IPs can make while still finding other IPs to profit from. Yes, this is because orc etmyology is part of 700-1000 AD German folklore and thus are public domain. The concept of the orc/ogre monster are linked to 16th century Italian writers and a 17th century French writer and thus are also in the public domain. The reason why we can all enjoy the concept or orcs today is because of that. If the Tolkien Estate still had copyright and Blizzard refused to pay them a licensing fee royalty, we wouldn't have Warcraft IP today. I don't think anyone here is advocating stealing IP.

What I'm saying is that copyright expiration durations should allow exceptions for abandonware durations to be expedited. Abandonware being games that have no clear ownership. All works should be given the default copyright years. Once gamedevs / publishers go bankrupt or die, IPs can be auctioned off to highest bidders by its creditors. And if those works are still passed up, they should be given a shorter yet reasonable amount of time to allow original authors to claim ownership to revalidate their copyright before letting them enter the public domain. Say 10-25 years?

The intent is to force companies to have clear ownership with their registration and licensing contracts. This is so fans know who to contact to express their interest in more products of that IP instead of leaving it in a limbo where no one wants to build on that material without the fear of being sued by a company that has long stopped caring about it.

With the way things are, you'd have to wait 95 years so your great grandchildren can finally create works of an IP that no one cares about anymore. People are unsure who to contact, know who owns the right to certain works, and are still being threatened by lawyers anyway like the case with Night Dive and Warner for NOLF. There is plenty of interesting and old stories to build on. I argue with another example of Sony not caring about Marvel IP besides Spider-Man and look where we are today: IP with clear ownership creating lucrative works significantly impacting culture. If you sell abandonware, it's no longer abandonware. Some of the profits are going to the current IP owner.

If you have any more doubts about my opinion, I'd suggest looking into some of those links I posted, especially the book I posted. Disney's own works were derivatives of public domain folklore and even Mickey Mouse started off as a parody of Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) and look at how all of these works have contributed to Western arts, culture, and entertainment innovation. Society and creative works benefits as a whole when more works enter the public domain where they're built upon.

No we don't, I can't see how these hold any value at all. They exist, sadly, and that's all they can show up.
I wish all the crap games just disappear forever, why would anyone want to save them for the future, makes no sense.

Filters can only go so far (should be worked on though), some curation is probably a good idea. I'm not really thinking of some unusual, new indie or old cult classic with glitches but rather RPG maker generic copy number 10 is not necessary if GOG has one or two.

Games workshop space marine is one that springs to mind. I did not mention abandonware, and if you have seen any of my posts on the subject I also point out that it is illegal.

However I note in this thread and another, you have called anyone not agreeing with, to quote “criminals” and “pirates”. When you want to continue a discussion avoid insulting other users.
To a degree, yes very little is new. Sure today’s man uses a smaller metal club propelled by chemicals rather than arm but it’s still the same thing. I am not saying that is wrong or that another way even exists. What I am saying is that there are a lot of “them” who have learnt to work IP ownership purely to serve their own ends, there are companies that exist soley to acquire IP and profit from it, with no creative input at all. What’s that big music one that buys artists out at the moment? True in that case artists do tend to get paid.
One of the ways of handling this is to have a limited exclusivity window whereby the creator is remunerated, then it becomes open.

I would love to see Descent to Undermountain on GOG

I would buy TekWar right here right now, run it with BuildGDX and have fun. So yeah, some people want some bad games.