No kidding about that inflation. On the old Wishlist there are a total of 47 unfulfilled game wishes with over 10000 votes, and that includes duplicates.

Most of Peter Molyneux l's games are in Legal Limbo. Ijust voted for his The Movies to be on Gog, but I am not holding my breath.

You can guess who was killing "Lionhead Studios"... some greedy people i do not want to talk about.

Now we got this "legal limbo" situation and there is just no way out anymore... those games could become buried forever, some sort of "living dead". No matter how hard the gamers are crying... it is buried alive and still, it may never become fully restored anymore. At least not up to the point any copyright issues has been removed by the mighty shackles of "time" which can wear out any rules and rights. Although, it could be to late at that point, those games may become "beyond restoration", killed by laws and "legal limbo-matters". I am not even sure for how long this data could be achieved in some way... only time will tell. Because there is virtually almost no one feeling responsible for... so no official instance is truly taking care of it.

Anyway, the gamers made their voice clear; the industries are now the ones in charge but no one knows if they can free themself from their own shackles.

I thin some of the legal limbo is due to incompetence rather then greed; some game designers simply did not do
Due Deligence" whne it came to the agreements they made to get their games published.
My Sister is a practicing attorney in the Bay Area, and she handles a number of software rights cases, and it incredible how careless a lot of progrmaers are when it come to basic legal issues,. SOme signed contracts without bothering to have an attorney look it over just to save some legal fees.

"Legal fees" are very pricey in usual and they simply are living in another world with own laws: Which is not very wise because those own unofficial laws might not last very long as soon as it is being moved into "official laws".

If it comes to that point, which happens a lot indeed... there is simply nothing properly being setup and it lacks any solid backbone. So the game, if it comes to laws is pretty much law-less and because we live in a world with laws... it is as good as busted, unless somehow with a lot of troubles, someone may be able to attach something new.

However... remember, this studio once was owned by MS and if not even MS is sufficiently competent attaching some proper legal-condition on those games, it looks incompetent beyond any sane scale.

In the end no one creating those games was able to bear any responsibility because some behemoth in the background appeared to "handle it" as it was considered the owner. Which, it seems... was not really the case, but ultimately if no one feels responsible naturally no one will care legal-matters in the end, not even those in theory sufficiently competent.

Besides, i currently own close to 500 DRM free PC games but out of those 500 only 4 got their source code released to the public. The last one was "Descent 3" i noticed few days ago. Actually it has been released somewhere in 2024, so 25 years after its first release. It does not mean this game can not be commercially sold anymore; because the only thing actually "open" is the source code, not its assets. The assets still will have to be gotten from a legal copy, indeed available on GOG: https://www.gog.com/en/game/descent_3_expansion No matter this fact, over 99% of all devs in the industry rather would want the game to slowly die instead of being open minded toward this matter.

https://github.com/DescentDevelopers/Descent3

It was very useful because this game was close to incompatible with my PC... i was not even able to get it to run on my PC anymore, so i had to remove it from my collection. Since the dev was releasing the source code... it did not take long for fans to create a own source port and this version finally was without any flaws compatible with modern systems... even my gamepad is working now.

So, what i want to say is simply, it can make a huge difference in many cases and it makes it so much easier for game preservation to anyone without the huge work of reverse-engineering it, which is rarely ever done due to many reasons (one of them are legal issues).

Of course, if the source code is available at all... which unfortunately is not always the case... so for some games they are either as good as lost due to them being almost completely broken or... they need the legal issues being stripped away else almost no one is doing huge work for trying to restore it. Sometimes fan made "patches" acting kinda like a emulator, or trying to move assets to a new engine (although another time we got legal issues, and it is already some reverse engineering required in such a case) may work but not always.

There is another game people say could be restored rather easy: Digimon World (currently ranked 1 on Dreamlist). Yes there is actually a Korean PC port of it but it may not necessarily run properly and it may as well need the access to its source code else we get another difficult restoration-issue. The translation is missing as well, i dunno who is gonna do it for a affordable price. Fans? Yes.... but another time there can be legal issues... so it is just a truly tricky quagmire the entire preservation-matter and it surely will always need some good fortune.

Well... who needs "Palw... i mean Pokemon" if they got Digimon on GOG:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXP2zz7egvE

Please no one should spell out Palw... else Nintendo may snap out and now even Digimon W... shush people...

How the heck Digimon World of all things all of the sudden became the number one most anticipated game according to GOG community?

Even more so, how the heck it has more comments than any other game in TOP 100? Not just barely, mind you. It currently has over 1600 comments while the second one is at 800 and most others rarely exceed 200 or even 100.

They have been teasing it for almost two weeks now, that *could* explain it, but I didn't check how many votes it had before that

Check this out: one third of the comments was written beginning January 29 through February till early March with dozens of comments every day. Then there is a hole with few and far between comments until July when the whole rest was added.

Ok that's kinda sus, I understand it's good marketing to say that "thousands of people made it possible!" but it also defeats the point of the dreamlist iif you're gonna inflate the votes/comments of the games you get the rights for

Or it's just a lot of people that really want this re-released on GOG and at the same time are also using the comments as a means to get Bandai Namco's attention, on top of the votes.

Digimon is a distant third place in the collectable monster genre, even if it has had a mild resurgence in recent years. But I find it very hard to swallow that there's that many Digimon fans outside of Japan clamoring for a game...that [checks notes] never came out for PC in English?

If a game has not been released in english on PC it does only mean they was not considering its demand any serious. Looking at the Steam sales of newer titles it is indeed rather a "distant third place" in this genre... which is still good enough in order to justify a PC release, in english.

I can not say which ones are the most popular ones, probably at this point Palworld and Pokemon, although Pokemon is Nintendo only, so no PC release.

Nonetheless, the game in fact has been localized in english on the Play Station, so the translations are even available in theory. Although this would mean Bandai to "hand out" those translations and then moving it over to the PC version.

Perhaps GOG may have access to it, in such a case not that big of a matter but it totally depends on Bandai, a company i can not say much about because a pretty low signature so far.