just wondering if there is any word on if there are any old games like black & white.

I'm just curious on how that works i figure GOG has to pay like royalties or some legal licenses (not sure i spelled that right) for rights to support the game companies.

I know there is a coming soon thread, just wondered how it works is it difficult to get them, and what is involved.

as i said i'm just curious on how that works.

It's not that simple. Often old games aren't for sale because there isn't clear ownership or because the game is just completely unusable on modern hardware. It's not just a matter of purchasing a license in most cases.

They don't purchase anything (besides the rights on the games themselves when they buy them, but it's very rare). They look for who is the current owner of a game and make a deal with him for distribution. And those rights can be very complicated : someone has the music, another has the game, and a last one the visual for instance.
In the case of Black and White, Microsoft seems to be the main owner (and that's a problem in itself because MS doesn't have any working relationship with GOG, they hate drm-free things), and the rest of the rights seems to be more or less currently uncertain.

thanks for a response i never knew how GOG got the old games they have, i just thought of it today and just wondered how difficult it was for them to do what they do with the old games

Some GOG staff have let us know that the two main hurdles are legal and technical, legal often being the biggest problem.

It isn't always clear who has the rights and sometimes multiple parties have different rights to a part of a game (art, code, music/sound). And of course sometimes publishers who have the complete rights don't want to release on GOG because of their DRM-free stance, it's not worth the financial income, they just don't want to bother, or another reason. That's why you don't see highly-desired (based on the wishlist) games like Black & White, Diablo, Warcraft, Freelancer, Blade Runner, Silent Hill. You can bet that GOG would love to have these here, for $$$income$$$, prestige, and publicity.

And on the technical side sometimes games don't work well enough for GOG's standards on their test machines, no matter what they do. This seems to be less of an issue than legal problems, but can for sure still be an issue. I think this was the reason Revenant didn't show up in the initial batch of Square Enix releases in 2012, instead showing up in 2015.

No poblem, It's an interesting subject, truth be told.
Here is the best documentary GOG made about that, if you got around an hour of free time :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffngZOB1U2A

There is kind of an hope for B and W : even if Microsoft isn't legitimately on GOG, it has a kind of backdoor on here, via Nordic (cause they don't like drm-free, but they like their money, of course). THQ Nordic has published a MS related game here with Ori, and even said that some others game like that one might follow. But Ori and the blind forest is loosely related to MS (a kind of exclusive distribution deal ?), and is far from having the kind of rights connundrum that B and W seems to have.
So, yeah...

EDIT : Maybe one day...

I would assume good personal/business relationships of the founders, with key-people of the "old" games industry, with the appropriate contacts and relationships to get them on the table.
Long story short, contact with people who have a "mental" archive of their old work, by people who were involved in gaming since its initial "takeoff" as a trend. But that is just my assumption.
Also blood sacrifices.
:P

Here's the amazing, 96% true behind-the-scenes tale of how GOG acquired the long-awaited Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine.