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And who will check if those *unofficial* patches are safe?

I'm not sure that's really true. The more games they get the more people come here to shop. Once a game has been released here they don't have to do much unless they get people having trouble with them or there's a new version of the OS out that changes something they need.

And the DOSBox and SCUM games mostly don't need much work beyond getting the respective 3rd party software working. I think they probably know about most of the exceptions at this point.

So did it never occur to you that most of the games on GOG are largely static?

You are aware that GOG was hiring QA testers for permanent position, and they are still looking for more QA testers for temporary position, right? And that they do use quite a few external testers as well. So, if you have an increased amount of games to test, you increase the number of testers, just like GOG is doing. No. As someone that does mod, I will say that this is a very bad option.
Let's take JA2 1.13 patch. There are currently 2 branches of it, stable and developer, with stable being published every 2 years or so, while the developer gets new features added almost daily. There are also at least 4 major mods based on 1.13 (AIMNAS, AFS, Metavira, Deidrianna Lives), which use different versions of the 1.13 mod. There is one central forum for 1.13 (Bear's Pit), but there are a few more forums that work on it as well.
So, if a GOG customer has a problem with 1.13, where does he ask for advice? From the place he bought the game, from the place he got the mod, from the publisher, of from the mod makers?


P.S. Also, GOG does occasionally use unofficial mods for compatibility purposes. But I do believe that mods should be accessible only from the mod's homepage, not from 3rd party sites.

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Fortunately you have overseen that the more games they have the more sales they'll get the more employees they have. In an ideal world this would probably cancel out the higher effort and the time to maintain compatibility is a constant.

Now maybe they add only games that are not very popular and then sales would be sub-average and the service quality could indeed drop.

But then maybe number of customers of GOG increases and then service quality would get better just like this.

Or they can use synergies (maintaining one game is not so different from maintining another) and then with increasing number of games they get more and more efficient.

So all in all it's difficult to predict really but most probably the service quality of GOG will stay roughly constant.

Damn, I should have picked up JA2 on sale! Grrr...

Like already mentioned, hiring more people is always an option, as long as you are doing good business.

Also, I presume there are two different "sections" for GOG games:

- The old classics where GOG indeed does lots of QA and compatibility work to get them to work. They need to agree with the IP rights holders (publishers) about the work GOG will do for it, and what perks GOG will get for their work (e.g. limited-time GOG exclusivity, like with the Star Wars games (before they appeared to Steam) etc.). Or then GOG might even buy the rights to the game themselves, like for Fantasy General apparently.

- The newer games (especially indies) where GOG leaves the main responsibility to the actual game developers/publishers. I would be surprised if GOG really did the same rigorous compatibility testing on those games, as they do for old classics that they try to fix themselves. Most probably GOG just tests (sanity checking) that the installers and updates generally work, and don't try to finish the game several times on dozen(s) of different PC configurations, which I believe is what they are doing for the older games.

Even for some the old classics, it might be the main QA responsibility is somewhere outside of GOG, e.g. for the Night Dive games I presume, and the few DotEmu games I recall being sold on GOG.

Just my assumptions of course, only the GOG staff knows for sure. The publishers care if they believe there is money to be made (compared to the workload, which might be something that GOG.com, DotEmu or Night Dive might agree to do for them, for a price).

Then again, quite often they seem to opt for HD remakes that they can sell again as a "new" game.

Indeed there will be new OSes, however things such as Virtualisation and Emulation have come a long way. I still have one machine running XP, one for Win 7 and my up to date machine. However, with the free VMware, Oracle VirtualBox, DosBox etc. I don't need to fire either of them up.

So, as long as your willing to put some effort in, this shouldn't be an issue. However if you mean that you want to be able to fire Galaxy up on GoogleWindows 2050 and press button play game, then that is different.

I agree. We shouldn't have any new games.

Problem solved.

shut up :P

well, it's not like OSes are changing drastically on a daily basis :). A lot of the older titles didn't need an upgrade in years. i would like to see that something like the availability of widescreen patches is displayed directly on the game page. if they can't or don't want to ship it directly with the installer that's fine, but i really would like the information to be (easily) available.
for a start it already would be nice to put a link to the game forum on the shop page and have a stickied thread there where users can collect that sort of thing.

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No, no. I think he is on to something, just did not take it far enough. You see, we should not have ANY games AT ALL. Then there would be no problems with compatibility whatsoever.

We could also get rid of our computers, just to be on the safe side.