Posted October 10, 2016
ShadowAngel.207: Technically, gog is like your old video game store from yesterday. What did they do? They did sell everythung under the sun. They didn't stop selling Rise of the Robots because it's horrible. They just continued to sell it.
I think your comparison does not work. First of all, brick and mortar game stores did (and still do?) have to select what they sell. After all, they have only a limited shelf space. They definifely can't sell everything under the sun, they have to decide which games to carry, which older games to try to get rid of by selling them dirt cheap or even throw to trashbin altogether, etc. The other thing is that at least in the case of GOG, having more relatively new titles on the store means more maintenance work for the GOG staff, as it is apparently the GOG staff itself who maintains at least the offline installer versions of games. That probably causes the need to restrict the number of new releases to GOG store. Maybe GOG is hoping that the older games they have here stabilize themselves over time, not receiving new updates anymore, so they don't need much of maintenance anymore. But it is the relatively new titles that are still updated that are the problem, I'd believe. (E.g. I've noticed Chaos Reborn seems to be updated quite often for some reason, it just got yet another update today? Whenever I run gogrepo to get updated GOG games, Chaos Reborn seems to be quite often one of the changed games.)
I just keep thinking back when GOG was changing its game installers from v1.x to v2.x, what a massive work they must have had in front of them. They had to do it in parts over a long time, even though back then they had much less games than now. They are probably wishing very hard they won't have to change the offline installers for all their older titles ever again. If it comes to that, I wouldn't be surprised the new "installer" wouldn't be any real installer at all, but some zip file that you uncompress yourself, and then maybe run some script to make sure all dependencies are ok. And it would be the same format that the "Galaxy versions" of GOG games use, not separate versions.
Post edited October 10, 2016 by timppu