Nope, I don't have an optical drive any more (except on the old laptop and an extra blu-ray player).

This. If you're a collector, no ISO or any image format would ever be "the real thing"

A few games do include the ISO- the file GK1.GOG in Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers is just a renamed disc image that gets mounted by DOSbox.

Although while I was trying to get it running smoothly in DOSbox Turbo for Android, I found that not only do you not need to have it mounted, it ran much faster without it, so I'm not sure why it's there... but it is if you want it. I assume there are others.

Agreed - I wouldn't mind ISOs as bonus materials but not as a primary way of distributing purchases.

Though it would certainly be interesting to have the disk images of some games, I probably wouldn't have much use for them. I'd rather have the setup/setsound exes of all DOS games.

you raise a very important issue already discussed in previous threads
which is, what to do when GOG patches a old game to run on newer OS
that breaks backward compatibility.
i think you don't need the ISO for that.
GOG should simply create multiple versions of the game and make them
available to download, like they already do with Mac and Linux but add
also for Windows 9x, Windows 2k/XP next to Windows (modern/current)

Mounting ISO's can be a real pain since it usually requires some sort of 3rd-party program. GOG eliminates the need for ISOs by combining all the game data to one installer. It's much easier to configure games that way.

Like my Drakensang collection. I had to rip the disk on my laptop, then copy the image to the PC, just to install the program. thankfully it didn't have any drm (SecureRom or similar) or needs the disk to run.

In Windows 7, the feature to mount virtual disks is integrated and no extra software is needed.

Nope, I don't see a point in it.

But older versions of Windows such as WinXP still don't have built-in ways to mount ISOs. The "mixed-media" discs/ISOs can be a pain to deal with as well. That's why it's nice that GOG can package the whole game into one installer so people don't have to worry about mounting ISOs or dealing with CUE files.

No to ISO,Gog make it pretty simple to install and that is what I wan't.....

No

There's quite a bit of extra hassle trying to install and work from stuff via iso images. Years ago when i was ripping all my game cd's like Diablo 2 and Morrowind and the like, mounting an iso to play a game wasn't that tall of an order...

But now? Hmmm.

I wouldn't mind games that i could just mount as an iso and play, no installation necessary (actually i did that with Terraria and it works great!), but as an install disc... No...

Although having the original iso's on hand in case you have a really old system you could play it on and burn as an image wouldn't be a horrible idea, but with technology improving as it is keeping to older hardware just isn't as beneficial as it was. In 10 years time there's huge leaps in computer technology, probably the next leap uses graphene which has notes of working upwards of 150Ghz...

IMHO, the number of people who would want something like this and feel strongly enough about it would be a very small niche minority at best, and of those, few would be willing to spend much more than current prices for that option. It would certainly be a small enough number of people that the overhead costs of doing the work and ongoing maintenance over time, duplicating a lot of things internally to produce yet another format - would be unlikely to produce a profitable business model from the effort, or at least not one that would be as profitable as other possible efforts that could be done with the same amount of manpower and yield benefits to a wider customer base with higher profit margins.

It's kind of like taking Bluray movies and producing VHS tapes from them for sale. Sure, there are people out there who still have VHS, but it is a dead technology that the number of potential customers is extremely small and every day it only would become smaller.

While I think it is not something that enough people would care about to make it worthwhile to do, there are still people out there buying vinyl LPs in an emerging niche market too. People who feel strongly enough about it can hit up the GOG wishlist with their votes I guess, like just about any suggestion/idea we might have and if there are enough people out there who do care, GOG will then have some metric with which to even gauge interest. Without some kind of metric though, it's probably safe to say it would never happen.

It's also something that is trivial for just about anyone to make their own adhoc images (that may or may not actually work depending on how/where the given installer expects to decompress it's files). One would just have to make an autorun.inf file, throw a game's file collection into a dir and point CD burning software at it to make an image, test, rinse, lather, repeat until it works.

For myself though, it falls into the category "not interesting to me, CD/DVD distribution of video games died long ago" whether real physical media or virtual ISO9660 image files. Don't think I've ever seen anyone bring it up in the forums before either, another adhoc measure of lack of interest methinks. :) They're focused on embracing moving forward with digital distribution with their own client right now also which is a big effort and work in progress. Making ISO images would be going backwards if anything. :)

But... it all boils down to -> GOG wishlist + votes + wait and see what happens, probably forever without feedback. :)

Update: Oh, one more thought... GOG is highly unlikely to have any particular game here and charge one price for the regular customer, but charge an additional fee for people who also want a bonus ISO image to install from, it just creates confusion in pricing and leave some people wondering which one they should get, the ISO version or the non-ISO version. The last thing they want is to add even more confusion to the purchase decision making process. So it's something they'd have to include with the game whether you want it or not if it is available for a given game and have it as a "bonus extra", otherwise it's just a pile of confusion. Since they couldn't charge extra then, they'd have to either just do it for fun and give it away for free like other goodies and also support it, or they'd have to raise the price of the games themselves to cover their efforts and everyone who buys the game foots the bill to support this archaic format whether they want it or not. In turn, people would go into an angry rage in the forums because a game's price just went up by $0.49 or $2 or whatever to support an archaic distribution format 99.9% of people don't care about. :) So... whether or not any one person, or 100 people would pay extra for this feature, they would be very unlikely to develop such a feature with a business model that charged individuals who want it more money, nor one that charged everyone more money whether they wanted it or not.

I dont see why anyone should ever want to have specially ISO for some game. To cut in short, ISO is basically 1:1 byte image of optical media. Its contains not only actual game data but also filesystem overhead, service data and plain empty space too. Consider it as form of archive with somewhat complex but not very effective structure.
For normal cases ISO is actually WORSE choice then any modern archive format. If you want to play game someone will be in need to extract game data or to mess with drive emulation anyway. Why bother MORE?

BTW, i'm not SURE that GOG can get actual real disks for all games. So they will end that doind that? Creating "artificial" iso files from game installers? And that will not be "genuine" anymore.