But why gog?

If I have some Win98 Game on cd , and a free win98 emulator, I wouldn't care about anything.

and DOS is also licensed by Microsoft, isn't it? And yet DosBox is legit?

Indeed. "Winbox" can't really happen unless Microsoft allow it.

My point is that GOG wouldn't be able to sell old games which don't run natively anymore without a legal and functional emulator. I don't think GOG would be able to bundle future game releases with a full copy of Windows XP which would run on some virtual machine.

DOSBox is legal because it's written completely from scratch, using no proprietary DOS code that belongs to Microsoft. Of course, you can try to rewrite Windows 95 or Windows XP from scratch, but that is obviously a lot harder to do than DOS.

They could put in the work to make them run on WINE maybe?

20 years from now I'll probably be dead from all my health issues, so it won't matter. :P

In the meantime, the vast majority of my PC games run on Windows 7, some requiring workarounds, etc. There is only a handful of games I've failed to get running properly. That being the case, I'll have no problem playing my games up to 2020, when support for Windows 7 ends.

As for replaying games - it really depends entirely on the game. While there are some games in my collection I can't see me replaying (or even finishing for the first time), there are dozens of others that I know I will revisit time and time again. If a game is good, then it's worth replaying, no matter how old (or dated) it is.

If you're asking about games specifically from this generation, then I'd have to say the Elder Scrolls games and recent Fallout games (with tons of mods), Just Cause 2, The Saboteur, etc. I tend to prefer more 'free-roaming' games that offer lots of exploration, these days.

I have had 10-20 years of gaming now so I guess I could pretty much answer that question easily. How much of the games I'll replay? Quite a lot! Most of the games that had an impact to me, a good and memorable story like Baldur's Gate, or something utterly eccentric yet oddly fulfilling like Psychonauts, or even a game I suddenly find myself thinking back to because it was a pioneering game, like Ultima VII (I once replayed the game just to bake bread!), I'll replay.

I had the same thought as a lot of you guys did. I thought I wouldn't replay an RPG or an adventure game because I already know the story. Strangely enough, it isn't the case. Even though I already know the story to The Longest Journey, it doesn't stop me from replaying it. And every replay kinda gave me it a new dimension of understanding.

It's almost the same concept as reading a book. Most of us do not focus on the details during the first run, but on the subsequent runs we begin to milk it for all we can.
Oooh! There's one game in particular released quite recently of which I'm sure I'll play again in the future: Fallout 3! For a strange reason too, I'd play it just to hear Galaxy News Radio again

While it possibly couldn't be called Winbox for trademark reasons, there's nothing stopping anyone from producing a Windows compatibility layer/emulator that is based on clean code. The ReactOS project even did a full audit of its code to ensure that it was clean. Microsoft doesn't have a say in the matter as nothing of their work is in there.

The chances are that a Windows emulator would be based on WINE code for the GUI and OS calls and on DOSBox or Bochs code for the hardware emulation. Both codebases are mature enough to do so.

None of it would be based on original Microsoft code, so unless Microsoft trademarks are violated somewhere along the line, Microsoft has no claims on it.

Bear in mind that DOSBox didn't really become viable and interest didn't really pick up in it until 2006 when Vista came out, effectively making it impossible to run native DOS software using VDMSound, and hardware became fast enough to run more recent DOS games.

Now that more and more Windows 3.1 and 95 stuff (pre-DirectX 8) is getting impossible to run, interest in "WinBox" is likely to pick up in the next couple of years.

I'm a wannabe-archivist besides my foremost "gamer" nature, so I EXPECT to play all my games (yep, all of them) 20, 30 and 40 years in the future.

After all the Microsoft OSes retrocompatibility and the eternal replayability of arcade games through MAME were the things that made me stick with PC as my computing platform of choice. I won't expect these things to change in the foreseeable future.

Games I will very much enjoy to play in 20 years time? The usual suspects: Prince of Persia (1/2/Sands of Time), Out of this World, Flashback, Monkey Island (1&2), Ghosts'n Goblins, Ghouls'n Ghosts, Strider, Rastan, Shinobi, Black Tiger, Half-Life 2 etc. etc....

I'm an incurable replay-addict. I expect a game to be able to hold up to multiple playthroughs over many years--which is one of the reasons that I don't like Halflife 2 as much as I used to. But in 20 years? No idea. I haven't been gaming for 20 years. Heck, I haven't even been playing violin that long, and I started when I was 4 :P

Sadly I am pretty sure that 10-20 years from now the "computer" those of us who are still alive will be using probably won't be able to run anything more complex than angry bird or a basic flash game IF it's actually able to run anything at all on it's own and is not just a dumb ultra closed terminal only able to stream data/video from a remote server farm.

So I am afraid that apart the some popular old games that will continue to be proposed on subscription based streaming services most of the other will simply be impossible to play. I hope that if I am still around when it happen I will have found another hobby...

I'd rather hit that point later than sooner. Besides, life is a dead end, too, and still I cling to it. Just because I know I will die eventually doesn't make me resign to that fate right here and now and reject all life-extending measures like medicine as futile. ;)

And yeah, that PC from '98 is still working perfectly fine. I have no idea how long it will still last but if I had given it up years ago and thrown away my old Win98 games, I'd be totally dependent on GOG now to release a Vista or Win7 compatible version of Silver. Luckily, for the moment I'm not, I can stil play it whenever I want to. :P

I still play Elite, and that's about 27 years old now...

I'll still play Thief and Rome Total War. The number and quality of the mods mean that it'll never get stale. One thing worth mentioning is that we may in principle be able to play older games on newer hardware, but if the game's engine has certain hard-coded limitations (e.g. Thief's Dark engine didn't like multi-core CPUs and DX9+ graphics cards) then you're kinda screwed unless the source code is released.

I can't say that I'd still be playing any particular game on a regular basis 20 years from now. But as I get older and (possibly) wiser, I seem to get hit with bouts of nostalgia more often and will fire up games like Diablo or MechWarrior 2 for a night. And I've got an Atari 2600 emulator on my netbook, and will play Pitfall and River Raid every once in a while.

To be honest, I doubt I'd revisit more than 10% of my game collection in 20 years, if even that. But what would really bug me is simply knowing that I no longer had THE POTENTIAL to play those games -- even if I never actually did. It's just sort of that finality of "you will NEVER be able to play this game again... EVER!" that would bother me.

I"ll probably have burned out and shot myself in five years, if the Bradys haven't taken my gun away. Otherwise, I still have BattleTech. Pen-and-paper games never go out of style. Though we might run out of paper soon. There's a frightening thought...

Okay, out of curiosity I counted the most likely candidates for replay in years to come.

Around 132 games, out of 276 PC titles. So nearly 50% I would continue to play well into the future.

Actually, when I think about it, the whole game industry could crash over night, and I'd barely notice. :P