GOG Patrons- Join gamers keeping classics alive
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gog.com
> The GOG Preservation Program is our ongoing effort to save classic games from being lost to time. That means working to secure rights, fixing compatibility so they run hassle-free on modern systems, and even rebuilding missing features so the experience is the best you can get, while staying true to the original.
It still baffles me how the "rights" to a game (or any IP) can be a thing when the company has essentially abandoned it. Like take the Resident Evil example FTA: Launched in 1996, 2000-2023 not available (i.e. not for legal sale). I am a bit of an extremist wrt IP laws, but that just seems so crazy to me that we would provide a legal system to "protect" IP that isn't being used and is just being (essentially) hoarded.
That said, my gut feeling says it's mainly about them not willing to invest in it, because they can't see the economic viability. If GoG were to go to the rights holders and say "Hey lad, we have a platform and a lot of experience in reviving older games, you'll get x% of revenue", I'm sure some would be like "ok".
Of course, I'm also sure these rights holders have received offers like that from various parties for a long time now.
Copyright is granted to media creators in order to incentivize creativity and contribution to culture. It's not granted so as to empower large collectives of lawyers and wealthy people to purchase the rights and endlessly nickel and dime the public for access to media.
Make it simple and clear. You get 5 years total copyright - no copying, no commercial activity or derivatives without express, explicit consent, require a contract. 5 years after publishing, you get another 5 years of limited copyright - think of it as expanded fair use. A maximum of 5% royalties from every commercial use, and unlimited non-commercial use. After 10 years, it goes into public domain.
You can assign or sell the rights to anyone, but the initial publication date is immutable, the clock doesn't reset. You can immediately push to public domain, or start the expanded fair use period early.
No exceptions, no grandfathering.
There's no legitimate reasons we should be allowing giant companies like Sony and HBO and Paramount to grift in perpetuity off of the creations and content of artists and writers. This is toxic to culture and concentrates wealth and power with people that absolutely should not control the things they do, and a significant portion of the wealth they accumulate goes into enriching lawyers whose only purpose in life is to enforce the ridiculous and asinine legal moat these companies and platforms and people have paid legislators to enshrine in law.
Make it clear and simple, and it accomplishes the protection of creators while enriching society. Nobody loses except the ones who corrupted the system in the first place.
We live in a digital era, we should not be pretending copyright ideas based on quill and parchment are still appropriate to the age.
And while we're at it, we should legally restrict distribution of revenues from platforms to a maximum of 30% - 70% at minimum goes to the author. The studio, agent, platform, or any other distribution agent all have to divvy up at most 30%.
No more eternal estates living off of the talent and creations of ancestors. No more sequestration of culturally significant works to enrich grifters.
This would apply to digital assets, games, code, anything that gets published. Patents should be similarly updated, with the same 5 and 10 year timers.
Sure, it's not 100% optimal, but it gets a majority of the profit to a majority of the creators close enough and it has a clear and significant benefit to society within a short enough term that the tradeoff is clearly worth it.
Empowering and enabling lawyers and rent seekers to grift off of other peoples talent and content is a choice, we don't have to live like that.
There is a limited amount of time to read in a day and the amount of 10+ year old content that is still amazing is more then anyone could ever read, and it's hard to compete with free.
I think video games is actually kinda an anomaly when it comes to copyright because they have been, on average, getting better and better then games released even in the recent past, mostly due to hardware getting better and better. Also any multiplayer game has the community issue where older games tend to no longer have a playerbase to play with.
Same could be said about movies/tv shows that rely on CGI up until somewhat recently where the CGI has pretty much plateaued.
More recorded shows exist than any one man can watch in a lifetime, and yet there are multiple concurrent series ongoing right now.
I think the real kicker is that IP law was built around things like books, that don't suddenly stop working or need to be maintained, etc. Modern laws should take software into account and deal with it differently.
If that were true of music, companies wouldn't be buying back catalogues for (upwards of) hundreds of millions[0][1].
[0] https://apnews.com/article/music-catalog-sales-pop-rock-kiss...
[1] https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/ranked-biggest-music-catal...
However, even 1% of a very large market is a huge tail, which is valuable.
Imagine a world in which spotify and youtube and netflix had to compete on product and service quality, instead of network effects and legal technicalities. In which you could vibe code an alternative platform and have it be legally feasible to start your own streaming service merely by downloading a library of public domain content, then boot-strapping your service and paying new studios for license to run content, and so on.
The entire ecosystem would have to adapt, and it would be incredibly positive for creatives and authors and artists. There wouldn't be a constant dark cloud of legal consequences hanging over peoples heads, with armies of lawyers whose only purpose in life is to wreck little people who dare "infringe" on content, and all the downstream nonsense that comes from it.
Make society better by optimizing the policies that result in fewer, less wealthy, and far less powerful lawyers.
There's better examples like No One Lives Forever that have been stuck unavailable for purchase because of rights reasons but RE1 is arguably not that.
There's no good way to even ask "who owns this?" for a piece of IP other than the highly inadequate and risky approach of just pirating it and waiting to see who sues you. But even then DMCA provides all sorts of problems with unauthorized groups claiming to be rightsholder representatives.
But if GOG comes and the restore the "commercial activity" of a game, actively selling, even if no one buys, then you can't say that it was commercially abandoned, and that will postpone of that much that it will be on GOG the legal claim of "having the IP active".
> if there is no commercial activity and the IP violation is not enforced for some many times, it can be considered that you are responsible for this and there was no legal way for the user to be able to use the software.
That's somewhat true for trademarks. If you don't consistently enforce a trademark, then the person you're suing for trademark violation can use that as an argument in court. However, it's not true for copyright (such as someone illegally distributing a game you own).
You can make a thing, copyright it, and also never sell, see for example open source software. You can even copyright something that nobody's seen before.
Copyright, patent, and trademark all have substantial differences.
https://www.gog.com/forum/legor_the_lord_of_the_rings/crashe...
(there are other forum posts about other crashes)
So, when I had some money left over at Christmas, I got a couple of Lego games for my Nintendo Switch instead.
The Resident Evil IP is still alive and kicking though (with the latest installment trailered during the game awards a few weeks ago).
It’s often much more difficult getting to know who has what rights. There is the developer, there is one or more previous publishers (can be different per region in the world), there are investors and sponsoring publishers. And then there are sales, mergers and liquidations after bankruptcy. And no-one really knows (or wants others to know) what rights where are.
Glad they put this into the FAQ, because that was certainly my first thought, although I'm not sure the answer really assuages my concerns.
You have to admit that the combination of "Original founder buys back GOG from CD Projekt" and then "GOG introduces patron tier" soon thereafter does suggest a company in some financial hardship.
From sales of millions upon millions of copies of The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 games?
Moreover, if somebody is really into these old games, they may want to support it and get access to the behind the scenes material, discord, vote for which games to prioritize etc. I don't think this is very different than eg subscribing to the patreon of a creator to get some extra content.
For a lot of games it's just a matter of configuring dosbox and packaging it, I can't see how that would be very expensive. But for others it's a lot more involved.
I mean we can go off on a tangent about why IKEA should not get away with being registered as a charity, but as long as GoG is not doing tax evasion I don't see the problem.
Now I can imagine having specific campaigns. Let's say they need $50,000 to release an upgraded port of Shining Force.
Cool, I might be open to pre-ordering it at $25 so they can see if there's enough interest to proceed. But why am I going to literally just donate to a private company. I think the entire world has gone mad, there's not even a real product here. It's not like for that $5 a month they give you a random game or something. They just want money.
I am also happy to buy more old games from GOG than I ever have the time to play, so they already get my money.
Not so sure about this patreon thing though.
Just a vague 20,000 game list which may or may not have games that I am interested in.
Also seems like Patrons should get access to the games that are preserved, at least after some point of contributions (e.g. after $60 were accumulated in donations over a period of time)
I would gladly pay 2x or 3x that amount if I knew I would get access to this game library hassle-free in the future.
Good idea overall, "meh" execution so far.
The FAQ should state explicitly that patron money will only be used for preservation, not put into GOG general revenue, if that is indeed true.
But I saw nowhere in the FAQ explicitly that this subscription money will only be used to the "active act" of preserving other games.
Not that it is any guarantee that it would sell at all or be successful.
In fact, today’s graphic possibilities and available monitor resolutions make it possible to accurately and aesthetically simulate an analog CRT monitor with its scanlines and aspect correction (DOSBox Staging). But of course you can just use big sharp pixels.
What I also like in this project is that they also share logs with what they worked on each game, eg for the resident evil series [0]
[0] https://www.gog.com/blog/resident-evil-1-2-3/#:~:text=RESIDE...
Now I'm wondering if you could put e.g. a Windows virus into a Gameboy game, such that if someone did the opposite of what we're talking about and ran it "natively" then they'd be infected. Afaik this kind of native execution as an alternative to emulation is being done via recompilation projects - see e.g.
NES - https://andrewkelley.me/post/jamulator.html
N64 - https://deepwiki.com/Zelda64Recomp/Zelda64Recomp/3.1-recompi...
To repeat myself from old threads, it would be awesome to have something like a WindowsBOX, like DOSBox but emulating (probably) Windows 98SE, fully open source. GOG could use that for old Windows games and never have to modify the games themselves. I would be happy to support GOG developing an emulator like that, rather than making old games run on new Windows.
The things GOG is improving are some bugs that occur mostly in games, e.g. something with color palettes in pre-2002 games. But I think every game using DirectX 9 or later will work without any adaptations, even ten years from now.
That said, there's also something to be said that if a game is patchable, there is some value in patching it to run directly rather than "need" an emulator.
I've bought Resident Evil twice before guys, I'm not paying £7.99 to get another copy. I get that there's some service provision —maybe even some first party dev work— but patrons should either be the product and these games get released for free, or the price of the game should recoup the hassle of licenses.
What am I missing? It seems like they're trying to double-dip.