Zygoptera on 22/12/2008 at 21:42
Of course GOG has permission/ licencing agreements for all their titles, they aren't HOTU and the publishers get a proportion of each sale's revenue.
The general idea of windows compatibility is that it works 'out of the box'- not having to get mouse2k, random versions of dos4gw, imagecfg, dosbox, various sound emulators, whatever else while following some set of instructions only to find that it still doesn't work, and provides peace of mind that it will work. In most cases that has included things which are beyond most internet fixes, like fiddling with the executable and in some cases getting new patches from the original developers.
As for people using GOG not buying new games, well, the kind of people who are buying fallout/ giants/ arx fatalis/ gothic I/ freespace/ simon the sorceror or whatever are not, by and large, going to be running out to buy FarCry2 or Red Alert3 or GTAIV with the six to ten USD they would otherwise still have. There's a demand for such games because, as seen by much of GOG's target market, the current crop of games are, with a few exceptions, short and shallow with overemphasis on marketing sturm und drang, pretty graphics and appeal to as broad and shallow a demographic as possible, designed for gibbering drool dispensers who run crying to mummy at the slightest sign of difficulty or originality. The rest of GOG's target market just want to legally and conveniently (re)play some classic games which may have been lost or missed out on or simply not work on current hardware. Either way there's minimal direct competition between them and current games.
