[HN Gopher] GOG Has Had to Hire Private Investigators to Track D...
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GOG Has Had to Hire Private Investigators to Track Down IP Rights
Holders
Author : haunter
Score : 131 points
Date : 2025-10-17 18:44 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thegamer.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thegamer.com)
| rolph wrote:
| kudos for the effort, really.
| mr_sturd wrote:
| I'm sure this was alluded to in NOCLIP's YouTube documentary on
| GOG[0].
|
| It was said then that half of the battle was tracking down rights
| holders as IP had sometimes been absorbed through multiple
| acquisitions by the time they came to restore some games.
|
| [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffngZOB1U2A
| bawolff wrote:
| Maybe we should bring back copyright renewal. If you had to file
| a renewal with the government every 20 years it would solve a lot
| of the problems with abandonware.
| t-writescode wrote:
| Copyright was 20+20. MOST problems with it come from endless
| extensions and no format shifting exemption.
|
| Fix those and we'd be muuuuch better off.
| jaggederest wrote:
| You also have to charge a fee/pigouvian tax on the renewals.
| When renewal is free, there's a substantial deadweight drag
| on society as a result from everyone renewing by default.
| bawolff wrote:
| Even without a fee, requiring renewal at least means stuff
| that people have totally forgotten about doesn't get
| renewed, and stuff that does get renewed at least has a
| recentish owner on record.
|
| It would be a large improvement over the status quo of
| having a term of 70 years after the death of the author.
| branon wrote:
| I like GOG a lot but it's wild to me that their GOG Galaxy client
| doesn't work on Linux! A lot of gamers who care about
| preservation and availability are spending money with Valve
| because Steam's DRM is mostly inoffensive and the Linux support
| is so good.
|
| The addressable market segment of people who play PC games and
| also care about DRM-free accessibility would be larger if GOG's
| launcher ran on Linux and targeted Linux users. It seems like a
| logical overlap to me.
|
| Valve is eating GOG's lunch in this segment but it could easily
| change. Sure it might be small but it's bigger than ever, still
| growing, and seems to fit GOG's mission.
|
| I would definitely start repurchasing my Steam games DRM-free on
| GOG if only they provided a launcher with the tooling necessary
| to download & run them on my system.
|
| As things stand now, and for all the good GOG does... it's not
| enough to be DRM-free but only distribute Windows installers.
| You've just outsourced the DRM scheme to Microsoft. If the
| software doesn't run on a DRM-free OS, the job is only halfway
| done.
|
| And in the meantime, GOG's product is tragically subject to
| piracy, (I believe) partially enabled by their decision to _only_
| package games for the OS upon which most piracy traditionally
| takes place! :( I hope this could be offset by packaging for a
| crowd with more ideological overlap.
| mathieudombrock wrote:
| It really does seem like the idea of DRM free games and Linux
| goes hand in hand. I would be really interested to hear about
| why they don't currently offer Linux support for their
| launcher.
|
| I'm in the same boat here. I would be more than willing to
| rebuy some games on GOG if they supported Linux.
| lawlessone wrote:
| Does it work with wine/proton? anecdotal but even in
| apps/games where they make a linux port the wine/proton
| version sometimes works better.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| I have Linux GOG games which refuse to run for one reason
| or another. Some outdated library, compiler, whatever that
| is not on a modern distribution.
|
| If you want easiest future proofing, you have to use the
| windows release.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The idea of running old Windows games definitely doesn't go
| hand in hand with Linux. And I think GoG simply has way more
| Windows experience, lots of work to do, and little realistic
| chance of tapping some huge market if they spent all the time
| you need to support 2-3 major Linux distros - especially when
| you need to offer things like Multi-player support as well on
| those, plus maybe game recording and whatever else the
| overlay offers (GoG Galaxy is not just a storefront).
| shmerl wrote:
| A bigger problem for me is not lack of Linux Galaxy client, but
| that a bunch of developers only release Linux versions on Steam
| (Larian with BG3 is a recent example).
|
| But I agree in general. The issue is probably that GOG is a
| smaller store than Steam and Linux segment for them in result
| is also way smaller than for Steam, so they don't see it as a
| priority.
|
| Meanwhile you can use lgogdownloader.
|
| It's sort of interesting that they support Linux as platform
| for games sales to begin with. Besides them, Steam and itch.io
| who even does?
| haunter wrote:
| >Linux versions on Steam (Larian with BG3 is a recent
| example)
|
| Not just on Steam but only for Steam Deck
|
| But I think that's an understandable position. One single
| distro with one single hardware (okay two because the LCD and
| OLED versions has some differences).
|
| Once you go down the "full Linux support" way it's a hellhole
| of different distros, compositors, proprietary and open
| source hardware drivers etc. This is where Flatpak, AppImage,
| snap etc. could actually play a good part imo if done well
| but I'm not sure I've seen any games released on Steam for
| Linux in those formats (maybe Steam not even allow it)
|
| Edit: you can download BG3 for any Linux distro not just the
| Steam Deck
| shmerl wrote:
| Good chance that this version will run on most up to date
| distros without much issue. So I don't see it as a reason
| not to release it.
|
| _> proprietary and open source hardware drivers etc_
|
| Somewhat of a problem, but not so much anymore, most Linux
| gamers know to use AMD and Mesa. So I'd say their focus on
| SteamOS is a good base of support.
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| Those are sometimes related. I know Tooth and Tail never
| released on Linux on GoG because they use the stores
| networking for multiplayer. So you can't do that on Linux
| without Galaxy but can on Steam.
| shmerl wrote:
| Yeah, that's a good point.
| cardanome wrote:
| To be fair I could have sworn that BG3 had a Linux version.
|
| Using heroic and wine is so seamless that I don't even
| remember if I have been running a game natively or not. It
| just works.
| m463 wrote:
| > Valve is eating GOG's lunch in this segment
|
| I think you are comparing apples and organges
|
| valve will give you a game license, gog will sell you a game.
|
| you can download, install and play all gog games forever with
| no drm.
|
| (I use lgogdownloader and download all games to linux)
| branon wrote:
| Apples and oranges yes, but to most users (even Linux users)
| there's only a very blurry line between these concepts. I
| admit this is not ideal.
|
| I believe choice of storefront is more a service and support
| problem, and less about the product itself.
|
| Game licensure and game ownership are equivalent products at
| the end of the day in most instances. Rugs could be pulled,
| yes, but thus far haven't been very often or to any
| significant extent (that I know of).
|
| Most paying customers are fine to run proprietary code,
| accept DRM, or buy a license instead of owning a game. Even
| Linux users will do this if the company (Valve) has a decent
| track record at practicing "don't be evil" (they do).
|
| As a Linux user, when you purchase a game from GOG (and I
| concede that this is ideologically superior to a license from
| Valve) you are on your own afterwards. Windows users can get
| a bit of help from Galaxy and I think GOG even does tech
| support now but this doesn't apply to our segment.
|
| You must now divine a scheme whereby your game is made
| runnable. Cue fighting with distro repositories and Wine
| versions/prefixes/winetricks, or depending on a third party
| launcher (Bottles/Lutris/Heroic/pick one), or adding the game
| to the Steam client (that you probably have installed already
| anyway) because Steam knows how to run things with Proton...
| and then you must maintain this going forward.
|
| This might not bother you or you may even find it therapeutic
| (and I do, for certain games). But the majority of the
| segment doesn't like it, and it won't scale as well as a
| first-party solution, not even for an individual user.
|
| My assertion is that exchanging game ownership for game
| licensure currently looks like a pretty fair deal if I
| receive first-party support for running the game on my OS.
| But GOG could change that!
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| There is also minigalaxy
| Retric wrote:
| You have an executable with gog, but playing it forever
| requires long term support.
|
| I don't expect whatever windows may or may not be available
| in 2060 to be able to support such a download from 2025 in a
| playable fashion.
| rendx wrote:
| Any game ever can run very well on any modern hardware
| using emulators or virtual machines.
| cwillu wrote:
| There was an awkward period of 3d accelerated games that
| required 16-bit framebuffers; I've had no success getting
| them to run in emulation
| tsimionescu wrote:
| That is quite false, especially if you mean "out of the
| box". And it's likely a temporary situation - there's no
| guarantee whatsoever that people will maintain x86 and
| some specific Nvidia Pixel Shader emulation support 50
| years from now.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| nVidia has dropped 32-bit PhysX support in 50-series
| cards, significantly impacting some older-but-not-old
| games, and there's no real solution yet except to own an
| older card.
| keyringlight wrote:
| This has already happened, PC Gaming Wiki has entries for
| lots of games where support for various old methods of
| doing things no longer work, on real hardware on windows,
| and you need to use a variety of workarounds like
| dgvoodoo or a fix by a random third party modder to get
| the game to operate correctly. And that's before you
| consider defunct copy protection or trying to add
| improvements.
| 3abiton wrote:
| I think this is a moot argument, especially for x86 arch. I
| can run nearly almost any game built for windows 98 - till
| now, on linux.
| apayan wrote:
| I agree that GOG needs to port their client to Linux for all
| the reasons you stated, but as a workaround you can use Lutris
| which lets you log into your GOG account and download+install
| games (Windows games too).
|
| It's not as pain free as Steam, because you sometimes still
| have to apply wine fixes, but it works well with the most
| popular games.
| haunter wrote:
| Heroic is way easier to use imo, but both are good options
| https://heroicgameslauncher.com/
| cholantesh wrote:
| My primary gripes with Lutris are:
|
| 1. it doesn't (at least recently?) always do a great job of
| handling multiple displays, either launching games on my
| second monitor, which I orient vertically or getting
| confused about which monitor to use and switching back and
| forth until eventually the instance (but not the Lutris
| client) crashes
|
| 2. I find myself getting into launcher hell where I'll use
| a different wine version for one game and when I switch to
| a different game, it's using this new wine version and
| stops working
|
| Not sure if Heroic solves these issues but I would try it
| again (didn't have any luck setting it up initially) if it
| does
| haunter wrote:
| I can answer the first on at least:
|
| If you are using KDE then there is a global Window rules
| setting and Heroic actually obey those rules, so you can
| force to launch a game always on X display, always
| minimized etc.
|
| https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/kwin/kcontrol/windowspeci
| fic... (not sure that's the most up to date manual)
| apayan wrote:
| I hadn't heard of Heroic before. I'll check it out. Thank
| you.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I don't know about the overall market analysis so I'm not
| commenting on that. But I do know that personally, GOG meets my
| needs in spades and Valve doesn't, so I've spent a lot of money
| at GOG and will for the foreseeable future. I am a Linux guy
| and don't own any Windows machines. I couldn't care less about
| the Galaxy client. To be honest, I'm not even sure what it does
| -- I just know that I get along just fine without it.
|
| For me, GOG is as close to perfect as I've found.
| weaksauce wrote:
| it's like the steam client but for gog + all the other
| markets like epic/xbox apparently including messaging.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Yeah, I just looked it up. It doesn't look like it does
| anything that I need, so I'm not troubled by the absence of
| a Linux version.
| unsnap_biceps wrote:
| the unification of other game stores is just largely
| broken. They haven't maintained their plugins for many
| years and as the stores change, functionality breaks in
| weird ways.
| dandersch wrote:
| Bad QA for actual Linux games was the main reason I stopped
| buying on gog. Even when a game had a (gog exclusive) Linux
| port using their weird "game inside a shell script"
| approach[0], often times I would run into more problems than
| just using wine/proton on the Windows build.
|
| [0] apparently using this https://icculus.org/mojosetup/
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| Linux doesn't not prioritize backwards compatibility. It's
| time to stop trying to make linux native gaming work without
| a stable ABI.
| dandersch wrote:
| I agree. Game devs are better off targeting proton as a
| platform, but Linux purists complain if there is no native
| port and you don't get the brownie points for putting in
| the effort.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I think there's plenty of brownie points to be had for
| making sure a game runs well under Proton... There's very
| little reason that GoG cannot do what Steam does with
| Proton for Windows games.
| oneshtein wrote:
| Android is Linux. It has loads of users and loads of games.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Don't conflate mobile free to play games (i.e. gambling
| simulators with a thin veneer) with actual games. I
| wouldn't be surprised if there were fewer actual games
| playable on Android than the full catalog for Sony PSP.
| Mobile free to play games are exclusively a way to prey
| on people's addictions in the hopes of finding enough
| "whales".
| ntoskrnl_exe wrote:
| I'm a Linux user who buys a lot of games on GOG and I've never
| had a problem running them using Wine stable, with the only
| exception being games that supposedly don't even work on Proton
| yet.
|
| Majority of the games there don't even come in a native Linux
| form, and those that do can be a hit or miss when it comes to
| compatibility - at least one game I tried needed a dependency
| from a no longer available package. Alternatively a few titles
| come shipped with some kind of wrapper that's really just an
| outdated version of Wine surrounding a win32 EXE.
|
| Also, isn't the point of buying something DRM free that you
| don't have to use a client or any other online feature? The
| offline installer has always been GOG's killer feature in my
| book, that's how you make sure the game gets truly preserved.
| m-p-3 wrote:
| For now I rely on Heroic Launcher and it does a decent job for
| my GOG games on Bazzite.
| Avamander wrote:
| How long has it been? Like a decade? That's when I bought my
| last GOG game and decided to wait for a proper Linux client.
|
| Having a nice way to view and manage a game library is
| essential at this point. I don't want to do it manually.
| noAnswer wrote:
| I use https://lutris.net for this. One starter for all.
| bragr wrote:
| >Paczynski says they once hired a private investigator to find
| someone living off the grid in the UK. He had unknowingly
| inherited the rights to several games
|
| My grandfather was a "landman" for oil companies tracking down
| mineral rights and has all sorts of stories like this. It can all
| get messy and weird fast.
|
| Stuff like tracking down people you'd assume would be dead but
| are in fact ancient and alive at 103 in a nursing home.
| Convincing a bank that through a series of mergers and
| acquisitions that they are the rightful owners of the mineral
| rights to a piece of land foreclosed on in the great depression
| by a bank that itself failed. Generations of poor people dying
| without wills or settling probate. Inheritance battles spanning
| generations until no one alive was around for the start. Step
| mother that swooped in and married a man at the end of his life,
| inherited everything, remarried, had kids and left everything to
| them instead of the step kids.
| nihilist_t21 wrote:
| I work for an oil and gas brokerage company. What you say is
| absolutely true (Especially your last sentence!). Some wild
| stories. We've certainly dug up some family drama throughout
| the whole process.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| A weird quirk of the system. PIs are the only private-sector way
| to get certain kinds of information about people, including
| corporate entities.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| Link to the actual article instead of a page summarizing the
| article: https://www.thegamebusiness.com/p/when-we-launched-
| resident-...
| namrog84 wrote:
| I briefly worked at Microsoft xbox back compat where we made the
| Xbox OG and Xbox 360 games work on Xbox one and newer generations
| and I know the PMs spent considerable time and effort doing
| similar things for the earlier Xbox games to be allowed for us to
| have them work on newer Xbox generations. It's really surprising
| that sometimes IP changes hands enough in some cases the owners
| might not have even known they owned something. I think the legal
| and permission always definitely one of the harder problems. I
| know music in some games were also particularly challenging, a
| few games had to have sound tracks removed or replaced.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Sigh, "bought" a copy of Dark Reign which I had a lot of fun with
| back in the day, but is doesn't run. Click on 'Play' and it
| briefly says "Syncing 0%" then the play gets shaded for 3 or 4
| seconds and then lights up again like it has never been selected.
| Not a lot of direction on the 'support' page about where to go
| from there. So not a great initial experience.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Monitoring system calls (on Windows, that's a type of DLL call)
| is a good way to debug confusing processes that only last for a
| few seconds. I _expect_ the launcher is launching some program,
| which is saying "I started successfully!" and then hitting an
| error state before it draws a window, so the launcher concludes
| you must've finished playing.
|
| Sysinternals Process Monitor ("procmon") is your friend.
| Animats wrote:
| This is why copyrights should need registration and renewal. They
| used to, and things dropped out of copyright when nobody paid for
| the renewal.
|
| There's a similar problem with mineral rights. US states register
| land ownership, but not mineral right ownership is not as well
| tracked. Litigation over abandoned mineral rights is not rare.
| yardstick wrote:
| Special shout out to the No One Lives Forever (NOLF) series of
| Spy-parody FPS. Stuck in rights purgatory for 25 years now.
|
| https://www.thegamer.com/no-one-lives-forever-the-operative-...
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| I play on Linux only. It's a shame GOG doesn't support it.
| emergie wrote:
| Lame journalism. If they're struggling with spelling of basic
| surnames like Paczynski, Brzeczyszczykiewicz or Gzegzolka then
| what will they do if they come across harder ones like
| Stolzpowylamywanyminogami or
| Chrzaszczbrzmiwtrzciniewszczebrzeszynie.
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