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GOG has had to hire private investigators to track down IP rights holders

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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.

3 months agoby branon

>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.

3 months agoby bragr

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.

3 months agoby bawolff

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.

3 months agoby Animats

Link to the actual article instead of a page summarizing the article: https://www.thegamebusiness.com/p/when-we-launched-resident-...

3 months agoby jccalhoun

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.

3 months agoby namrog84

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-...

3 months agoby yardstick

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

3 months agoby mr_sturd

For me this is the "business as usual" asshole move of GOG.

If there is no clear owner, and no one claiming right anymore, then it is abandonware that we can all profit of.

But now Gog will actually spend lot of effort to make the intellectual property alive and so killing abandonware that is their competition in the end. When a game is still sold through their platform, it can't claimed to be abandoned as it is still in the market generating revenues.

And in the example they give with the PI it is even worse. You don't do this in the interest of the creator that needs to be rewarded for its game but some distant relative that had nothing to do with it...

3 months agoby greatgib

Most voted comment on the last YouTube ad, which I liked by the way: where's the Linux support?

I support gog, I've been buying games from them for a long time. By yeah, where's the Linux support?

3 months agoby atum47

A weird quirk of the system. PIs are the only private-sector way to get certain kinds of information about people, including corporate entities.

3 months agoby phendrenad2

>Of course, this will never happen because executives don't care about preserving games.

It happens with Denuvo because executives recognize licensing DRM software costs more than the revenue the game brings in.

3 months agoby charcircuit

Lame journalism. If they're struggling with spelling of basic surnames like Paczyński, Brzęczyszczykiewicz or Gżegżółka then what will they do if they come across harder ones like Stółzpowyłamywanyminogami or Chrząszczbrzmiwtrzciniewszczebrzeszynie.

3 months agoby emergie

I'm surprised nobody asked -- does anyone know which games this off-the-grid Brit had inherited the rights to?