The Daily Populous Thursday June 5th, 2025 evening edition
Authored by gamedeveloper.com and submitted by HeadBearOfSwamp

Are video game preservation and the video game business at odds? According to groups like the Entertainment Software Association, the answer is "yes." Its lawyers argue that making older games publicly available through digital libraries would harm the commercial interests of IP holders, who it says are the true arbiters of preservation.

But according to Marcin Paczyński, senior business development manager at GOG, the answer is "no."

In a conversation at the 2025 Game Developers Conference, Paczyński explained that preservation is becoming the backbone of the CD Projekt-owned storefront. In November 2024 the company unveiled the GOG Preservation Platform, an initiative to ensure games sold through the platform will be backwards compatible on every PC in the years ahead.

The Preservation Platform isn't just a label on the storefront. GOG engineers are working hard behind the scenes to solve compatibility bugs on every game run through the program using a custom DirectX wrapper to ensure a game released for MS-DOS will work on all future versions of Windows by translating the game purely to DirectX instead of Vulkan, the format used by XVK. Using the wrapper also allows GOG engineers to solve compatibility errors by fixing the wrapper itself, instead of making updates game-by-game.

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As long as Microsoft maintains support for DirectX, all games that possess the wrapper will be backward compatible. (Mac and Linux support is hopefully on the way).

Developing and maintaining that wrapper costs money, with 15 years of development already invested in its functionality. Paczyński said that it was only early last year that deploying it on a large scale became commercially feasible, thanks to tooling advancements and sufficient revenue through GOG.

As he described it, a commercial venture targeting preservation isn't just good business for GOG and publishers with back catalogues—it's vital for keeping classic video games available to the public.

The Preservation Program came to life after the team at GOG had two major assumptions upended. First, they assumed the majority of games sold on GOG were fully compatible with modern machines.

Nope. Only thirty percent were fully up-to-par. Players were purchasing classic games and just not reporting any issues if they ran into a compatibility error.

Second, they assumed the public—and publishers listing games on the platform—knew that GOG was maintaining about 4,000 of the 11,000 games on the marketplace.

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Nope. They did market research and found people had zero idea about their hard work. Everyone thought the games it worked on were being maintained by the original developers. "That was like a bucket of cold water," Paczyński said with a groan. "That's one of the reasons that that we're addressing with this." When players ask "why should I buy a game on GOG and not on Steam?," he wants there to be a clear answer.

Now that answer is this: Steam is a great place to buy new games, and GOG is a great place to buy "back catalogue" games. "There is no way in heaven that Steam will spend resources of fixing other people's games," he said.

Publishers have also warmed up to this pitch since GOG doesn't charge any extra money for this maintenance. It's funded by the storefront fees taken from every game purchase. It's not "free," but it's not a service developers have to budget for. "We are crazy like that," admitted Paczyński.

GOG's DRM-free business model was the spark that lit the fire of this project. Because DRM will inevitably stop working, only DRM-free games can be truly preserved. Sometimes publishers strip away DRM years after a game's initial launch, but if a publisher goes under, there's no one left to do that task.

The game industry's adoption of DRM in the 2000s has created a ticking clock. "Compatibility is deteriorating," Paczyński claimed. He pointed to the differences among versions of games listed on the Preservation Program versus versions that live on Steam and other platforms. Developers and players can view the changelogs GOG publishes that document updates. If a game is sold on Steam and sold on GOG, the version sold on Steam won't have the compatibility improvements made possible by the DirectX wrapper.

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It's this process that Paczyński believes makes true preservation possible. "Preservation is not only about you having a physical copy somewhere in the closet. It's about keeping those games available and maintaining them. And because maintenance is a continuous process. It never ends."

With funding for video game preservation already tenuous, GOG's commercial venture is what's making that continuous process possible.

There are still major hurdles to solve in commercial game preservation

Paczyński is optimistic about the progress made preserving games on GOG. The company is using a "dream list" to solicit votes from players on what they want added to the program, and more publishers are signing off on having their games included. Back catalogues are key for driving revenue between game releases, and GOG has opened the door for more diversified sales.

But not every publisher is excited about this. GOG Game Preservation launched with a promise to fully preserve the first two Warcraft games made by Blizzard Entertainment. Weeks later, the Microsoft-owned company delisted Warcraft: Orcs and Humans and Warcraft 2 from GOG. Players who already owned the games will have their copies preserved in perpetuity thanks to the DirectX wrapper, but future players will have to go to Battle.net. "It wasn't a good day... when we heard that news," Paczyński said delicately. "But this is not new for GOG. Games are delisted for many different reasons. We have no control over that... because it's our partner's decision and responsibility."

GOG also has to step carefully when obtaining older games and putting them up for sale. That's true even if a developer or publisher closed its doors years and years ago and a game could be considered "abandonware." Someone still owns the rights to a game, and the company has had to fend off lawsuits from law firms fishing for clients who may not be aware they even own those rights. Tracking down those rights and getting all the contracts signed is time-consuming and costs money.

On a more positive note, Paczyński said GOG is looking at methods for preserving classic mods. Steam did its own version of this years ago through Steam Workshop, but not all developers include Steam Workshop support for their games. That means players who want to play say, the original Long War mod for Firaxis' XCOM: Enemy Unknown have to go through a complicated process of installing different files instead of just clicking a single button like they can for XCOM 2.

There's also the fact that, if it wasn't for modding communities, many games would already be lost to the sands of time. "A lot of those classic games—classic meaning they were made ten [or more] years ago—are being kept alive because of the amazing modding communities," Paczyński said. GOG's preservation mission wouldn't be possible if it wasn't for modders tinkering away for free.

All of these variables are the reason Paczyński sees game preservation as a commercial process—one that benefits GOG, publishers, and the nonprofit archival community alike.

"It's a continuous effort but because it's connected to business, we are actually able to make it happen."

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