GOG Has Had to Hire Private Investigators to Track Down IP Rights Holders
66 comments
·October 17, 2025branon
m463
> 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)
Retric
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.
3abiton
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.
rendx
Any game ever can run very well on any modern hardware using emulators or virtual machines.
branon
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
There is also minigalaxy
ntoskrnl_exe
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.
dandersch
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
Linux doesn't not prioritize backwards compatibility. It's time to stop trying to make linux native gaming work without a stable ABI.
dandersch
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.
oneshtein
Android is Linux. It has loads of users and loads of games.
apayan
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
Heroic is way easier to use imo, but both are good options https://heroicgameslauncher.com/
cholantesh
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
apayan
I hadn't heard of Heroic before. I'll check it out. Thank you.
JohnFen
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
it's like the steam client but for gog + all the other markets like epic/xbox apparently including messaging.
unsnap_biceps
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.
JohnFen
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.
Avamander
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.
BaardFigur
I believe the problem is that most of the games they host are Windows games, so in that regard, Linux doesn't make sense.
And maintaining something like Proton is pretty complex, there's so many different distros. Actually ensuring the game works probably was too big of a task for them.
You can always add your gog games to Lutris though.
noAnswer
I use https://lutris.net for this. One starter for all.
mathieudombrock
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.
tsimionescu
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).
Ferret7446
Why not? My experience has been that old games run easier and better on Linux than Windows thanks to Wine and Microsoft's stupidity
lawlessone
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
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.
m-p-3
For now I rely on Heroic Launcher and it does a decent job for my GOG games on Bazzite.
bragr
>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
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.
jccalhoun
Link to the actual article instead of a page summarizing the article: https://www.thegamebusiness.com/p/when-we-launched-resident-...
bawolff
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
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
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
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.
Bratmon
Even if all it required was one to sign an affidavit saying they are the current copyright holder, that would solve a LOT of archiving problems.
Animats
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.
namrog84
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.
yardstick
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-...
mr_sturd
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.
phendrenad2
A weird quirk of the system. PIs are the only private-sector way to get certain kinds of information about people, including corporate entities.
ChuckMcM
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.
opan
Can you get more info by launching the game from a terminal?
Also, shot in the dark, but maybe try the solution from this old thread: https://www.gog.com/forum/dark_reign_series/dark_reign_2_not...
wizzwizz4
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.
rolph
kudos for the effort, really.
cynicalsecurity
I play on Linux only. It's a shame GOG doesn't support it.
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.