As long as you keep a pc with the specs and OS of the time the game was released. GOG is also making an effort to patch these games to make them run on current hard- and software without the hassle of finding and downloading fan patches, running emulators/virtual machines and all the other hoops one might have to jump through to get an old game running.
Of course you could theoretically pirate the gog version after they made it run, but given that these games usually cost about 5-10 bucks and some go as low as 1-2 when on sale, i think that’s worth it to support these efforts.
You are right, they are doing good work to help make sure these games run.
One point of clarification though, they are pulling in the fan-patches themselves and building installers to install the emulators/vms as part of the installation. So they aren’t updating these games, they are creating an environment where, regardless of how things change, these games will be playable.
What this means for the end-user is that any mods or other fan patches can still be used, because they haven’t changed any of the game’s code, so they are actually doing a better job at preservation than many of these companies releasing “Remastered” versions of their games are doing.
I can play my pirated games forever too
As long as you keep a pc with the specs and OS of the time the game was released. GOG is also making an effort to patch these games to make them run on current hard- and software without the hassle of finding and downloading fan patches, running emulators/virtual machines and all the other hoops one might have to jump through to get an old game running.
Of course you could theoretically pirate the gog version after they made it run, but given that these games usually cost about 5-10 bucks and some go as low as 1-2 when on sale, i think that’s worth it to support these efforts.
You are right, they are doing good work to help make sure these games run.
One point of clarification though, they are pulling in the fan-patches themselves and building installers to install the emulators/vms as part of the installation. So they aren’t updating these games, they are creating an environment where, regardless of how things change, these games will be playable.
What this means for the end-user is that any mods or other fan patches can still be used, because they haven’t changed any of the game’s code, so they are actually doing a better job at preservation than many of these companies releasing “Remastered” versions of their games are doing.