Comment on GOG Has Had To Hire Private Investigators To Track Down IP Rights Holders

slimerancher@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

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, but was super supportive of “preserving his family’s legacy” when GOG tracked him down.

So, it happened once. And they hired one private investigator. Not that it isn’t interesting, but why exaggerate everything?

Remaining quotes from article:

“To be perfectly honest, it’s harder than we thought it would be,” Paczynski explained. “What we’ve found out is that games and how they work has deteriorated way faster than what we thought. And we are not talking only about the game not launching. We are talking about more subtle things as well, like the game not supporting modern controllers, or the game not supporting ultra-widescreen or modern resolutions, or even a simple thing like not being able to minimise the game, which is an essential feature today.”

Pacyznski says digital rights management (DRM) features are especially frustrating to circumvent, which means they’re working as designed. Heck, some rather famous games are unplayable without third-party patches because of DRM — any old Xbox-to-PC that’s saddled with a “Games for Windows Live” log-in comes to mind.

Pacyznski suggests that triple-A developers remove DRM from games after a few years to make life easier for future game preservationists. Of course, this will never happen because executives don’t care about preserving games.

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